From hope to crisis and back again? A critical history of the global CBNRM narrative

Dressler, Wolfram; Büscher, Bram; Schoon, Michael; Brockington, Dan; Hayes, Tanya; Kull, Christian A.; McCarthy, James J.; Shrestha, Krishna K.

doi:10.1017/s0376892910000044

Cited by 394 publications

(294 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Like participatory forest management (PFM) or community-based natural resources management approaches, co-management approaches have reached -a crisis of identity and purpose, with even the most positive examples experiencing only fleeting success due to major deficiencies‖ according to Dressler et al [1]. The initial excitement and rhetoric have given way to a more critical consolidation phase focused on resolving theoretical and practical limitations [2][3][4][5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing People Back into Protected Forests in Developing Countries: Insights from Co-Management in Malawi

Zulu¹

2013

Sustainability

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This study examines struggles to bring people back into protected forests to enhance sustainable forest management and livelihoods using insights emerging from a co-management project in Malawi. It uses mixed social science methods and a process-based conceptualization of co-management to analyze experiences, and theory of reciprocal altruism to explain major findings of continuing local forest-user commitment to co-management despite six years of conservation burdens largely for minimal financial benefits. It argues that overemphasis on cash incentives as the motivation for -self-interested‖ users to participate in co-management overlooks locally significant non-cash motivations, inflates local expectations, and creates perverse incentives that undermine socio-ecological goals. Some non-cash incentives outweighed cash-driven ones. Findings support broadening of incentives mechanisms, including via nested cross-scale institutional arrangements for holistic management that integrates adjacent forests into forest-reserve co-management. Strengthened institutions, improving community/government and intracommunity trust, improved village forests easing pressure on the reserve, measures minimizing elite capture, and impetus from an external threat, enhanced forest condition. Generous forest rights and appropriate community licensing and benefit-sharing systems also helped. Bureaucratic/donor inefficiencies, wood-extraction challenges, poor forest-based enterprise development, and low resource value undermined performance. Insights on forest-management planning, fair cost-sharing, targeting the poor, and need for social learning are highlighted.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing People Back into Protected Forests in Developing Countries: Insights from Co-Management in Malawi

Zulu¹

2013

Sustainability

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“…As such, it contrasts the classical forest conservation narrative of protected areas without people ('fortress nature') (Palomo et al, 2014). Such 'coercive conservation' led to exclusion of people from their lands and violation of their forest rights in many Tropical countries, thus fuelling debates on 'doing conservation otherwise' (Dressler et al, 2010). Consequently, discourses on proper forest management and conservation drastically shifted over time (Umans, 1993;Wiersum, 2009).…”

Section: Motives Goals Targetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of International Cooperative Initiatives on Biodiversity (ICIBs)

Arts

Buijs²,

Gevers

et al. 2017

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“…This literature builds on critical perspectives that emerged in community-based natural resource management studies on multistakeholder approaches (Edmunds and Wollenberg 2001, Larson and Ribot 2004, Dressler et al 2010). The critique is that these approaches tend to revolve around an assumed "neutrality" of research as a space for engagement where everyone's voice can be heard (equally) and focus on consensus building in contexts in which it might not be desirable for all parties (Barnaud and VanOur contribution aims to connect insights from this aforementioned literature and build on the more critical perspectives, but it also calls attention to the importance of the historical social-ecological context in which resource conflicts develop.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Power and politics in stakeholder engagement: farm dweller (in)visibility and conversions to game farming in South Africa

Brandt¹,

Josefsson²,

Spierenburg³

2018

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Here, we discuss tensions inherent in multistakeholder approaches addressing conflicts over natural resources as well as the involvement of stakeholders in research. Our discussion is built on knowledge generated by extensive research on the impacts of private farm conversions to game farms in South Africa, where significant increases in farm conversions have been observed since the 1990s. The studies had a particular focus on the consequences for farm dwellers, one of the most marginalized groups in the South African countryside. The research findings challenge the dominant narrative that game farming offers a win-win situation for nature conservation and rural development. Based on data from the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, we extended the narrow technical and economic framing of the narrative to include the socio-political meanings of the conversions. We reflect on a series of multistakeholder workshops that we organized, partly as a requirement of the funding agency. The workshop aims were to disseminate our research findings among the stakeholder groups and explore ways to mitigate the negative impacts of conversions. We discuss how we organized the engagement process in ways that sought to address the power differences between game farmers, the State, and farm dwellers. The main challenge appeared to be that farm dwellers were not recognized as stakeholders. This "invisibility" has multiple reasons, in particular, the historical and current trajectories of land dispossession. It is also linked to specific institutional and personal relations in the two provinces, resulting in different uses of the workshop spaces. By considering the complexities of stakeholder relations in the farm conversion context, we gained a deeper understanding of the politics of land and belonging in the still unequal postapartheid rural landscape. Based on experiences from the research as well as the workshops, we take a critical stance regarding mainstream notions of stakeholder engagement and resilience building. We argue that if we fail to consider power relations and politics explicitly in these processes, we risk neglecting important conflicts and reproducing the invisibility of marginalized stakeholders.

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From hope to crisis and back again? A critical history of the global CBNRM narrative

Cited by 394 publications

References 53 publications

Bringing People Back into Protected Forests in Developing Countries: Insights from Co-Management in Malawi

Bringing People Back into Protected Forests in Developing Countries: Insights from Co-Management in Malawi

The Impact of International Cooperative Initiatives on Biodiversity (ICIBs)

Power and politics in stakeholder engagement: farm dweller (in)visibility and conversions to game farming in South Africa

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