Wednesday, February 4, 2009

How to manage CPRs?

It becomes difficult to place certain products or structures as common property. Land- waste or forest, water sheds, ponds and rivers are most commonly implied when speaking of CPRs. These restrict the idea of collective ownership. People’s lives depend equally on other, non - income generating factors such as access to certain village roads or religious structures or halls such as those where marriages are held or meetings organised. All of these can be referred to as ‘commonly managed resources’. One example of commonly managed resource could be hand pump.
In the village assigned to me in field work there were many hand pumps constructed by our host organization. After their construction they were handed over to group of people staying in vicinity of hand pump. The only condition was that the group was restricted to ten families at maximum, these families themselves did not have any hand pump and they had to sign a document stating that they would look after maintenance of hand pump. But unfortunately this resource just like any other CPR suffered from same problems, problems of free-rider with people other than ten families also using the hand pumps extensively, poor maintenance of these hand pumps by authorized families which ultimately led to non working of these hand pumps.
But nobody could actually blame any of the stakeholders nor other villagers using the hand pump as neither of them had a choice. People who were making unauthorized use of hand pumps were doing so because they did not have one of their own and that obviously was one of the deterrents for authorized families for avoidance of maintenance of hand pumps as they were not the only one using the pump. The solution to this problem is something which I have been grappling with ever since I came back from the village but the answer has eluded me till now.

2 comments:

Joseph Kalassery said...

i think in a case of acute deprivation of some basic resource, the rules which prevents access to that resource would be broken.

thanks.

Sharat Jha said...

even if resource was available in plenty, group responsible for maintenance of that resource would normally prefer avoid maintenance of that resource and would be inclined to use resource from some other point therby depleting the resource and landing up in same situation. Consider the example of handpumps and imagine yourself.