10.3
Conclusion
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There are a number of important
lessons to draw from the foregoing extensive discussion. These
lessons can be summarized as follows:
- When trying to assess the
collective behaviour of traditional rural communities
vis-à-vis the environment, it is essential to make a
clear distinction between two sorts of problem: one of
pure distribution and one of resource management. While
the first problem is static, the second one involves a
time dimension. While the first problem refers to the
question as to how access to a resource is to be
definedthat is, who are to be accorded the right to
appropriate part of the current resource flow end who are
to be denied such a right; or how is this flow to be
shared among competing claimants?the second problem
implies that attention is given to the way current levels
of harvesting effort and modes of appropriating the
resource affect the resource stock over time.
- From our survey of the
socio-anthropological literature, it can be concluded
that, if members of traditional rural communities are
relatively good at perceiving and solving distributive
problems arising in connection with the use of natural
resources (they can even design ingenious systems of
rotation to regulate access among "insiders' in an
equitable way)especially so when the resource is
highly visible and well localizedthey are not
inherently conservationists as they are often portrayed
in popular accounts and eventhough perhaps to a
lesser extent than before - in socio-anthropological
writings.
- It is common practice to
ascribe mismanagement of village commons to collective
action problems. These problems are no doubt a critical
hurdle on the way to better conservation of natural
resources, and we shall return to them in Chapter 12.
What is worth noticing, however, is that, as pointed out
above, traditional rural societies were apparently able,
at least in certain circumstances, to make effective
collective arrangements to solve distributive problems.
Why should they then have been less efficient in
organizing to prevent depletion/degradation of CPRs? The
answer to this question in the present chapter is that
members of such societies do not conceive of their
natural environment nor of their own relations with it in
the same way as people in modern, rationalist societies
do.
In point of fact, they perceive
surrounding natural resources as a kindness provided by some
supernatural agents which constantly look after basic needs of
the people placed under their protection. Consequently, they have
a proclivity to think that these resources are infinite or
limitless. And if experience shows too patently that such is not
the case, they may still refuse to come to the view that their
own harvesting behaviour is liable to seriously affect resource
stocks. On the contrary, to reconcile their system of beliefs
with the newly emerging reality, they tend imagine that resources
have not been actually destroyed but simply moved or relocated
elsewhere (or made invisible) by an act of will of some god or
spirit. Besides saving the essentials of their old beliefs, a
reinterpretation of this kind has the advantage of presenting a
shortage of resource as a temporary phenomenon which can
(perhaps) be easily reversed. What bears emphasis is that magical
beliefs prevent rural people from drawing a conceptual
distinction between resource stock and resource flow and, a
fortiori, from understanding the link between current rates of
resource appropriation and the level of the stock. The very
notion of resource management remains alien to them, which, after
all, is not surprising given the intellectual sophistication
required to grasp it.
- Given the complexity of some
ecological processes (such as the determinants of fishing
stocks in many tropical maritime fisheries), there may be
a genuine uncertainty about the exact influence of human
harvesting efforts on the level of a resource stock, not
only among users but also among experts and scientists.
In such circumstances, the (sudden) depletion of a
resource may be correctly perceived as a reversible
process that is essentially determined by exogenous
forces. Highly intensive harvesting efforts, when such
uncertainty exists, are obviously not understandable in
terms of the tragedy of the commons or the prisoner's
dilemma. In this case, however, the government may be
perfectly justified in setting rules of restraint in
order to reduce the risk of irreversible depletion of a
resource that is or may turn out to be essential in the
future (see Chapter 1).
- Traditional rural societies
are far from static, however. Awareness of ecological
stress under conditions of increasing and continuous
human pressure on the environment may grow even if only
slowly and even if it typically requires visible signs of
depletion/degradation to be stimulated. This awareness is
therefore likely to develop more rapidly in those
societies in which 'a sense of limits' has already
pervaded people's minds due to previous experiences of
scarcity. Moreover, it emerges more easily with respect
to localized, visible, and predictable resources than
with respect to resources showing the opposite
characteristics. Such a movement towards increased causal
understanding of natural phenomena is bound to imply
radical revisions of old systems of beliefs so that man
can now appear, at least in a roundabout way, as an
important agent of ecological change.
- The fact nevertheless
remains that, since awareness-building is in this ease a
timeconsuming and hazardous process, people may realize
the need for conservation measures too late, that is,
when a resource is already irretrievably depleted, or
when it has been destroyed to such an extent that
incentives to conserve the remaining portion have
vanished. The possibility of resource destruction
resulting from slow or imperfect understanding of what is
going on and what to do points to the essential role of
grass roots education in preserving village-level CPRs.
It is too easily assumed, by economists in particular,
that lack of incentive is the main constraint that
prevents villagers from conserving their commons. In
still numerous contemporary situations, knowledge of
local-level ecological processes and of people's
responsibilities for environmental destruction is
inadequate. Therefore, especially when ecological change
is rapid, outside assistance is needed to help villagers
to analyse their own situation and its inner dynamics as
well as to design effective management solutions. As
shown by varied experiences of patient work with rural
groups, great progress towards achieving the first
objective can actually be made by helping them to draw
together a number of critical on-the-field observations
which have so far remained unconnected, and to articulate
these observations in meaningful causal sequences.