Search

There is increasing interest in community-based approaches to the management of natural resources in Africa. Pastoral areas present particular challenges and opportunities to community-based management programs. We consider an example where there are multiple definitions of the community that uses a resource, and these definitions are both nested and overlapping. Working at multiple levels of social organization and in multiple sites was critical for overall program success. We find addressing conflict can be a measure to address resource scarcity. We conclude noting signs that reduced insecurity has established the preconditions under which sustainable resource management can be accomplished. Key words--community management, resource management, conflict management, Africa, pastoralism

A stochastic model is considered where the resource has amenity value that always has the effect of reducing the rate of time preference. Paradoxically it is possible for amenity value to increase the rate of extraction.

The study of the ecological factors that govern fighting over resources has been analyzed by resource defense theory and evolutionary hawk--dove games. In essence, the models predict that increasing economic defendability of a resource should lead to increased frequency of aggression among competitors. We question this prediction because it is based on the assumption that individuals that do not possess a resource and must decide whether to attempt aggressive appropriation of another individual's resource face the same economic decision as those that already have possession of a resource and must decide whether to defend against an appropriator's attack. Using an evolutionary game analysis, we explore how changes in group size, clump density, patch richness, and predation hazards affect both the decision to appropriate and defend a resource and interact to predict effects on the frequency of aggression and aggressiveness of individuals. Our model predicts that increasing group size should result in a dome-shaped response of frequency of aggression and a slight decrease in aggressiveness. Increasing clump density is predicted to increase both the frequency of aggression and aggressiveness while increases in clump richness result in reduced aggressiveness at high richness values and a decelerated increase in the frequency of aggression. Finally, predation risk is predicted to increase the frequency of aggression only slightly but to lead to increases in aggressiveness. We compare these predictions to earlier resource defense models. We conclude that most experimental findings agree with our model's predictions but call for explicit experimental tests of our predictions concerning the frequency of aggression and aggressiveness. Key words: aggression; ESS model; foraging groups; hawk--dove game; kleptoparasitism; producer--scrounger game.

In an effort to achieve sustainable Natural Resource Management (NRM), the Commonwealth and State governments have moved to a regional focus for their major funding programs. This approach was driven by the belief that previous arrangements had been unable to achieve the required amount of change at the appropriate landscape scale and that state and national priorities were not being addressed. The authors, with a background in regional and national NRM and Landcare across the three Eastern States, have used their experience and knowledge of recent literature in this area, to evaluate the regional approach to NRM. As part of our evaluation we review the assumptions behind the move to the regional model and explore its strengths and weakness. Some of the key strengths of the approach are that it facilitates landscape-scale management, enhances integration across agencies and governments, and builds partnerships and enhances the capacity of participants. A key weakness is that there continues to be a focus on outputs rather than outcomes and this hinders our learning about how to improve NRM. Other weaknesses are poorly developed methodologies to underpin integration at the regional scale, the high transaction costs involved in operating across the federal structure, insufficient autonomy for regional groups, and a lack of forward funding commitments.

Researchers at the Mallik site in Canada's Mackenzie Delta undertook the first modern, fully integrated field study to test the production potential of natural gas hydrates. There is a possibility that hydrates would be able to provide a sustainable supply of gas for the world's future energy needs as they are an immediately producible source of natural gas and hence production can be started and maintained by 'conventional' methods.

In response to over-exploitation of communal marine resources, many national governments have sought to introduce new management regimes to replace pre-existing indigenous systems. However, with the increasing popularity of community-led participative development projects amongst mainstream development agencies, the direction is now to reintegrate such systems into 'modern' management solutions. This may be appropriate under certain circumstances, but tends to oversimplify and overlook the contradictory motivations of subgroups within any single community.

The stock available to each generation depends on the extent of exploitation by previous generation and on resource's growth rate, which is either slow or fast. Subjects show altruistic restraint in exploitation but not enough to achieve the social optimum. Altruistic concern for future generation, however, may provide substantial incentives to constrain the exploitation of resources because of leverage effect of the resource growth dynamics.

An analysis of a variant of the classical harvesting game, where a number of competing agents simultaneously harvest a common-pool natural resource is carried out. The development in the number of active participants is outlined, and the stability criteria for a dynamic Cournot-competitive game are given.

The spatial distribution of a natural resource is an important consideration in designing an efficient survey or monitoring program for the resource. Generally, sample sites that are spatially balanced, that is, more or less evenly dispersed over the extent of the resource, are more efficient than simple random sampling. We review a unified strategy for selecting spatially balanced probability samples of natural resources. The technique is based on creating a function that maps two-dimensional space into one-dimensional space, thereby defining an ordered spatial address. We use a restricted randomization to randomly order the addresses, so that systematic sampling along the randomly ordered linear structure results in a spatially well-balanced random sample. Variable inclusion probability, proportional to an arbitrary positive ancillary variable, is easily accommodated. The basic technique selects points in a two-dimensional continuum, but is also applicable to sampling finite populations or one-dimensional continua embedded in two-dimensional space. An extension of the basic technique gives a way to order the sample points so that any set of consecutively numbered points is in itself a spatially well-balanced sample. This latter property is extremely useful in adjusting the sample for the frame imperfections common in environmental sampling. KEY WORDS: Environmental sampling; Imperfect sampling frame; Monitoring; Non-response; Spatial sampling; Survey design; Systematic sampling., 1. INTRODUCTION Environmental studies invariably involve populations distributed over space. Traditionally, such studies tended to focus on relatively small and well-delimited systems. However, some of the environmental issues that we [...]

The commoditization of natural resources in a global economic system and the territorialization practices of nation-states present formidable challenges to the sustainable use of natural resources. Likewise, certain environmental problems such as growth management and residential sprawl have proved intractable to our existing political processes. This case study of grazing and growth conflicts in Arizona demonstrates that intractable environmental problems may actually be emergent properties of complex systems, requiring new political approaches that foster collaboration and knowledge sharing between disputing stakeholders. One such collaboration in Arizona revealed that attempts to remove grazing from Arizona landscapes could actually be to the detriment of biodiversity, contrary to the expectations of grazing critics. Key words: grazing, environmental conflict, land tenure, politics, sprawl, Arizona

Indigenous peoples' claims to use and manage natural resources have caused controversy in recent times. One notable example is the current debate surrounding the claims by indigenous groups to harvest, as of right, wildlife and other culturally important resources. Here some contemporary manifestations of indigenous rights to use and manage resources are examined taking three examples from Australia and New Zealand: kereru, dugong and pounamu. The case studies reveal a spectrum of contemporary manifestation of indigenous rights to natural resources ranging from a lack of legal rights to self-determination over culturally important resources. The case studies highlight sites of commonality and conflict between governments and indigenous peoples, and between conservationists and indigenous peoples, in the context of sustainable management decision-making. Following an examination of the factors that influence the extent of contemporary recognition of indigenous rights, it is argued that current reconciliation processes in both Australia and New Zealand offer opportunities for increased indigenous involvement in environmental management.

Within Australia, disputes over natural resources and the environment are likely to escalate as government policies increasingly proscribe access and use rights. Using the NSW natural resource management system as a model, the common characteristics of environmental disputes are briefly described and analyzed to illustrate the difficulties in bringing such disputes to a successful resolution. It is argued that appropriate Environmental Dispute Resolution (EDR) policies and strategies have the potential to provide better alternatives to legal action, to lower transaction costs and to achieve better environmental outcomes. US experience in this area is examined to highlight possible future directions for Australian practice. The article concludes with an examination of three key investment areas which, if pursued, could lead to EDR practice being improved and its outcomes enhanced. These are: development of a systematic EDR research program; the need to translate research outcomes into professional EDR practice: and, the need to provide policy and institutional support for EDR at all levels of government.

The regional scale has become increasingly important for natural resource management, with funding support focused on regional plans. It is also the scale at which adaptive management--an approach to managing natural resources that actively seeks to learn from the implementation of policies and strategies--could be expected to work best. This article explores passive and active adaptive management through review of a salinity management program in the north-east region of Victoria between 1997 and 2001. The North East Salinity Strategy (NESS) was a conventional, passively adaptive program, but active adaptive management could have been considered. We sought to understand the NESS program logic through document review, semi-structured interviews and a focus group, and in the process looked for signs of adaptive management. The NESS program logic was sound, and it achieved progress towards many of its goals, A more actively adaptive approach may have achieved more, but it would have been constrained by some social and institutional factors. We suggest that a culture of reflection was absent from the NESS. Reflection was inhibited by institutional arrangements such as reporting requirements and funding processes, and by social norms that separated implementation from research, and equated rationality of action with certainty of outcome. We present a hypothetical NESS to highlight the differences between the current conventional approach and one based on active adaptive management. We suggest that any, attempt to adopt active adaptive management will need substantial commitment and flexible thinking, to overcome the identified barriers,

The least-cost-first extraction rule for deposits with different extraction costs is shown to be invalid in general equilibrium. It is shown that if extraction is from a high-cost resource, it is restrained, and it is optimal to begin extraction from a low-cost resource.

The survival of the human population and the vital environment that supports it is threatened by overpopulation. Entering the new millennium, stark contrasts are apparent between the availability of natural resources of our earth and the billions of humans who require them for their survival. Each day about a quarter million people are added to the more than 6 billion that already exist. Yet, the availability of natural resources that support human life, like food, fresh water, quality soil, energy, and biodiversity are being degraded, polluted, and depleted. KEYWORDS: Food, energy, natural resources, population, survival.

In the 1970s native Americans and white farmers in eastern Montana and western south Dakota began to develop a common interest in protecting the rural environment from large-scale development. The farmers follow cultural understanding moreover to identify ways to live together in future.

This essay examines the function of synecdoche as a master trope in the environmental discourse surrounding the salmon crisis in the Pacific Northwest. It argues that synecdoche as a rhetorical construct has shaped and expressed public, political and scientific views of salmon in at least four critical ways. First, salmon has been rendered synecdoche as a Northwest icon by both Native Americans who first occupied the region and by European Americans who followed. Second, the story of the salmon as told by Northwesterners, which stems from its life cycle and reinforces its iconic status, is conveyed in synecdochic form. Third, the complexity of problems facing salmon and the prospects for recovery are described in terms of an intricate web of part for whole and whole for part relationships. And fourth, the human folly described in the history of the salmon crisis extends the synecdochic patterns in the discourse to conclude with an ironic lament about salmon and life as a whole. As such, synecdoche combines with irony to establish a pattern for crisis discourse that reveals human folly in a way to overcome it., THE CONCERT OF natural resources evolved during the twentieth century from the limited sense of 'raw materials' for the production of useful commodities, to an expanded notion that includes the [...]

Unsustainable and inequitable exploitation of Cambodia's natural resources like forestry, fishery and agricultural land, by the political, economic and military elites has undermined the livelihood of rural populations. Hence, policy implications for the government of Cambodia and the international donor community are discussed.

Exploitation of common property natural resources by private firms is evaluated. Optimal entry regulations and optimal marginal investment incentives of the government to prevent over-capacity of resource externalities are analyzed.

The relationship between resource politics and security in international relations is discussed. It examines the place of resource and development issues, in attempts to develop regional institutions.