Having reviewed different aspects of devolution policies in NRM, it appears that, in spite of widespread adoption of devolution policies around the world, the impacts of these policies towards increased people’s power in decision making, livelihoods and more sustainable NRM have remained limited in most cases. This has led to discussion of the third (and final) aspects of devolution policies in Edmunds et al.’s (2003a) analysis: the relationship between existing local management practices and devolution interventions. Studying this relationship also helps assess the contribution of devolution to improving local people’s position in decision-making processes.
The relationship can be conflicting, mutually supportive or neutral. Mutually supportive relationships have been observed under the influence of the joint management model. For instance, local people participating in collaborative management programmes have received legal recognition of their customary access and withdrawal rights to natural resources, as well as development assistance to improve their livelihoods. In addition, as a result of their enhanced legal status in NRM processes, local people have become more politically visible and inclined to speak out to protect their rights (Wollenberg et al., 2008). In general, however, as Edmunds et al. (2003a) found in their research, examples of mutually supportive policies are hard to come by in the literature on devolution of natural resource management.
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In fact, the relationship between existing local management practices and devolution interventions is often conflicting. Without a proper understanding of local contexts, institutions, customs and norms, it has been observed that community forest management programmes are often in conflict with existing systems at particular localities. For instance, in setting up committees for forest protection under JFM in India or implementing many JFM schemes, there has been little effort to build upon or formalise traditional and/or existing methods and institutions (Behera and Engel, 2006; Matose, 2006; Springate-Baginski and Blaikie, 2008; Bhattacharya et al., 2010, Chapter 7 and 8). In this regard, spaces for local people to deliberate their knowledge as postcolonial scholars advocate remain limited. Even if spaces are created for local people (e.g., rights to certain forest products, rights and responsibilities to develop a management plan, or the creation of grassroots organisations for forest management), they are done so on the terms of the Forest Department, as shown by various studies (e.g., Fisher, 2000; Dachang and Edmunds, 2003; Edmunds and Wollenberg, 2003; Edmunds et al., 2003b; Behera and Engel, 2006; Thoms, 2008; Chapter 7 and 8).
When local institutions have been created without considerations to local practices, local-level politics of control have been ignored in new resource management systems (as seen at the study sites – see Chapters 7 and 8). This, in turn, has created substantial conflicts with the existing NRM practices and decision-making processes that had previously regulated the use of local forest resources (Ribot, 1998; Mandondo, 2000; Malla, 2001; Vedeld and Rao, 2001; Medina et
al., 2008). Forest departments and states frequently take on co-management without the
necessary changes to their views about the way forest environments operate, and without distancing themselves from their assumed positions of control (Matose, 2006; Chapter 8). As a result, relations between the state and local people in co-management initiatives are still characterised by inequality, with local people having little power on which to protect their access to natural resources (see Gibson and Marks, 1995; Oates, 1995, 1999; Holmes, 2003; Matso, 2006, Chapters 7 and 8).
In view of the above, the author supports the argument put forward by Barrow et al. (2000) that governments, NGOs, donors may have pushed the establishment of community institutions too fast at the cost of community understanding and ownership, which is analysed in Chapter 7 and 8. This highlights the fragility of induced grassroots organisations to protect their own benefits in the face of coercive power from the state. At the same time, they also raise an opposite question about how to help induced grassroots organisations exist successfully within state system to
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protect rights of their serving communities. This is the area that this thesis tries to address and discussed in Chapter 7, 8 and 9.
Moreover, the evidence in Sections 2.3, 2.4 and the above highlights the feminism and postcolonialism argument that NRM decisions are evoked and embedded in contestations over gender, class, race and other social relations on the subject of defining and satisfying needs (see Rocheleau et al., 1996; McEwan, 2001). In this context, stronger and wealthier actors will impose their knowledge over others’ to realise their agenda (as seen in India and elsewhere; see Sections 2.2 and 2.3). Therefore, in the view of post-colonial feminists, such as Spivak (1988, 1999), the problem does not lie in the inability of local people to speak for themselves but in the unwillingness of the more powerful to listen.
Following this line of argument, states are often seen as being ambivalent towards handing more power to rural communities. In Asia NRM devolution processes are still dominated by government (Thomas-Slayter, 1994; Edmunds et al., 2003a; Bacalla, 2006; Springate-Baginski and Blaikie, 2008; Pulhin and Dressler, 2009). In fact, the state prefers to allocate tasks to civil society organisations that they cannot afford to do financially or do not want to be involved in politically (Bebbington and Farrington, 1993). That is why states may promote devolution policies for their own benefits such as a means of reducing conflict with local communities, strengthening their authority over people and natural resources or reducing costs and responsibilities for the state, or because they are under pressure to give away some of their decision-making power (Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995; Bryant and Bailey, 1997; Sundar, 2001; Banuri and Najam, 2002; Shackleton et al., 2002; Woodcock, 2002; Edmunds and Wollenberg, 2003; Nhantumbo et al., 2003; Vandergeest, 2003; George and Kirkpatrick, 2006; Chapter 4). This leads to a situation in which the power relations between the state and local resource users remain unchanged although devolution programmes are implemented.
Furthermore, the analysis in the previous sections of this chapter shows that co-management initiatives do not necessarily solve problems of inequality in state–people relations around natural resources. Instead, they lock into complex socio-political dynamics revolving around interactions on unequal terms by different groups of people, which are, in turn, embedded of these in broader power struggles over resource control and access between various actors, in particular between state actors and villagers and between men and women (Matose, 2006; Sikor, 2006). In the view of political ecologists, the power struggles over resource access and control can be seen through the resistance strategies that local people employ to influence state policies
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on natural resources. Resistance strategies have been classified by Biot et al. (in Jones and Carswell, 2004) into confrontation, compliance, adaptation and evasion. Confrontation (i.e. direct but not necessarily violent conflict to challenge power relations) is a familiar response to coercive measures imposed on local people by the state. Compliance, which appears when the parties involved share social norms and structures in natural resource use, is the opposite of confrontation and serves as a reinforcing mechanism for the status quo power structure. Adaptation appears when local people comply with constraints imposed by government and adjust their objectives accordingly. Finally, a strategy of evasion is in use when local community, in face of coercion by the more powerful state, accepts the formal or ritual aspects of the state’s demands but leaves the state’s overall objectives unachieved.
Resistance strategies can also be in the form of “everyday form resistance” (Scott, 1985) that is the false compliance and feigned ignorance of ‘illegal’ activities of local people in state-control natural resources areas, in order to, for instance, ‘counter-map’ states’ efforts to claim the ownership of their traditionally used resources (Peluso, 1993, 1995). They are means by which local people avoid provoking more powerful state into any retaliatory action that might exacerbate their socio-economic and political difficulties (Bryant and Bailey, 1997; Holmes, 2007).