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Natural resource management
A critical appraisal

Jayalaxshmi Mistry

Introduction
Natural resources play a critical role in our lives, providing us with, for example,
food, shelter and energy. For more than 1.3 billion people around the world, natural
resources in the form of fisheries, forests and agriculture provide close to half of all
jobs worldwide, with rural people, in particular, directly depending on natural capital
compared to other parts of the population. In Africa, more than seven in ten poor
people live in rural regions, and most are engaged in resource-dependent activities
such as subsistence farming, livestock production, fishing, hunting, artisanal mining
and logging. In these areas, natural resources provide the primary sources of income
(financial and otherwise), but also the safety nets when crops fail, droughts hit and
employ ment opportunities are few and far between.
Current thinking in the management of natural sources has linked natural and social
sy stems into integrated and nested social-ecological sy stems, imply ing that effective
management and governance of natural resources requires an understanding of the
multiple, networked and dy namic interrelationships between socio-ecological
sy stems at different scales (Pierre and Peters, 2009). Yet, to date many development
policies and actions have supported a command-and-control approach which lacks
the ability to manage and adapt to unexpected and rapid change. In addition, these
management solutions/policy interventions have come from higher-scale structures,
for example, national governments, which are not alway s compatible with the
realities and perspectives of smaller-scale units, such as isolated rural communities
and their associated natural resources. Even at the community scale, issues emerge
with regard to how distinct groupings, for example, women, y outh, the disabled and
the elderly are engaged in natural resource management. The challenge of future
policy evolution, therefore, is to link more explicitly socio-ecological sy stems at
different scales with governance approaches that are reflexive in the way that they
deal with multiple perspectives, interests and values of stakeholders (Voss et al.,
2006).

Current approaches to natural resource management

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Although within the theoretical debates there seems to be growing advocacy for
holistic, social-ecological, adaptive and participatory approaches to natural resource
management, current policies seem to have hijacked both protectionist or ‘fortress’
and community -based approaches, and rolled them into one, where a clear
distinction between the two can be hard to identify in practice. The way this has
happened has been through the dominance of neo-liberal thinking leading to the
increasing commodification of nature, where natural resource ‘goods’ and ‘services’
are transformed into ‘objects’ meant for trading as commodities (Castree, 2008).
Notions closely associated with the commodification of nature include the separation
of humans from the environment (e.g. narrowing down an ecological function to the
level of an ecosy stem service, hence separating the latter from the whole
ecosy stem), the establishment of a monetary value of nature (where price becomes
paramount over other metrics of worth) and the separation of the resource user from
the manager and the rise of the managerial class (the ‘provider’ and ‘consumer’ of
resources set up a supply –demand relationship in market or market-like exchanges).
In this paradigm, and under the label of ‘green capitalism’ or ‘market
environmentalism’, the creation and capture of market value for the services
provided for humans by the non-human world is considered the most efficient and
sustainable means of mitigating global environmental problems, such as climate
change, while maintaining and even enhancing economic growth (Arsel and Büscher,
2012). Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the arena of tropical forest
management, where new forces are acting to modify and/or repartition access to,
and exploitation of, natural resources. Sources of development financing are being
made available to developing countries to maintain their forest stands, especially
through assistance for climate change mitigation and adaptation through, for
example, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+),
Pay ments for Ecosy stem Services (PES), Multilateral Environmental Agreements
(MEAs) and direct investments from private and non-governmental initiatives
(Ghazoul et al., 2010). However, little is known about the potential impacts of these
new funding initiatives on forest conservation and to what extent they recognise, if not
ensure, inclusion of divergent values, participation in political decision-making and
equitable distribution of benefits, as determined by ethnicity, gender, age, income
distribution and other differentiating factors (Sikor et al., 2010). It has been argued
that these new funding streams could potentially escalate inequalities, with some
critics arguing that these initiatives may potentially diminish the power of local
communities to control the management of their own natural resources. For example,
national governments could apply carbon reduction strategies by disincentivising
carbon intensive livelihoods within rural settings, such as traditional slash-and-burn
agriculture, while supporting development projects, such as large-scale hy droelectric
dams, that do not alway s directly and fully compensate for these lost livelihoods.

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 Guy ana, for example, has been actively seeking way s to sustainably manage its
extensive tracts of natural forest resources. Two particular policies championed by
the government of Guy ana are the adoption of the Low Carbon Development
Strategy (LCDS) and REDD+ (Mistry et al., 2009). The LCDS in particular calls for a
reorientation of the economy from a resource extraction development paradigm to a
supplier of environmental services, with low carbon and climate resilience as the
focus. Out of this initiative emerged a memorandum of understanding (MoU) and a
concept note agreed between Guy ana and Norway for interim bilateral funding for a
five-y ear period to support forest carbon and ecosy stem service management
through PES schemes. In addition, there is the growing involvement of the private
sector in forest resource management. For example, the investment firm Canopy
Capital and the related environmental alliance known as the Global Canopy
Programme (GCP) signed agreements to help finance protected areas in return for
‘ownership’ of Guy anese forest ecosy stem services, including carbon retention,
rainfall generation and climate regulation, and a claim in any future profits.
Incorporating environmental externalities into the market economy reflects a belief
that the dy namic behaviour of the capitalist sy stem changes from one of unlimited
growth to one where environmental limits feed back to balance growth within
sustainable limits. However, significant questions still remain on how one can value
environmental externalities such as biodiversity loss, the effects of greenhouse gas
emissions and ecosy stem services.
Although there has been considerable international and national coverage of
REDD+ (e.g. see the REDD Monitor website at www.redd-monitor.org), how these
schemes will be implemented and the implications for the most vulnerable and
marginalised members of society are unclear (McAfee, 2012). Although there is
evidence that local communities have been consulted and/or participated in many
PES and REDD+ processes, whether they understand and fully accept the
commodification in situ of their natural resources and the potential implications is still
very unclear. For many, entering a market economy and/or placing monetary value
on their resources are also radically new cultural practices and little is known of the
potential impacts on local societies and cultures, especially because these often do not
have the governance structures and practices able to cope with such global sy stems.
Devolution of natural resource control to local communities has occurred in
participatory community -based approaches as well as in the form of integrated
conservation and development projects (ICDPs). However, under the neoliberal
agenda, true local control of resources has been limited. In some instances,
corporations and international agencies, such as large environmental/development
NGOs, have increased their influence over local resource use through the
decentralised governance structures. In many, economic activities linked to the
market, such as ecotourism or involvement in PES schemes, are promoted as

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livelihood options, which could further disfranchise marginal communities.

Collaborative adaptive management

Today, in many parts of the world, particularly intertropical biodiversity -rich
regions, we are dealing with increasingly complex, dy namic and unpredictable
social-ecological sy stems, made even more so principally as a result of direct and
indirect human interventions at a range of scales. Many natural resource
management problems seem intractable and often involve the convergence of
multiple crises: unpredictable and dy namic development financing; food insecurity ;
unplanned urbanisation; climate change; escalating organised crime; environmental
degradation and biodiversity extinction; unemploy ment; life-threatening pandemics
such as AIDS and avian flu, corruption, and the list could go on and on. Three distinct
approaches to managing these complex situations have been identified: authoritarian,
market-led and collaborative. The authoritarian approach has the appearance of rapid
implementation. However, the limited number of people involved in the decision-
making process runs the risk of missing out crucial issues, and prescriptive
implementation can be derailed by a range of disenfranchised stakeholders thus
requiring significant investments in enforcement authorities. The market-led
approach can generate a range of creative and innovative solutions, but frequently
runs the risk of allowing the most financially successful approach to dominate, which
principally benefits the established economic elite rather than addressing wider issues
of social justice and ecological sustainability. The majority of scholars researching
the management of complex problems have instead encouraged a clear shift towards
the adoption of a transdisciplinary, multi-scalar, participatory and adaptive approach
to problem-solving which is led and owned by local communities (see, for example,
Project Cobra at www.projectcobra.org). However, this shift in rhetoric has run well
ahead of knowledge about how adaptive management might work in practice.
Looking forward, the aim should be to champion locally owned solutions to natural
resource management which are genuinely participatory, democratic and non-
hierarchical. There should be more focus on learning from and with local
communities on how they have developed their own processes of adaptive
management, and how other organisations can support these communities in the
development process. For example, recent research on community capacity building
for adaptive management has identified a range of skills as well as a knowledge base
on which it needs to be implemented (Mistry et al., 2011). Key skills needed for
adaptive management include risk management, initiative, critical and sy stemic
awareness and reflective practice, and as the number of and/or mistrust between
stakeholders involved in management processes increases, skills of negotiation,
communication, conflict management and empathy become increasingly important.
As there have been calls for a significant shift away from the top down, expert-led

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(usually foreign) decision-making, strengthening local and institutional capacity for
adaptive management through enhancement of these skills can, as Hey man and
Stronza (2011) point out, help people in biodiversity -rich developing countries to take
the lead in finding long-term sustainable solutions to their own natural resource
management and conservation/poverty dilemmas.
What is required is an alternative framework to the mainstream models of how
nature is viewed and resources are managed as an alternative to the neoliberal
globalising agenda which increasingly places control over natural resource
management in the hands of multinational corporations and transnational bodies such
as the World Bank. New paradigms need to build on localised relationships between
communities and the ecology within which they are nested. This approach does not
advocate protectionism and isolation, but rather the sharing of experiences and
resources amongst communities so as to maximise benefits for all rather than the
elite minority .

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