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THE POOR CONSERVATION outcomes that followed decades of intrusive resource management strategies and planned development have forced policymakers and scholars to reconsider the role of community in resource use and conservation. In a break from previous work on development, which considered communities to be a hindrance to progressive social change, current writing champions the role of community in bringing about decentralization, meaningful participation, cultural autonomy, and conservation (Chambers and McBeth 1992; Chitere 1994; Etzioni 1996). According to a recent survey carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO 1999), more than fifty countries report that they pursue partnerships with local communities in an effort to better protect their forests. But despite its recent popularity, the concept of community rarely receives the attention or analysis it needs from those concerned with resource use and management.
In this volume we seek to redress this omission by investigating "community" in work concerning resource conservation and management.1 Communities are complex entities containing individuals differentiated by status, political and economic power, religion and social prestige, and intentions. Although some may operate harmoniously, others do not. Some see nature or the environment as something to be protected; others care only for nature's short-term use. Some have effective traditional norms; others have few. Some community members seek refuge from the government and market; others quickly embrace both. And sometimes communities come into existence only as a result of their interactions with governments and markets.
This chapter begins by exploring the conceptual origins of the community, especially as it relates to writings on resource use. The ensuing analysis reveals that three aspects of community are most important to those who advocate a positive role for communities in resource management-community as a small spatial unit, as a homogeneous social structure, and as shared norms. The chapter argues that community is better examined in the context of conservation by focusing on the multiple interests and actors within communities, on the process of how these actors influence decision-making, and on the internal and external institutions that shape the decision-making process. A focus on institutions rather than on community is likely to be more fruitful for those interested in community-based natural resource management.
The chapter suggests that research and policy move away from universalist claims either for or against community. Instead, community-based conservation initiatives must be founded on images of community that recognize their internal differences and processes, their relations with external actors, and the institutions that affect both. The final section reviews how the contributors to this volume explore these themes.
Community in History An understanding of the current widespread preoccupation with community requires an understanding of at least some history of the concept's use. Such a history shows the ways in which "community" has moved in and out of fashion, and prompts caution in accepting community as a panacea for problems concerning the conservation of natural resources.
Current perceptions of community appear strongly linked to analyses of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholars attempting to understand the portentous transformations that rocked their world.2 The source of these changes was thought to lie in the economic sphere-industrialization, monetization, and production to satisfy material needs. Sir Henry Maine, for example, saw the world moving from relationships based on status, kin networks, and joint property to one based on contract, territory, and individual rights.3 Maine's underlying image of societal evolution influenced Tönnies's formulation of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, or community and society.4 Tönnies's view of community as an organic whole continues to color present conceptions to a significant degree, and accounts for some of the attraction community holds for many conservationists.
Most of these scholars of social change highlighted the disappearance of community and its replacement by other forms of social organization. Their theories of classification, in this sense, were also theories of evolution.5 For Marx and Engels, Spencer and Comte, and even for Weber and Durkheim, society moved along an evolutionary path. Status, tradition, charisma, and religion would increasingly give way to equality, modernity, rationality, and a scientific temper. This theorization of social change automatically pits community against the market, since marketization and urbanization erode community.
Modernization theorists shared this evolutionary view. Under the strong influence of Parsonian structuralism, they characterized whole societies using the evolutionary labels "underdeveloped," "developing," and "developed." The dichotomous pattern variables of Parsons were presumed to describe not only existing realities and directions of historical change, but also the desirability of movement in that direction.6 Analytical categories representing discontinuous social states overshadowed the real processes of historical change.
While scholars of social change generally accepted the ongoing nature and irreversibility of change, they differed in their judgments regarding the benefits of progress and the desirability of traditional community. A strong correlation exists between those who view progress positively and community negatively: Marx, Spencer, and the early Durkheim saw ongoing social changes as liberating humanity from the coercive and limiting world of the past, from the "idiocy of rural life," that community, in part, embodied. The same is true of most modernization theorists.7 Other scholars with less sanguine views about the benefits of progress did not abandon community altogether.
Writers like Tönnies, the later Durkheim, and Dewey did not see any utopia at the end of the social changes they described. Instead of liberation from the tyranny of custom, they saw "progress" dissolving the ties that anchor humans to their milieu, providing a sense of selfhood and belonging. Writers during this period and after made impossible searches for the community that they believed had existed, fully formed, just prior to the disruptive set of social changes they experienced.
Community and Conservation Like more general works on community, the history of community in conservation is also a history of revisionism. Images of pristine ecosystems and innocent primitives yielded over time to views of despoiling communities out of balance with nature, mostly due to the double-pronged intrusion of the state and the market. A recuperative project on behalf of the indigenous and the local (community) has attempted to rescue community. But the rescue project has itself come under attack by new anthropological and historical research suggesting that communities may not, after all, be so friendly to the environment. The practical and policy implications that accompany these changing images are immense.
The basic elements of earlier policy and scholarly writings about local communities and their residents are familiar. "People" were an obstacle to effi- cient and "rational" organization of resource use.8 A convincing logic undergirded the belief that the goals of conservation and the interests of local communities were in opposition. Conservation required protection of threatened resources: wildlife, forests, pastures, fisheries, irrigation flows, and drinking water. Members of local communities, however, rely on these resources for their fodder, fuelwood, water, and food and thus exploit them without restraint. This schematic representation, popularized by Garrett Hardin and bolstered by several theoretical metaphors that served to (mis)guide policy, provided a persuasive explanation of how resource degradation and depletion took place.9
Empirical evidence about the context within which most rural communities are located helped prop up the view. The population of many rural areas in tropical countries has grown rapidly, even with out-migration to cities.10 Demographic growth, it was argued, could only increase consumption pressures. Penetration by market forces, which linked local systems of resource use to a larger network of demand, further increased the pressure on natural resources.11 At the same time, many believed that poorly articulated and enforced property rights arrangements provided disincentives for individuals to protect resources.
These factors implied that even if people had successfully managed resources in some harmonious past, that past was long gone. Instead, the way to effective conservation was through the heavy hand of the state or through the equally heavy, if less visible, hand of the market and private property rights. Such ideas supported conservation policies that aimed to exclude locals. National parks and other protected areas are the most obvious result of this thinking. International conservation agencies backed many of these policies.12
While many of these beliefs persist,13 most of the current ideas about the community's role in conservation have changed radically: Communities are now the locus of conservationist thinking.14 International agencies such as the World Bank, IDRC, SIDA, CIDA, Worldwide Fund for Nature, Conservation International, the Nature Conservancy, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and USAID have all "found" community. They direct enormous sums of money and effort toward community-based conservation and resource management programs and policies. A flood of scholarly papers and policy- centric reports also feature community-based management (e.g., Arnold 1990; Clugston and Rogers 1995; Dei 1992; Douglass 1992; Perry and Dixon 1986; Raju et al. 1993; Robinson 1995). Exemplifying the swing toward community, a recent collection of essays on community-based conservation tells us, "Communities down the millennia have developed elaborate rituals and practices to limit off take levels, restrict access to critical resources, and distribute harvests" (Western and Wright 1994, 1).15