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Expanding lake and the landless pastoralists in pastoral Tibet, China
The Journal of Peasant Studies
Abstract
This paper argues that everyday politics are instrumental in negotiating development outcomes despite the pervasive influence of centralised state power. The paper highlights the fluidity and adaptability of Chinese policy formulation, emphasizing local learning and improvisation. This is especially important for pastoral communities in remote rangelands, where land appropriation and environmental exploitation are increasingly evident. The paper sheds light on the influential role of everyday political practices in shaping outcomes within the Chinese context, while simultaneously contesting simplistic portrayals of top-down state planning in China. By emphasizing the existence of manoeuvrability and opportunities for negotiation within this framework, the paper advocates for a nuanced understanding of governance dynamics and power relations in the Chinese context.
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The governance of rangeland in Amdo, Tibet is characterised by constant negotiations and contestations, includ- ing resistance from below, and is shaped by various processes in the real-world context. Through the notion of assemblage, which involves bringing together an array of agents and objectives to intervene in social processes to produce desired outcomes and avert undesired ones, this paper adds to the existing body of research on land governance by examining how institutions are formed in the case of a hy- droelectric dam on the land of the pastoralists.
Climate change policies and the green energy transition have renewed colonial structures and injustices for Indigenous peoples in land-use conflicts, but not without resistance. This article explores epistemic controversies in a legal struggle concerning impacts from wind energy infrastructure on Southern Saami reindeer herding and culture in Norway. The article draws on courtroom ethnography and diverse written material concerning a court case between the wind energy company Fosen Vind DA and the Southern Saami reindeer herders in Fovsen Njaarke Sïjte. The findings show that the parties’ competing claims to truth rely on different knowledge systems and worldviews concerning what Southern Saami reindeer herding is an ought to be. However, beyond onto-epistemological struggles between the “Indigenous” and the “Western”, Fosen Vind DA and the Norwegian state strategically ignored all knowledges that threatened capitalist and green colonial interests. The Fosen case illustrates how Indigenous peoples can contest dominant knowledge regimes and colonial presumptions about their livelihoods, culture, and rights through the legal system. However, the Norwegian state’s reluctancy to respect the outcome of the Supreme Court verdict reveals that asymmetric power relations continue to pave the way for colonial dispossession of Saami landscapes, epistemes, and human rights in the green energy transition.
Many large-scale land acquisition studies focus on the role of powerful transnational corporations, foreign and domestic governments. Instead, we shift the focus to the role of local actors, in this case, pastoralists in Samburu County, Kenya. Here, we apply the concept of 'intimate exclusion' and show that pastoralist elites' desire and ability to maximize productive and financial gains from customary land, coupled with their privileged understanding of land-related laws and regulations and ability to use or threaten others with violence, enables the control of extensive customary lands and the exclusion of weaker pastoralists. These processes, we find, are rooted in the country's capitalist development trajectory traceable to colonial rule. Overall, the paper highlights local 'homegrown' actors' role in large-scale land acquisition, how social intimacy provides space and opportunity for unequal gains, and how historical gains offer unique opportunities to gain from new political and economic developments.
Gaining access to land for grazing is less straightforward than before and the individualized plot system does not allow the flexibility to manage grazing effectively. As a result, hybrid systems of rangeland governance have evolved. Such systems are neither private, nor communal, nor completely open property arrangements: they emerge from a negotiation between herd-owners, village heads, religious monastery leaders, government officials, and others. Institutional and organizational innovation therefore means that pastoralists can generate reliability in the face of new forms of variability and uncertainty.
Pastoralists must continuously confront uncertainties, responding to high levels of variability and volatility where the future is unknown. Yet mainstream modernising development in pastoral areas aims to create stability through control, enacted through restrictive plans and policies. Through a series of case studies, this article explores pastoralists’ own sensitive, flexible and caring responses, attuned to the instabilities of pastoral settings. The cases show how uncertainties can be seen as intersecting constructions of knowledge, materiality, experience, embodiment and practice, where flexible, often collective, caring approaches are central to pastoralists’ lives. These insights have wider implications for other contexts where people inhabit uncertain worlds, and so suggest a fundamental challenge to the controlling approaches of conventional development.
Résumé : Les éleveurs doivent constamment faire face aux incertitudes de l’à-venir et répondre à de haut niveaux de variabilité et de volatilité. Cependant, la tendance au développement moderne dans les zones pastorales vise à créer une stabilité par la mise en œuvre de stratégies de contrôle et de politiques restrictives. En s’appuyant sur une série de cas, cet article analyse les réponses plus sensibles, flexible et attentionnées des pasteurs, en phase avec l’instabilité de la condition pastorale. Les cas montrent comment les incertitudes peuvent être vues comme des constructions de savoir entrecroisant expérience matérielle, incorporation de compétences et de pratiques. Ces approches bienveillantes, flexibles et souvent collectives sont centrales dans la vie des pasteurs. Ces exemples ont des implications plus larges dans d’autres contextes où des populations vivent dans des environnements incertains. Les approches conventionnelles du développement fondées sur le contrôle sont fondamentalement remises en question.
Hybrid land governance, mosaics, polycentrism have become ways to describe contemporary rangeland settings-ways of responding to uncertainties through flexible institutions, overlapping boundaries and an assembled, plural bricolage of practices. However, this is frequently thought to be recent, often arising from more formal, regulated systems, whether state, private or communal, and with well-defined land tenure regimes. This paper argues that hybridity (in various forms) has always been present in Amdo Tibet, despite the political changes over time and space. Hybridity is a necessary response to uncertainty and central to the utilisa-tion of variable resources, which is the core strategy of pastoralism. Yet the form of hybridity varies as it must be constructed in particular historical circumstances, constrained by political economic conditions between the feudal, collectivist, liberalised eras. Today's hybridity-and so contemporary rangeland use and management strategies-must be understood in this historical context, as an accretion of practices and strategies that have emerged over different eras.
Global warming and environmental deterioration have had an enormous impact on the Three Rivers Region. The rise of the monastic organizations in Tibet had its social-politic factors such as the international impacts on "Green Tibetan" movement, China's foreign non-governmental organizations (FNGO) policies, and the revitalization of Tibetan Buddhism. The first Tibetan Monastic Organization (TMO) was officially registered in Golok Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (GTAP), People's Republic of China (PRC) in 2007. Since then an increasing number of TMOs in rural Tibetan areas started to take participate in conservation around the globally important Three Rivers Region, and these TMOs have begun to make an impact on environmental governance. In this paper, we chose Badma Rinto Wildlife Conservation (BWC) as the case study to obtain a better view of peoples' perceptions on the role of TMOs in conservation and development through questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and participatory observation. The study had illustrated that the conservation efforts from BWC is widely accepted from both local communities and government, and surprisingly with expectation from communities on BWC to bring greater influence in terms of future conservation and community development. Furthermore, the environmental work for conservation in Tibetan areas must be a collaborative effort among residents, Buddhist monasteries, monastic organizations, environmental NGOs, and the government.
This paper examines the politics of rural water governance in China through a governmentality lens and village water intervention case. The China Rural Drinking Water Safety Project (RDWSP) was an attempt to control water, while also serving as a tool of power to impel the rural population towards national development goals. The authors analyzed official documents and conducted interviews in a village in Shandong Province to investigate the RDWSP's rationale and practices, as well as how water access and management were negotiated by rural water users. The paper argues that (1) confronted with a decline in local governance capacity and in an effort to rectify the mistakes of the supply-driven, technocratic paradigm, the RDWSP attempted to integrate social, environmental and economic concerns but did not achieve that goal; (2) the decline in local governance capacity and people's pragmatic everyday strategies contributed to an individualized approach to solving water problems, reflected in people's disengagement from the government project and local participation, an effect that may sustain people's marginalization and exclusion from good-quality water access and management. Using the Chinese water project as an example, the paper contributes to the debate on state-induced water control versus civil society “counter-conduct” formed by daily interactions. Furthermore, it enriches the study of politics in general by presenting the state as a site of contested institutionalization and ongoing negotiations, confronted by everyday narratives and encounters with marginalized citizens that go far beyond and are far more complex than overt resistance or covert weapons of the weak.
The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) ideology, rooted in its foundational struggles, explicitly denounces “bureaucratism” ( guanliaozhuyi ) as an intrinsic ailment of bureaucracy. Yet while the revolutionary Party has blasted bureaucratism, its revolutionary regime has had to find a way to coexist with bureaucracy, which is a requisite for effective governance. An anti-bureaucratic ghost thus dwells in the machinery of China's bureaucratic state. We analyse the CCP's anti-bureaucratism through two steps. First, we perform a historical analysis of the Party's anti-bureaucratic ideology, teasing out its substance and emphasizing its roots in and departures from European Marxism and Leninism. Second, we trace both the continuity and evolution in the Party's anti-bureaucratic rhetoric, taking an interactive approach that combines close reading with computational analysis of the entire corpus of the People's Daily (1947–2020). We find striking endurance as well as subtle shifts in the substance of the CCP's anti-bureaucratic ideology. We show that bureaucratism is an umbrella term that expresses the revolutionary Party's anxiety about losing its popular legitimacy. Yet the substance of the Party's concern evolved from commandism and revisionism under Mao, to corruption and formalism during reform. The Party's ongoing critiques of bureaucratism and formalism unfold in parallel fashion with its efforts to standardize, regularize and institutionalize the state.
Village cadres are important agents for the state yet disciplining them has been difficult. There are few disciplinary tools that can easily hold them to account. Prior to 2018, Party discipline did not apply to non-Party cadres. Legislation was ambiguous in relation to these grassroots agents and had to rely heavily on legal interpretation. The impact of the cadre evaluation system on village cadres, who are not considered to be public servants on the state payroll, was limited. This situation has changed since 2018. The party-state has consolidated and institutionalized ways in which grassroots cadres are checked and disciplined. Instead of relying on policy regulation, which had been the dominant disciplinary method since 1949, village cadres are now fully subject to Party rules and state laws. These changes have been accomplished through the application of three measures. First, village Party secretaries are to serve concurrently as village heads, and members of village and Party committees are to overlap, thereby making them subject to Party discipline. Second, village cadres are now considered to be “public agents” and are on an equal legal footing with other state agents. Finally, a campaign waged by the criminal justice apparatus cleaned up village administration and prepared it for upcoming village elections in a new era.
Land is a key input in economic production and production-waste sink. This links land to the causes of and responses to climate change. The dominant climate action ideas are based on the concept of 'land tenure security' which, in a global context marked by land-based inequities, means ratifying what already exists. This reinforces undemocratic social structures and institutions that themselves contribute to climate change. A restructuring of global land politics is called for, without which any analyses of and responses to climate change are at best superficial, and at worst, flawed and self-defeating. What is needed is to acknowledge the pervasive land-based social inequities in the world, and to end such inequities by pursuing a redistribution of a range of access to a range of land and resources in ways that categorically benefit the working people.
Focusing on pastoralism, this article reflects on five diverse cases across Africa, Asia and Europe and asks: how have COVID-19 disease control measures affected mobility and production practices, marketing opportunities, land control, labour relations, local community support and socio-political relations with the state and other settled agrarian or urban populations? In response to the lockdown measures, we explore what innovations have emerged to secure livelihoods, through new forms of social solidarity and 'moral economy'. The cases examine how impacts and responses have been differentiated by class, age, wealth and ethnicity, and explore the implications for socioeconomic processes and political change in pastoral settings.
Political reactions ‘from below’ to global land grabbing have been vastly more varied and complex than is usually assumed. This essay introduces a collection of ground-breaking studies that discuss responses that range from various types of organized and everyday resistance to demands for incorporation or for better terms of incorporation into land deals. Initiatives ‘from below’ in response to land deals have involved local and transnational alliances and the use of legal and extra-legal methods, and have brought victories and defeats. The relevance of political reactions to land grabbing is discussed in light of theories of social movements and critical agrarian studies. Future research on reactions ‘from below’ to land grabbing must include greater attention to gender and generational differences in both impacts and political agency.
This special issue furthers the study of natural resource management
from a critical institutional perspective. Critical institutionalism (CI) is a
contemporary body of thought that explores how institutions dynamically
mediate relationships between people, natural resources and society. It focuses
on the complexity of institutions entwined in everyday social life, their historical
formation, the interplay between formal and informal, traditional and modern
arrangements, and the power relations that animate them. In such perspectives
a social justice lens is often used to scrutinise the outcomes of institutional
processes. We argue here that critical institutional approaches have potentially
much to offer commons scholarship, particularly through the explanatory power
of the concept of bricolage for better understanding institutional change. Critical
institutional approaches, gathering momentum over the past 15 years or so, have
excited considerable interest but the insights generated from different disciplinary
perspectives remain insufficiently synthesised. Analyses emphasising complexity
can be relatively illegible to policy-makers, a fact which lessens their reach. This
special issue therefore aims to synthesise critical institutional ideas and so to lay the
foundation for moving beyond the emergent stage to make meaningful academic
and policy impact. In bringing together papers here we define and synthesise key
themes of critical institutionalism, outline the concept of institutional bricolage
and identity some key challenges facing this school of thought.
In this article we review research on Chinese guanxi and social networking in the past twenty years and identify the major perspectives, theories, and methodologies used in guanxi research at micro and macro levels. We summarize the main findings of over 200 journal articles on guanxi research in terms of its conceptual definitions and measurements, its antecedents and consequences, and its dynamics and processes. Furthermore, we identify the gaps between different levels of guanxi research and discuss future directions to advance our understanding of the complex and intricate guanxi phenomenon.
本文综合回顾了过去二十年来中外文献中有关中国人关系和社会网络的研究，对微观及宏观层次上关系研究的主要视角、理论、及研究方法进行了区分，并对关系研究在概念定义、测量、前因后果、动态变化和过程等方面的主要实证研究结果进行了总结。此外，本文论述了不同层次关系研究之间的空白并指出了未来研究方向, 以便更深入全面地探讨和了解关系现象的错综复杂性。
"We analyze the emergence of an adaptive co-management system for wetland landscape governance in southern Sweden, a process where unconnected management by several actors in the landscape was mobilized, renewed, and reconfigured into ecosystem management within about a decade. Our analysis highlights the social mechanisms behind the transformation toward ecosystem management. The self-organizing process was triggered by perceived threats among members of various local stewardship associations and local government to the area's cultural and ecological values. These threats challenged the development of ecosystem services in the area. We show how one individual, a key leader, played an instrumental role in directing change and transforming governance. The transformation involved three phases: 1) preparing the system for change, 2) seizing a window of opportunity, and 3) building social-ecological resilience of the new desired state. This local policy entrepreneur initiated trust-building dialogue, mobilized social networks with actors across scales, and started processes for coordinating people, information flows and ongoing activities, and for compiling and generating knowledge, understanding, and management practices of ecosystem dynamics. Understanding, collaborative learning, and creating public awareness were part of the process. A comprehensive framework was developed with a shared vision and goals that presented conservation as development, turned problems into possibilities, and contributed to a shift in perception among key actors regarding the values of the wetland landscape. A window of opportunity at the political level opened, which made it possible to transform the governance system toward a trajectory of ecosystem management. The transformation involved establishing a new municipal organization, the Ecomuseum Kristianstads Vattenrike (EKV). This flexible organization serves as a bridge between local actors and governmental bodies and is essential to the adaptive governance of the wetland landscape. It is also critical in navigating the larger sociopolitical and economic environment for resilience of the new social-ecological system. We conclude that social transformation is essential to move from a less desired trajectory to one where the capacity to manage ecosystems sustainably for human well-being is strengthened. Adaptability among actors is needed to reinforce and sustain the desired social-ecological state and make it resilient to future change and unpredictable events."
Politics in peasant societies is mostly the everyday, quotidian sort. Hence, if one looks only for politics in conventional places and forms, much would be missed about villagers' political thought and actions as well as relationships between political life in rural communities and the political systems in which they are located. To make this case, the paper explains the meaning of everyday politics by distinguishing it from two other realms of politics and then discusses four types of everyday politics. The paper concludes by suggesting that, in addition to better understanding peasant societies, the concept of everyday politics makes us – researchers – further aware of, and realise the importance of, our own everyday political behaviour.
Using interviews with peasants and cadres in North China, compliant villagers (shunmin), recalcitrants (dingzihu), and policy-based resisters (diaomin) are distinguished by reference to their resistance routines (or lack of resistance). Compared to both violent acts and "everyday forms of resistance," policy-based resistance is typically less risky and more effective, because its practitioners employ beneficial central policies to defy local leaders who they believe have ignored or violated these policies. Acting under the sufferance of authorities at higher levels and within the rubric of prevailing political values and norms, policy-based resisters occupy an intermediate position between subjects and citizens. Moreover, their active pursuit of policy-based (sometimes proactive) claims may indicate the growth of rights consciousness in the Chinese countryside.
How is one to understand contentious acts that open channels of participation while also making use of existing channels? Rightful resistance is a partly institutionalized form of popular action that employs laws, policies, and other established values to defy power holders who have failed to live up to some ideal or who have not implemented a popular measure. Analysis of opposition to cadre misconduct in rural China, supported by evidence from the United States, Norway, and South Africa, suggests that resistance can share a common dynamic despite its occurrence in strikingly dissimilar settings. Aggrieved individuals and groups turn to established principles to anchor their defiance; use legitimating myths and normative language to frame their claims; rely on existing statutes and government commitments when leveling their charges; and locate and mobilize advocates within officialdom. In differing contexts, a combination of rights talk, legal tactics, and open confrontation may induce power holders to surrender advantages in accord with principles that usually favor them. The cases examined further suggest that rightful resistance springs from rights consciousness and increases it and, finally, that it may be more consequential than most "everyday resistance" while remaining less risky than wholly uninstitutionalized defiance.
The conventional paradigm in political economy routinely treats living, complex, adaptive social systems as machine-like objects. This treatment has driven political economists to oversimplify big, complex social processes using mechanical models, or to ignore them altogether. In development, this has led to theoretical dead ends, trivial agendas, or failed public policies. This article proposes an alternative paradigm: adaptive political economy. It recognizes that social systems are complex, not complicated; complexity can be ordered, not messy; and social scientists should be developing the concepts, methods, and theories to illuminate the order of complexity, rather than oversimplifying it. The author illustrates one application of adaptive political economy by mapping the coevolution of economic and institutional change. This approach yields fresh, important conclusions that mechanical, linear models of development have missed, including that market-building institutions look and function differently from market-sustaining ones.
Empirical evidence increasingly suggests that while the uptake of agroecology brings significant benefits to ecosystems, health, and communities, yet achieving a transition towards agroecology can still be complicated. In this article we contribute to this literature by offering a power-sensitive analysis of the transition towards agroecology. We build on insights from critical institutionalism and introduce a complementary analytical view for examining the institutional arena in which actors' interactions influence individual decisions to adopt agroecological practices. We label this bundle of interactions as ‘intertwined relations’. Our empirical data is drawn from a study of a program in rural villages in Peru, designed to encourage farmers to take up agroecology. Our case study demonstrates that the local dynamics influenced agricultural transition and that their evolution exposed more complex mechanisms of power-play in farmers' interactions. We identify two power-play mechanisms that influenced farmers' decisions to adopt agroecological practices: copying and learning - which entails learning from peer farmers with more resources before adopting an agroecological production model, and the manageability of the risks - which was adopted as a strategy for managing the multiple risks of adopting agroecology, and aligning their economic and social interests with those of the agroecology programs.
This article examines the implementation of China’s ongoing program for rangeland protection through the case of Nagchu in the Tibet Autonomous Region. The program's three goals are preventing rangeland degradation, changing ‘the mode of pastoral development’, and increasing pastoralists' income. Based on the belief that overgrazing has caused pervasive rangeland degradation, it compensates pastoralists for losses incurred where grazing is banned and rewards them for maintaining livestock numbers within determined rangeland carrying capacity. In practice, in China’s upwardly accountable system, local officials focus first and foremost on funding-oriented task fulfillment rather than rangeland protection. Consequently, the program ends up having little to do with rangeland protection, serving instead as a monetary-payment and de-stocking program advancing China’s overriding goal of transforming traditional pastoralism.
The cadre system in China is designed to reduce human error as well as improve government efficiency and competence. Focusing on the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), this research analyses the particularities of the cadre system in China’s ethnic minority regions and their impact on local governance. It argues that peculiarities in the recruitment, evaluation, term of office and ethnic minority cadre arrangements have actively and passively encouraged controversial cadre behaviours at the local level. Together with the historical, political and demographic conditions in the TAR, the cadre system has, at times, decreased the efficiency, competence and credibility of local governments. Although changes have been introduced in recent years to address some of the issues, the cadre system’s impact on local governance remains fundamental.
Cambridge Core - Political Sociology - The Art of Political Control in China - by Daniel C. Mattingly
In the reform era, the Chinese state often resorts to managed campaigns to implement important policies. This article examines how managed campaign influences the mode of bureaucratic operation in China. Avoiding a simplistic dichotomy between campaign mobilization and bureaucratic institutionalization, this study unpacks the Weberian bureaucratic concept and shows that some core dimensions of the model are compatible with managed campaign. While the pressure of mobilization tend to compromise functional differentiation and strict adherence to stable rules, they can reinforce other dimensions such as top-down control in a multilevel hierarchy and procedural integrity. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has configured the bureaucracy to serve its organizational and political needs, resulting in a mode of operation that partially conforms to the Western standard of public administration.
Lake Qinghai, the biggest inland lake and biggest saltwater lake in China, lies in the north-eastern part of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau. The lake is also an important vapour source for the special region. The dynamic variation of its water surface is a response of climate and environment around. In this study the long-time variation of Lake Qinghai was explored from time and space perspectives, based on the shoreline information which was extracted manually with moderate-high spatial resolution remote sensing imagery. The results showed that, as a whole the Lake Qinghai's area decreased from 1974 to 2004 and then increased till 2016. In 2004 the area was smallest, 4223.73 km², smaller by 253.80 km² than that in 1974. From 1974 to 1987 the water surface shrank sharply. While the variation range was relatively modest with mean value of 6.85 km² during the period from 2000 to 2009. During the last 7 years, the water surface increased by 128.27 km². In 2012, there was a sharp expansion with 65.12 km² larger than previous year; moreover the annual variation reached maximum, 59.18 km². The shoreline of Sand island, which lies in the east coast, varied significantly during the past few decades. From 1974 to 2004 the maximum back distance from the coastline was 4.59 km, and the value of annual variation was 0.39 km in 2012. The increase of precipitation in Lake Qinghai region, and the enlarging inflow runoff, which benefited directly from local ecological environment control measures implemented by government, are two important reasons to make the lake expanding in the last two decades.
Since the late 1970s, the literature on adaptive management has grown markedly. Active and passive forms have been identified, implementation trialled and institutional requirements explored. Adaptive management is now an accepted quality of governance and, in some cases, a legislative requirement of natural resource management. The concept is widely encouraged; yet, there remain high rates of implementation failure. Confusion on the definition of adaptive management is one cause of implementation errors, with researchers, natural resource managers and policy-makers talking and acting cross-purposes. Adaptive management is variously described as ‘experimental management’, ‘learning by doing’ and ‘structured decision-making’. Adding to the confusion, the related terms adaptive co-management and adaptive governance have also emerged. This article analyses the definitions of adaptive management, adaptive co-management and adaptive governance, highlighting confusion within definitions, between definitions and misinterpretations of definitions. Furthermore, interchangeable use of these terms suggests a lack of additionality. Differing epistemologies, and consequently, interpretations of uncertainty, are shown to be at the core of misinterpretations and ensuing confusion. The findings identify distinguishing dimensions of adaptive management, adaptive co-management and adaptive governance before proposing clear definitions.
Drawing on a case study of pastoral areas in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, this article illustrates four forms of everyday strategies adopted by herders to deal with the risks and uncertainty generated during China's reform era. To avoid direct confrontations with the authorities, herders resort to strategies that subvert government policies rather than engage in overt forms of resistance or protests. Through analyzing how herders avoid risks resulting from imposed policies, market forces, and grassland degradation, the article shows the ways in which these everyday strategies advantage local people in their attempts to secure a livelihood.
Legal pluralism and hybrid governance are two lines of research that address the interactions between state (official) and non-state (unofficial) norms. Both come to similar observations, yet they seem hardly aware of each other's existence. With very few exceptions, the one does not refer to the other. This article seeks to explore whether links can be established. It presents both lines of research, identifies common ground, explores what they can learn from each other, and seeks to find whether the distance can be bridged. It concludes that legal pluralism and hybrid governance could be mutually reinforcing if scholars in the two lines were aware of and used each other's findings and methods, and saw each other as complementary.
In this introduction we argue that access and property regarding natural resources are intimately bound up with the exercise of power and authority. The process of seeking authorizations for property claims also has the effect of granting authority to the authorizing politico-legal institution. In consequence, struggles over natural resources in an institutionally pluralist context are processes of everyday state formation. Through the discussion of this theoretical proposition we point to legitimizing practices, territoriality and violence as offering particular insights into the recursively constituted relations between struggles over access and property regarding natural resources, contestations about power and authority, and state formation.
The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr Ostrom uses institutional analysis to explore different ways - both successful and unsuccessful - of governing the commons. In contrast to the proposition of the 'tragedy of the commons' argument, common pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisheries.
The resilience perspective is increasingly used as an approach for understanding the dynamics of social–ecological systems. This article presents the origin of the resilience perspective and provides an overview of its development to date. With roots in one branch of ecology and the discovery of multiple basins of attraction in ecosystems in the 1960–1970s, it inspired social and environmental scientists to challenge the dominant stable equilibrium view. The resilience approach emphasizes non-linear dynamics, thresholds, uncertainty and surprise, how periods of gradual change interplay with periods of rapid change and how such dynamics interact across temporal and spatial scales. The history was dominated by empirical observations of ecosystem dynamics interpreted in mathematical models, developing into the adaptive management approach for responding to ecosystem change. Serious attempts to integrate the social dimension is currently taking place in resilience work reflected in the large numbers of sciences involved in explorative studies and new discoveries of linked social–ecological systems. Recent advances include understanding of social processes like, social learning and social memory, mental models and knowledge–system integration, visioning and scenario building, leadership, agents and actor groups, social networks, institutional and organizational inertia and change, adaptive capacity, transformability and systems of adaptive governance that allow for management of essential ecosystem services.
This study challenges the oversimplified way in which abstract and bureaucratic 'design principles' derived from resource management literature are translated into development policy and practice, in pursuit of robust and enduring institutions. Drawing on research in the Usangu Basin, Tanzania, it explores the socially embedded nature of institutions for common property resource management and collective action. The concept of 'institutional bricolage' is outlined; a process by which people consciously and unconsciously draw on existing social and cultural arrangements to shape institutions in response to changing situations. Contrary to much theory, this study shows that institutions formed through bricolage are a dynamic mixture of the 'modern' and 'traditional', 'formal' and 'informal'.
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The Innovation of Social Governance Mechanism in Tibetan Areas During the Transformation Period
- L Z Fu
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Adaptive Management; Adaptive co-Management
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