Suchergebnisse

Eine gemeinschaftliche Verwaltung der natürlichen Ressourcen in den früheren Bantustan-Gebieten Südafrikas kann ein wichtiger Ausgangspunkt für gegenwärtige und zukünftige ländliche Entwicklung und Lokalverwaltung sein. Am Beispiel eines Teildistrikts in Eastern Cape illustriert der Autor, wie insbesondere drei Faktoren ein gemeinschaftliches Management der natürlichen Ressourcen des Gebiets behindern. Dies sind einmmal die zwar unterschiedlichen, aber doch allgemein schwachen Anreize für die Menschen der Region, sich in einem kollektiven Ressourcen-Management zu engagieren. Ein zweites Hindernis ist das hohe Niveau institutioneller Einflußnahme in diesen Gebieten und drittens schließlich die Tatsache, daß die Verschwommenheit der aktuellen Regelungen ein Maximum an Flexibilität bei der Nutzung der natürlichen Ressourcen zuläßt, was die Einführung eines stärker formalisierten Systems schwierig macht. (DÜI-Hlb)

The notorious `tragedy of the commons' is incorrectly held to be the eventual fate of all resources that are used collectively rather than by individual private owners. This essay reviews several examples around the world of successful collective management of environmental resources - institutional regimes that have operated for decades or even centuries without resulting in degradation of resources. It then explores the features shared by these historically unconnected institutional regimes in order to begin specifying the characteristics of regimes that circumvent tragedy. Successful systems usually have well defined communities of eligible user-managers and clear, easily enforced and environmentally cautious rules to constrain resource use. But they vary greatly in terms of the allocation of the harvested supply of the resource, from hierarchical systems of rights with unequal allocation of the resource to very egalitarian systems that assign equal shares by lottery.

This article intends to showcase that land grabbing of gauchar (pastureland) at the village level affects women and men in differing ways, along the variables of gender and caste. The article uncovers the notion that the link among gender, caste and access to common property resources (CPRs) are deeply rooted in the power dynamics of the caste-based operating system at the informal level. Drawing on intersectionality perspective, the article explains through ethnographic data collected over a period of time, in a small rural community in Gujarat, India, that women's social location/standing leads them to have multiple identities, which defines and alters their gender relations, norms, negotiations and access to resources, in context to land grab of CPRs. Consequently, the article argues that group-based social differences and power structures ultimately determine access to natural resources and institutional base for women from different strata of society wherein the governance structure may fall short of addressing these issues.