Co-management and Indigenous Communities: Barriers and Bridges to Decentralized Resource Management: Introduction

Abstract

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.

Shifting the Framework of Canadian Water Governance through Indigenous Research Methods: Acknowledging the Past with an Eye on the Future

“…We see this as a positive intervention in the status quo approach to doing research on water governance issues. This is a crucial shift in approach given that Indigenous knowledge is typically marginalized by dominant society [58][59][60][61][62]. As evidenced by the Indigenous water security challenges described in this paper, Indigenous peoples continue to experience ongoing colonial legacies, which create the adverse social, political, and environmental conditions making Indigenous communities more vulnerable to health problems, and other issues.…”

Indigenous social and economic adaptations in northern Alaska as measures of resilience

“…Statewide economic growth and institutional development led to tension between state government and traditional subsistence communities (Morgan 1976, Morehouse et al 1984, Spaeder 2005, Spaeder and Feit 2005, Dayo and Kofinas 2010. Until the 1970s, there were no seasonal restrictions or bag limits for caribou.…”

Co-management redux: anti-politics and transformation in the Ashaninka Communal Reserve, Peru

“…When explored ethnographically, the potential for community co-optation (and disempowerment) through co-management becomes a central trope (see Kofinas 2005, Mulrennan and Scott 2005, Spaeder and Feit 2005, Stevenson 2006). Paul Nadasdy (1999Nadasdy ( , 2003Nadasdy ( , 2005Nadasdy ( , 2007, in particular, criticises it as an instrument of domination in an unequal power field, another way of subtly 'extending empire' for the state, and a form of coercive participation that is disempowering for indigenous or local people (see also Kofinas 2005, Spak 2005).…”