Institutional Development for Local Management of Rural Resources Anis A
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Institutional Development for Local Management of Rural Resources Anis A. Dani, Christopher J.N. Gibbs, and Daniel W. Bromley THE INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR INTEGRATED MOUNTAIN DEVELOP• MENT (ICIMOD) was established in 1981, based upon an agreement between His Majesty's Government of Nepal and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The Centre was inaugu• rated in December 1983 and began its professional activities in September 1934. The Centre is located in Kathmandu, Nepal, as an autonomous, interna• tional organization with regional membership from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, China, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. The chief objective of ICIMOD is to promote integrated mountain develop• ment in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya, which means seeking comprehensive ap• proaches to reconciling socioeconomic needs with environmental harmony and productivity. This region, the largest mountain area in the world, directly sustains 100 million people; the population of the adjacent river basins and plains is estimated to be 350 million. The specific objectives of the Centre are multidisciplinary documentation and information dissemination, training and applied research, and provision of consultative services on resource management and development activities. THE AGA KHAN RURAL SUPPORT PROGRAMME (AKRSP) is a private, nonprofit company, established by the Aga Khan Foundation to help improve the quality of life of the villagers of northern Pakistan. It was established in 1982 with a mandate to focus on income generation in collaboration with government departments, elected bodies, national and international develop• ment agencies, and commercial institutions. Although AKRSP's own em• phasis is on income generation, it is also expected to assist other agencies in promoting social sector programs. AKRSP is expected to perform as a catalyst for rural development so that the company itself can withdraw from the project area, as local structures are gradually developed to sustain the development process. AKRSP works in Gilgit and Baltistan districts of the Northern Areas and in Chitral District of the North West Frontier Province, Pakistan. These three districts have a combined population of 750,000, living in more than 1,000 villages scattered over 70,000 square kilometers. The region is rugged and heavily mountainous at the intersection of four of the world's highest moun• tain ranges—the Himalaya, Karakorum, Pamir, and Hindu Kush. All of the region is above 1,200 meters with numerous peaks above 7,000 meters. The population of the region embraces three Islamic traditions, and five local lan• guages are spoken. A century ago, the region was the flash point of Asia; today it is the northernmost boundary of Pakistan with Afghanistan to the north and west, China to the north and east, and India to the south. INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR LOCAL MANAGEMENT OF RURAL RESOURCES INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR LOCAL MANAGEMENT OF RURAL RESOURCES by Anis A. Dani, Christopher J.N. Gibbs, and Daniel W. Bromley This report is based on presentations and discussions at the workshop held in Gilgit, 19-24 April 1986. Cosponsored by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, Kathmandu, Nepal; the East-West Environment and Policy Institute, Honolulu, Hawaii 96848, USA; and the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme, Pakistan. East-West Environment and Policy Institute Workshop Report No. 2 1987 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vli Overview and Rationale 1 Hill and Mountain Areas 2 The Aga Khan Rural Support Programme 4 Gilgit and the Northern Areas 4 Goals, Objectives, and the Workshop Process 8 Workshop Design 10 Structure 12 What Makes Common Property Regimes Efficient Managers of Hill and Mountain Resources? 13 Defining Common Property Regimes 14 Membership, Rights, and Duties in Common Property Regimes . 16 The Dynamlos of Common Property Regimes 19 Functions of Common Property Regimes 21 Evaluating Common Property Regimes 23 Field Trip and Discussions 24 Group Discussions 27 Ethical Implications 34 Feedback on the Field Trip Process 35 Conolusion 37 Tasks of Common Property Regimes and Their Performance 38 Priorities for Research 40 Strategy of the Workshop 43 Appendices: A. Summaries of Presentations 45 B. List of Participants 57 References 59 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank a number of people who made the Gilgit workshop a success and who made the preparation of this report possible. First, we must thank the members of all three sponsoring organizations for their active support and successful collaboration in bringing together participants from Asia and America to the Northern Areas of Pakistan. We particularly thank the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP), our hosts in Gilgit. We would like to acknowledge their useful contribution in enabling participants to understand the intricacies of their program and in making the workshop and this report possible. Second, we must thank those people who helped to prepare the report, in particular the chairs of the four working groups: Nek Buzdar, Michael Dove, Ram Yadav, and Robert Yoder. Material from their summaries has been incorporated directly into the main text. Presentations by participants are summarized In Appendix A of this report. We would also like to thank Hermann Kreutzmann, Lecturer of Geography, Free University, West Berlin, for his permission to reproduce the map of Hunza-Nagar. We are grateful to the participants of a June 1986 seminar at ICIMOD in Kathmandu, where feedback on the workshop and the workshop process were provided. Special thanks are also due the secretarial and editorial staff of the East-West Environment and Policy Institute in Honolulu, Laura Miho and Helen Takeuchi, for their oareful work. Finally, we must thank the AKRSP1s Village Organizers, Mohammad Iqbal and Noor Mohammad, who introduced us to the villagers of Hunza and Nagar. To these villagers we owe the greatest debt of all for generously sharing with us their time, experience, and many details of their daily lives in the mounts!ns. vli OVERVIEW AND RATIONALE Resources provide benefits for people, and institutions in the form of property rights establish people's claims to resouroes. Based on property rights, organizational arrangements evolve to articulate individual and collective entitlements. In rural Asia the resources of most Importance are natural resources, including land for cultivation, water for irrigation, and pasture land and forests as sources of fodder and fuel. In coastal areas, fisheries close to the shore may be added to this list. These are all renewable resources in the sense that they may yield a continuous stream of benefits over time if appropriately managed. Responsibility for managing renewable resources rests with the resource "owners" who may be individuals or groups, private or public When private property is recognized, the identity of the "owner" and the rights of "ownership" are usually unambig• uous. However, in rural Asia many renewable resouroes are collectively owned and managed in a variety of ways, and complex forms of individual and group property coexist. To outsiders especially, resource ownership may appear to be far from clear, and rights to own, possess, and use resouroes by individuals and groups may overlap. In many instances legal rights to ownership and actual use do not ooinclde. Complexity in property rights and the collective management of renewable resouroes are especially Important in hill and mountain areas. In these areas livelihood systems are typically based on the careful management of several integrated components, none of which may be especially productive. In particular, cropland, water, forest, and pasture are simultaneously managed as systems to produce food, fiber, energy, and forage. However, little is known about the institutional and organizational arrangements people employ to manage these resouroes. What are the arrangements? How are they applied? How well do they 1 2 perform? Can they be Improved upon? And what can we learn from them? In order to draw attention to these questions, a small workshop was convened in Gilgit, the headquarters of the AKRSP. The main purpose of the Gilgit workshop was to develop a framework for analyzing institutional arrangements for collective management of renewable resources at an operational level in a mountain region, to apply the framework in the field, and to develop implications and a research agenda for understanding Institutional change. The presence of AKRSP in the Northern Areas of Pakistan permitted the workshop to function in an area rioh in existing and new forma for resource management. A framework for analyzing these arrangements begins with the components of the ecosystem, which become resouroes when managed through Institutional rules and conventions to produce benefits for people. The interaction of people and resources creates a pattern of social and ecological outcomes that can be assessed, leading to further direct investment in the resource or Institutional and organizational change. Hill and Mountain Areas By their very nature, hill and mountain areas are typically inaccessible and often remote. Hill people in Asia find themselves frequently on the periphery, at a distance from centers of power in the lowlands and often astride boundaries or on frontiers between powerful rivals. Hill and mountain areas may be characterized as seoondary regions that are economically, institutionally, and spatially marginal (Koppel 1981). This contrasts with