About the Comunity-Based Natural Resource Management Program Initiative

Despite rapid industrialization and a well-established historical network of large cities, most people in Asia remain directly dependent on a productive natural resource base for their livelihoods. Unfortunately, pressures on this resource base are increasing. Urban-biased industrial development and non-locally managed investments in resource extraction within the context of an expanding global trading system are leading to resource depletion. Resettlement due to displacement, voluntary migration and historical conflicts exacerbate these resource pressures.

Rural populations themselves have increased rapidly with the improvement of basic health and living conditions. This is leading to an expansion of cultivated land, even into areas which are ecologically fragile and inappropriate for permanent cultivation. Within communities, power and gender relations often marginalize specific social groups. Systems of resource tenure and access are complex. Traditional, culturally-specific systems modified by colonial and state regulations may be changing rapidly with national economic policy reforms.

The Challenge
Problems related to the sustainable management of natural resources are most critical in the uplands and coastal areas, where natural resource degradation can lead to often irreversible loss of food productivity and the breakdown of ecosystem regulatory capacity and species habitat. A widespread process in Asia is the privatization of natural resources such as forests and coastal areas which were previously collectively managed. Privatization may lead to productivity increases in the short term, but frequently it also increases poverty because poor people who previously had access to these resources are now excluded.

'Traditional' policies and research have often discounted the role of local people in designing and implementing solutions for these problems. Proposing an alternative approach, the CBNRM program works with the local men and women most directly involved with natural resource management. Often they are the poorest of the rural poor and belong to ethnic minorities which are politically and economically isolated. The CBNRM program recognizes that these men and women may have intimate knowledge of the local resource base and that they are motivated to improve productivity if they can be assured of benefiting.

The Response - an Innovative Approach
The CBNRM program deals with resource degradation and rural poverty in mountainous and coastal areas of South and Southeast Asia by promoting research for development innovations to improve the productivity and sustainability of local resource use. These innovations can be technical, such as intensifying shifting cultivation or improving aquaculture. They can also be institutional or policy-focused.

However, neither technology nor institutional changes nor policy reform alone are sufficient to address poverty because in many cases the resulting benefits are captured by those who are already better-off, such as land-owners or farmers with good market access. Therefore,CBNRM addresses the interactions among the factors that influence natural resource access, use and management patterns.

The participation and leadership of local people is essential to CBNRM's approach, as innovations must be built on existing local knowledge and practice, rather than imposed from outside. It also requires recognition of the heterogeneity and multiple interests of different community members and outside resource users.

Objectives

Results

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• Evaluation of the CBNRM program
  External evaluation of the program in 2003

• Objectives
  

• Program brochure
  

• Prospectus
  

• Team Members