The impacts of long-distance relationships on local natural resource management

Abstract

The management of large common-pool resources, like fisheries and forests, is more difficult when more people and more communities can access them—a particular problem given increased population sizes and higher mobility in the Anthropocene. Social relationships spanning communities, such as kin relationships, business or trade relationships, and friendships, can make management even more challenging by facilitating overharvesting, transmitting norms for overharvesting, and encouraging corruption. However, these long-distance relationships can also bolster management by transmitting norms for sustainability, promoting interdependence, and laying the groundwork for nested management systems. Here, we review the positive and negative impacts of long-distance relationships on natural resource management, providing illustrative examples from our field research on forest and fisheries management in Tanzania. Drawing on the evolutionary literature, the development literature, and our field data, we offer suggestions for how development partners may leverage, or even deliberately foster long-distance relationships to promote successful natural resource management.

Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions

“…Human sociality is uniquely expansive, and so it may be that the historical upward trajectory in the scale and intensity of cooperation can continue into the Anthropocene, avoiding the worst outcomes we have described. Human groups often cooperate and share cultural elements even in the absence of external pressures (see [29]), creating a fitness interdependence which may mitigate competitive outcomes. Perhaps the expansive quality of human sociality may mitigate this scenario.…”

“…Betweengroup cooperation can take the form of trade networks, military alliances and treaties, and may often be coupled with cultural transmission including the sharing of language and traditions. These long-distance between-group interactions may play a role in natural resource management and environmental exploitation as well [29]. Human capacity to grow new cooperative and cultural connections between groups may even result in the formation of new social units at a larger scale.…”

Evolution of the polycrisis: Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability

“…First and foremost, among structural dynamics, global connectivity is causing interactions to become distant, e.g. through increasing trade, urbanization or information and communications technology [105,106]. A consequence of distant interactions is that people impact environments that they are not physically exposed to, and hence these impacts become increasingly masked [107,108].…”

Governance characteristics and feelings of safety are associated with attitudinal success in community‐based natural resource management & conservation organizations in northern Kenya

“…An important consideration in some systems are the potential interactions between different groups or communities in the broader cultural landscape in which CBC projects are embedded, and the potential for conflict or cooperation between groups (Cox et al, 2020;McGinnis & Ostrom, 2014;Pisor et al, 2022). In this study, we examine a large-scale initiative in northern Kenya whereby communities have established new participant-led organizations for the purposes of conservation and natural resource management ("community conservancies"; King et al, 2015;KWCA, 2019;USAID, 2013).…”