Why do local structures set up by external NGOs to co-manage environmental projects invariably fail? Can local farmers, herders, hunters, gatherers, transhumants and fishermen learn to cooperate? What can be done to help local stakeholders draw up sustainable collective rules for resource management? Are traditional social structures anachronistic or can they meet new challenges?

A study from the Institut de Recherches et d'Applications des Méthodes de Développement looks at projects in West Africa which have worked to bring together local decision-makers and resource users and to build intercommunity solidarity in a region characterised by extreme climatic unpredictability.

A vast and complex set of rules governs access to shared resources such as water-points used by pastoralists, fish, wild fruit, crop residues and routes taken by livestock through agricultural areas. Monetarisation of local economies, provision of infrastructure and equipment and new responsibilities (due to decentralisation) to contribute to the maintenance of resources have added to the need for financially competent and technically proficient community organisations able to work with government and with traditional leaders.

The main findings of the report include:

• Early joint resource management organisations, focusing on irrigation, failed as they did not clarify links with local structures exerting authority over the rest of village affairs.
• Because those who conceived early projects paid insufficient attention to existing systems of organisation and management, they often set up structures without real influence or power in the village.
• Projects fail which do not take account of supra-village issues and engage with other communities and district wide interest groups.
• Government is usually unwilling to see limits on its prerogatives in the interests of a real decentralisation of natural resource management.
• Creating a strictly community-based mode of local organisation is not risk free: people may close themselves to the world and, by rejecting other social groups, precipitate tensions between herders, farmers and migrants.
• Mistrust of state-sponsored law and order systems is so great that local farmers take on themselves the function of the rural police when they feel their resources are being improperly used.

Recent more successful initiatives have tried to build on traditional management models. Recommendations for government and donors include:

• Avoid creating new project-dependent structures.
• Constantly promote dialogue between different categories of users.
• Ensure by negotiation that the interests of minority social groups – small farmers, herders, women, and young people – are represented.
• Recognise that greater awareness of the respective mandates of different parties can only be achieved by regular frank and open meetings.
• Local bodies will only cease to be reliant on projects and the donors who spawned them when they are able to raise their own financial resources - central to self-capacity building.

Source(s):
‘Shared management of common resources: strengthening local skills’ by Bernard Bonnet

Funded by: IRAM

id21 Research Highlight: 20 June 2001

Further Information:
Bernard Bonnet
Institut de Recherches et d'Applications des Méthodes de
Développement (IRAM)
Parc Scientifique Agropolis
Batiment 14
34097 Montpelier
France

Tel: +33 (0)4 99 23 24 67
Fax: +33 (0)4 99 23 24 68
Contact the contributor: b.bonnet@iram-fr.org

Institut de Recherches et d'Applications des Méthodes de Développement (IRAM), France

Other related links:
MELISSA is Managing the Environment Locally in Sub Saharan Africa

CAMPFIRE - Empowering Rural Communities for Conservation and Development

NRI promotes efficient management of natural resources

WRI looks at natural resource management

FAO focuses on Sustainable Development

Refer to DFID's Natural Resources Management and Sustainable Livelihoods

UNU reports on the environment and proper use of resources