Analyzing Co-management I n recent decades, there has been a profusion of new decentralized institutions for resource management. They have developed as a result of the efforts made by state managers and local resource users to address an array of crises, conflicts and dilemmas surrounding common property resources. Through processes that are variously described as "co-management" or "co-operative management" or "community-based management" managers at the state level and users at the local level have together created scores of new decentralized common property institutions. As joint ventures, these institutions combine different aspects of both state-level and community-level approaches to governance. Accompanying this growth in common property institutions are efforts to analyze them and, as a consequence, the literature on co-management is also growing. Analyses of co-management are becoming quite diverse as a variety of approaches have been adopted, and a complex mix of differing and sometimes conflicting research findings is emerging. This special theme issue of Anthropologica seeks to explore this diversity and to highlight a set of themes and questions related to co-management. It also seeks to highlight research on relationships between indigenous communities and nation states. The authors in this issue adopt a variety of analytical approaches, some more than one, and collectively the papers address issues raised by political ecology, forms of control deployed by modern nation states, critical approaches to issues of empowerment and Indigenous visions of relations to the state. The findings that these papers present do not fit neatly together, nor do they implicitly fit within any one of the theoretical frameworks being used, but they do pose basic questions and tackle issues of wide import that are emerging from this rapidly developing area of research. In the process they also challenge some earlier approaches and assumptions.

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In 1994, Matthew Coon Come, who was then Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees in Quebec, appeared before a committee of the Massachusetts Legislature to ask them to support the Cree struggle against the proposed Great Whale hydroelectric project by not buying Hydro-Quebec power. The Grand Council of the Crees had just signed a complementary agreement with Hydro-Quebec, the public electricity utility of the province, giving C$5O million to the Crees and allowing new construction at the site of a hydroelectric dam that was part of the LaGrande project, which had been constructed over the previous two decades. A committee member asked: Why would you be so agreeable and so willing to modify an agreement, in light of the fact that we have heard that you folks signed the original agreement in 1975 under duress? In other words, if I were you, and Hydro-Quebec came to me and said, 'by the way ... we want to [install] four more sub-stations', I would be telling Hydro-Quebec to take a hike, (in Isacsson 1996) The Grand Chief explained that 'we live in a society in which we have to see how we can coexist, how we can live together [with Quebec].' His questioner persisted, asking the Cree if it was true Hydro-Quebec needed Cree approval to undertake the construction. Grand Chief Coon Come confirmed that and explained that the Cree agreed to more construction in part because of the already compromised quality of these areas -the 'river ... is already dead'. But there was no escaping the implication that had been painted by the questioner: the Crees were not really interested in saving the rivers, animals and a hunting way of life, but in money.

Chez les chasseurs cris de la région de la baie James, dans le nord du Québec, le monde de la pensée et celui des animaux interfèrent souvent, au gré des divers événements de la vie et des activités quotidiennes – chasse, relations sociales, luttes politiques. Tout comme les Ojibwa décrits par A. I. Hallowell, les Cris ne font pas de distinction radicale entre nature et société, ou entre humains et animaux, mais vivent dans un monde animé par différentes sortes de personnes. Si les animaux sont crédités d’une pensée aux yeux des chasseurs cris, ces derniers ne sauraient cependant avoir qu’un accès indirect et incomplet à cette pensée. La chasse crée des contacts avec le monde non humain. Ces expériences nouvelles sont en adéquation profonde avec les habitudes des Cris et confirment par là même la réalité de ce monde autre. Les grandes ruptures, dans ce cosmos social, sont le résultat d’actes asociaux tels que l’exploitation des animaux et des hommes perpétrée par des « cannibales de la forêt » ou des non-Cris. Au milieu de toutes les dégradations causées à leurs terres par l’industrie, les animaux incarnent idéalement – mais aussi très physiquement – le maintien de cette relation de réciprocité qui confirme aux Cris leur propre permanence.

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