Community-based natural resource management

This chapter introduces the concept of micro-governance in community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). The central argument is that wildlife-based CBNRM is good at delivering conservation benefits and generating income. However, we need to understand much more about micro-governance if the goal is also to ensure that CBNRM delivers public participation and equitable benefit sharing. CBNRM is a strategy by which groups of people collectively manage resources that cannot be managed individually because they occur in diverse and scattered configurations or are mobile, or both. Thus CBNRM tends to occur in forests, drylands and mountain environments where individualized agriculture is ecologically difficult.