Monday, February 16, 2009

Management of Common Pool Resources ( CPRs) is a vital issue in the rural areas. Garret Hardin had published the paper on the Tragedy of Commons with this idea, where he says that when a resource is open to use for all, each of the users would like to maximize the benefit that they get and consequently use it to an extent that it eventually becomes worthless for the whole community. as a solution to this he proposed that CPRs should be given in private hands so that all people get optimally benefitted from it. but that by itself does not ensure the optimum utilisation of the CPR by all the people. Responsibilties given without any accountability are not going to serve any purpose, as we see in the case of Plachimada. it will eventually lead to the unequal distribution of the resources in favour of those in authority. in contrast to that, Vanadana Shiva recommends that instead of handing it over to private hands, collective management of the resources by the local people would be a better idea to pursue. still an issue that remains is the power dynamics prevalent in a village. will the management of CPRs by the local people be able to overcome this limitation, because we usually see that those people who are influential in the village, get into the management of these CPRs.

1 comment:

riturocks said...

as such CPR gas quite broad perspective, now it will be very difficult to say that even if the person who is very influential in a community would be the only one who will manage CPR. when I went to Harankhudi for my Fieldwork ,it was quite clear in the area that people mutually used to cooperate in getting access tocommon pool resouces and this was possible because of the mutual trust and faith they had among them. even, the farmers used to share their crops according to their requirements. but, yes ,there was the expectations of help from others which never have gone futile till date because of belongingness these people have among them