Past management affects success of current joint forestry management institutions in Tajikistan
Helping to self-help? External interventions to stimulate local col-
lective action in Joint Forest Management, Maharashtra, India. International Forestry Review
Past management affects success of current joint forestry management institutions in Tajikistan
L. Jamila Haider 0 1
Benjamin Neusel 0 1
Garry D. Peterson 0 1
Maja Schlüter 0 1
L. Jamila Haider 0 1
0 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusamenarbeit (GIZ), GIZ Office Tanzania , 65 Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road, Dar es Salaam , Tanzania
1 Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University , Kräftriket 2B, 106 91 Stockholm , Sweden
In the Pamir Mountains of Eastern Tajikistan, the clearance of mountain forests to provide fuelwood for an increasing population is a major source of environmental degradation. International development organisations have implemented joint forestry management institutions to help restore once-forested mountainous regions, but the success of these institutions has been highly variable. This study uses a multi-method approach, drawing on institutional analysis supported by Elinor Ostrom's design principles and socialecological system framework in combination with resilience thinking to help understand why some communities in Tajikistan manage their forests more sustainably than others. The application of the design principles provided helpful guidance for practitioners implementing joint forestry management. The social-ecological system analysis revealed both 'history of use' and 'tenant density' as positively associated with forest condition. However, we also identify limitations of snapshot social-ecological assessments. In particular, we illustrate the critical importance of considering historical legacy effects, such as externally imposed centralised governance regimes (that characterise many post-Soviet states) in attempts to understand current management practices. Our work shows how a more nuanced understanding of institutional change and inertia can be achieved by adopting a resilience approach to institutional analysis, focusing on the importance of reorganisation. Lessons learned from our analysis should be widely applicable to common pool resource management in other semi-arid forested landscapes as well as in regions with a strong centralised governance legacy.
Joint forestry management; Common pool resource management; Social- ecological; Resilience; Tajikistan
1 Introduction
In the Pamir Mountains of Eastern Tajikistan, the clearance of mountain forests for
fuelwood is causing widespread soil erosion and negatively affecting a range of other
important ecosystem services, such as the provision of timber building materials, conservation
of wildlife habitat, recreational services and cultural values. Nearly all of Tajikistan’s
agricultural lands have been reported as suffering from some degree of erosion, with winter
pastures being particularly effected (Saigal 2003). This degradation has occurred
primarily due to overgrazing and the felling of mountain forests for fuelwood and timber. These
forests are a classical common pool resource, insofar as resource users cannot be excluded,
while resources consumed by one user are no longer available to others (they are
subtractable) (Ostrom 1990). This makes their management challenging as there will always be an
incentive to individually use more than is beneficial for the community as a whole.
Many scholars (e.g. Berkes 1989; Leach et al. 1999; Agrawal 2001; Agrawal and Gupta
2005) have proposed that decentralised community-based management can achieve both
conservation and human well-being goals in common pool resources by enhancing a
community’s ability to self-organise. However, self-organisation is not always evident,
especially in resource systems with a history of strong centralised governance (Barnes and Van
Laerhoven 2013), which has led to non-governmental organisations taking a key role in the
devolution of resource management (Shackleton et al. 2002; Blaikie 2006; Wright et al.
2016; Lund et al. 2018). In such instances, a common intervention strategy of both
governmental and non-governmental development programmes has been to invest in building
participatory governance mechanisms to help develop community-based natural resource
management (Kumar 2002; Robinson et al. 2010). Joint forestry management (JFM) is one
such approach that has been used to foster community-based management in many
different parts of the world by transferring harvesting rights of forest products to rural people
through contractual agreement with a relevant governing body (Robinson et al. 2010). Here
we identify a tension between what scholars have observed in many cases: that resources
users do self-organise, and the continuing practice of development organisations working
to try to initiate collective action through community-based management planning. An
interesting area of institutional scholarship is in contexts where practitioners aim to initiate
collective action.
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