Community Based Natural Resource Management ― From Economic Principles to Practical Governance

Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) emerged in the 1980s as a response to the need for greater local participation to conserve and manage natural and wild resources in the face of increasing encroachment by agricultural and other forms of land use development. This book provides both a comprehensive review of the principles of CBNRM, applicable globally, and practical examples of successes and failures of its implementation, including lessons learned.

It describes the evolution of governance systems for wild resources, and then uses the rich history of the transformation of the wildlife sector on private and communal land, particularly in southern Africa, to provide an alternative paradigm for addressing poverty and resource degradation in the world’s extensive agriculturally marginal areas. It then conceptualises this paradigm as the Sustainable Use Approach, and develops its theoretical foundation in terms of price and incentives (economics), proprietorship, subsidiarity and scale and adaptive learning. It shows that the primary challenges facing CBNRM are the devolution of rights from the centre to marginal communities, and the governance of these rights by communities.

The author extends Ostrom’s principles of collection action and advances the theory and practice of micro-governance, and of the cross-scale governance necessary to support it. In addition the book provides practical but theoretically robust tools for implementing CBNRM and training CBNRM support staff in conservation methods.