What is Community-Based Natural Resource Management?
Communities, defined by their spatial boundaries of jurisdiction and responsibilities, by their distinct and integrated social structure and common interests, can manage their natural resources in an efficient, equitable, and sustainable way. Natural resources are usually common pool resources such as forests, open woodland, grasslands, fisheries, wildlife, etc.
Reasons of CBNRM’s Popularity
•The phrase itself—“Community” (community as a spatial unit, a distinct social structure, and a set of shared norms).
There is also a powerful critique of the idea of the “community” as a “myth”
because natural resource boundaries and community territorial boundaries often do not coincide.
•The notion of sustainable natural resource management with “community”: allowing communities to exercise their own knowledge and institutions in
environmental management.
The lable “CBNRM” implies that the communities are supposed to deliver on
scientifically specified NRM principles, but in real life practice, the policies, rules and principles are seldom community-constructed and local.
•Promise of a diverse range of benefits predicted by social science theory and of a more sustainable management of natural resources.
CBNRM often makes more of its promises to deliver Natural Resource
Management than to assist a Community. The Promise is not made for, nor
delivered to, the community at all, but rather to fundraisers and natural scientists whose real aim is conservation.
Theoretical benefits of CBNRM:
•Pro-poor and safety net.
•Promote efficient resource use and allocation, locally appropriate technologies and the successful application of indigenous technical
knowledge
(Formidable problems to negotiating these knowledges at the interface with
development organizations)
•Locally managed resource systems with clearly recognizable territorial boundaries will tend to deploy all information in order to enable service
provision to match needs
(They will also create local institutions to solve issues of trust and malfeasance, and assist in issues of representation and transparency)
•Solve or palliate open access problems resulting from coercive and insufficiently policed state property regimes.
(Anyone who violates the rules will be directly apprehended by local people)
•Build local site of resistance against modernists, invasions, and globalizing forces.
•Initiate a benign cycle of effective participation, empowerment and the development of political confidence and expertise.
•Serve as an antidote to the acknowledged failure of state-run natural resources.
CBNRM’s failure in delivering stated aims
•Trade-offs of power devolution (mostly impact the poor)
•Weak leadership
•Uneven participation
•Corruption
•Problematic lack of official recognition
•Inadequate income alternatives。