ABSTRACT
A participatory approach that seeks to involve multiple stakeholders in natural resource management (NRM) does not guarentee more equitable and effective outcomes in practice. Research has shown that people can and do organize to promote collective action for managing natural resources held in common (Ostrom 1990). This research has identified governance principles for forming institutional arrangements and evaluated case studies to validate this list and provide insight into how common property users define their membership, exclude outsiders from resource use, and monitor each other’s activities, distribute costs and benefits, and reduce incentives for free-riding (Agrawal 2002, Dietz et al. 2003). Nonetheless, the relative value of scarce resources can also prompt powerful groups within society to assert control over and capture natural resources in order to appropriate wealth and enhance their position (Khagram et al. 2003) and participatory NRM can either empower local people to make their own decisions or reproduce existing power inequities (Sithole 2002). Thus a key challenge for NRM research is to unpack participation to distinguish initiatives that lead to resource capture from initiatives that democratize NRM for those people whose livelihoods directly depend on access to natural resources.
