ABSTRACT
Community conservation emerged in the last quarter of the 20th century at the intersection of people, environment, and sustainable development as demographic growth and globalisation overwhelmed the capacity for public governance of wild spaces. This spawned a somewhat disconnected literature about communities, common property, conservation, development, and decentralisation, due to no cogent conceptualisation of CBNRM. After providing vignettes of better-known examples of CBNRM including community forest management in Asia and Latin America, community-based fisheries in Asia, and community wildlife management in Africa, this chapter sets out one such conceptualisation. The author suggests that the three major strands of CBNRM are organisational management and decentralisation, common property theory, and market-led conservation in the service of environmental justice and sustainability. CBNRM markets a transition on the governance of wild resources from the public realm to collective and private governance. This has four attributes: the devolution of rights for wild resources to communities; the valorisation of wild resources to maximise community benefit; effective community governance, but within a larger framework of meso- and macro-level institutions; and adaptive systems that build social, institutional, and natural capital.
