Cabagan, Isabela State University
Co-Management of Natural Resources: a Comparative Perspective
The co-management of natural resources in Asia was the topic of an IIAS/NIAS workshop organized in September 1998 in Cabagan, Isabela Province, the Philippines. The workshop brought together practioners trying to implement the idea of joint management who are working in the field in projects or bureaucracies and scientists from various disciplines who take a more reflective view.By Gerard Persoon and Percy Sajise
Co-management of natural resources, that is the sharing of responsibilities for the management, including the exploitation and conservation of natural resources between the government and individual or collective users is rapidly gaining strength in Asia as in other parts of the world. This increase in interest has come about as a result of the limited success of top-down conservation projects and the continuing deterioration of environmental conditions in many countries in the region. Pertinently, this tendency is also inspired by feelings of injustice done to local people in the past.In recent years some countries, like India and the Philippines, have substantially changed their policies with regard to the management of natural resources. Increasingly local people are given rights to the various kinds of resources like forests, fresh water, coral reefs, pasture lands, and populations of fish and wild life. Terms expressing ideas similar to co-management are joint management or community-based management. International donor agencies, like the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Union, have also changed their policy guidelines in this direction. Organizations like the Worldwide Fund for Nature have also recently adopted principles for involving indigenous peoples and local communities in the conservation of nature. The burning question is: what is really behind this now popular banner of co-management and how is it conceived by the various parties involved?
The purpose of this workshop was to discuss the various ideas, forms, and concepts behind co-management as well as to discuss the experiences from the field, the successes and the failures. With this in mind people from the field and scientists with a more distant view were invited to participate. The workshop was organized jointly by SEARCA (Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agirculture, Percy Sajise and Gill Saguiguit) established in Los Baņos and CVPED (Cagayan Valley Programme on Environment and Development, the co-operation project between Isabela State University and Leiden University, Diny van Est and Gerard Persoon).
The workshop started with an overview of the history and the central concepts of co-management in Asia by Diny van Est and Gerard Persoon (Leiden Un.). Most of the papers focused on a particular case study in which co-management arrangements are implemented, amongst others: the fisheries in the Central Moluccas by Ingvild Harkes (ICLARM, Manila), forest resources under collective management by the Bugkalot in the Philipines by Dante Aquino (Isabela State Un.), pasture management without ownership on the Loess plateau (China) by Hu Wei (Un. of Cambridge), and the revitalization of local knowledge among the people of Minahasa (Sulawesi) by Haryo Martodirdjo (Padjadjaran Un., Bandung).
Arne Kalland (Un. of Oslo) provided an interesting example of co-management, ahead of its time, Japanese coastal fisheries (1868-1912). Brenda Katon (ICLARM, Manila) and Percy Sajise, assisted by Gill Saguiguit (SEARCA), presented more comparative papers concentrating on the experiences gleaned from a wider number of cases or by taking a longer time perspective analysing policy trends in natural resource management. The paper by Peter Brosius (Un. of Georgia) questioned many of the assumptions underlying the present trend in co-management thinking. Denyse Snelder (CVPED) directed her contribution to the need for a greater presence of the natural science in the management arrangements, as social and cultural (or administrative) realities often do not coincide with ecological or physical ones. As the end of the workshop, Roy Ellen (Un. of Kent) gave his comments on the papers and discussions of the previous days. He deftly pointed out some of the crucial questions at stake when analysing or trying to implement co-management arrangements in particular areas. His synthesis brought the variety of cases and experiences back to the central issues.
This workshop was organized within the framework of the activities of the East-West Environmental Linkages Network, a loose network of social scientists with a small core group from various countries in Europe, Asia, and the United States. Up to the present, four workshops have been organized by this network: on environmental movements in Asia; environmental discourse; indigenous environmental knowledge; and human rights and nature conservation. Books on these workshops have been published or are being prepared. Future activities on ecotourism and other subjects are planned by the network (Padjadjaran University, Bandung in 2000). The secretariat of the workshop is run by Alan Bicker (Un. of Kent) who can be contacted at his e-mail address (A.Bicker@ukc.ac.uk).
The workshop was originally selected by the ESF Asia Committee for funding and was sponsored by the IIAS-NIAS Strategic Alliance.
Dr Gerard A. Persoon is head of the Programme for Environment and Development of the Centre of Environmental Science, Leiden University. P.O. Box 9518, 2300 RA Leiden, Netherlands, e-mail: persoon@rulcml.leidenuniv.nl.
Dr Percy E. Sajise is director of SEAMEO SEARCA, College, Laguna 4031, Philippines, e-mail: pes@agri.searca.org.