Jean-Marie Baland – författare

This wide-ranging book, based on a report to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, bridges the gap between the enormous amount of empirical literature documenting efforts at managing local-level resources and the quickly growing body of theoretical knowledge dealing with natural resource management. By building a unifying framework, the authors aim to better define the conditions of success or failure of various forms of resource management at the village level. Contrary to a common view according to which mismanagement of such resources is to be ascribed to direct users falling prey to the Tragedy of the Commons', they convincingly argue that there are other important potential explanations, such as lack of awareness about ecological effects of human activities, poverty and heavy discounting of future income streams, uncertainty over future property rights and prices of natural products, and availability of more attractive income opportunities. Moreover, even when mismanagement practices obviously result from strategic interactions among users, many anthropological writings have pointed at crucial aspects that are bypassed by the characterization in terms of the classical Prisoner's Dilemma. Among these aspects, problems of leadership, co-ordination, and heterogeneity are given special emphasis in this book. The theoretical analysis specifies the various economic conditions (such as the extent of resource scarcity and market penetration, the size of user communities, and the nature of different parties' interests in the resource) and social considerations (such as the state of interpersonal communication, the frequency of interactions, the type of leadership, and the extent of mutual trust) under which these problems can possibly be overcome by local user groups. Stress is then laid on the global context within which user groups operate, including the nature and the forms of state intervention and the effects of increasing market integration. To date, this context has generally been uncongenial to community-based resource management; therefore, the authors recommend that, whenever a co-management approach is feasible, the concrete institutional form adopted is tailored to the specific features of local cultures.

Would improving the economic, social, and political condition of the world's disadvantaged people slow--or accelerate--environmental degradation? In Inequality, Cooperation, and Environmental Sustainability, leading social scientists provide answers to this difficult question, using new research on the impact of inequality on environmental sustainability. The contributors' findings suggest that inequality may exacerbate environmental problems by making it more difficult for individuals, groups, and nations to cooperate in the design and enforcement of measures to protect natural assets ranging from local commons to the global climate. But a more equal division of a given amount of income could speed the process of environmental degradation--for example, if the poor value the preservation of the environment less than the rich do, or if the consumption patterns of the poor entail proportionally greater environmental degradation than that of the rich.The contributors also find that the effect of inequality on cooperation and environmental sustainability depends critically on the economic and political institutions governing how people interact, and the technical nature of the environmental asset in question. The contributors focus on the local commons because many of the world's poorest depend on them for their livelihoods, and recent research has made great strides in showing how private incentives, group governance, and government policies might combine to protect these resources.