Good Food is First Food. It is not junk food. It is the food that connects nature and nutrition with livelihoods. This food is good for our health; it comes from the rich biodiversity of our regions; it provides employment to people. Most importantly, cooking and eating give us pleasure. …
The 13th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons that was held in Hyderabad earlier this month discussed the idea of the
Strategies Based on Natural Resource Management deals with experiences of improving livelihoods through investments in the natural resource base. This includes both watershed development initiatives as well as specialized NRM interventions for areas where watershed development may not be possible or even relevant. It describes natural resource based strategies such …
Goats give good returns only as long as fodder is free. Unlike cattle that are fed crop and crop residue, goats and sheep graze in wasteland, common grazing land and forests. In western Rajasthan, where degrading farm land and feed shortage forced people to abandon farming and cattle and turn …
Goat rearing is the poor’s survival response to an ecological crisis. It has turned out to be an economic success. But the goat economy has the potential to precipitate an ecological crisis if grazing is not ensured. Options before India are very few: shrinking grazing ground, restricted forest land and …
The influence of John Locke’s theory of property on the policies governing India’s landscape is examined in this paper. Locke’s concept of wasteland, as opposed to value-producing land, constituted a founding binary opposition that constructed how landscapes were categorised. The period under study covers the Permanent Settlement (1793), the Ryotwari …
Today, goats ensure income to five million households in India. But goat rearers face an opportunity and a threat as the demand for goat meat is set to shoot up, while grazing land is shrinking. If India does not secure its pastures, goats might turn from an asset to a …
Today, there is a growing consensus on the cross-cutting contribution of resource rights to reducing poverty, achieving food security, resolving resource conflicts and providing incentives for sustainable resource management and as a contribution to democratic development. The International Land Coalition (ILC) is a network of organizations united by a shared …
Indigenous communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs) of Bangladesh are managing forests around their homesteads in a sustainable way despite exclusion of customary rights on government managed reserved forests,. Bangladesh, as one of the forest poor countries in the world, is continuously struggling to conserve its forest resources. However, …
This monograph by Dr Jyothis Sathyapalan and Dr Gopinath Reddy is an attempt to understand the implementation processes of the Forest Rights Act 2006 in Kerala. The study also tried to evaluate the scope and feasibility of taking up the implementation of community rights and conservation duties in an integrated …
Investments in strong institutional arrangements in common property resources can contribute to better access to fodder and water for the poor livestock keepers. A strong institution and collective action has helped improve commons, thereby improving the livelihoods of poor livestock keepers in Udaipur region.
Upland watersheds in the tropics provide a range of crucial ecosystem goods and services. How they are governed can be crucial to human well-being and environmental sustainability. Communities, governments and firms have taken many different approaches to sharing these benefits, negotiating trade-offs between them, and allocating the risks and burdens …
Social capital has been defined as a set of informal norms that promotes cooperation among the members of the community. Where there is repeated interaction, the members are able to get better information about the activities and intentions of other members in the community than outsiders, thereby promoting collective action …
In the coastal community of Chabihau, Yucatan, Mexico, hurricanes Gilbert (1988) and Isidore (2002) opened breaches in the coastal dune. The government modified these breaches with a floodgate, channels, and bridges, allowing tidal influx that has transformed the swamp ecosystem into a coastal lagoon. Our long-term research (1990-2006) has been …
Village commons might suffer if forest rights act is not implemented well in Himachal Pradesh The Himachal Pradesh government has asked forest dwellers in the state to put forward their claims to forest rights. But it is being cautious in implementing the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition …
The severity of fuel wood and fodder depletion has been recognized through the hot arid tracts of India, since 70% of rural folk are dependent on them. The intensive study done on Baordi - Bambore watershed indicated that the state of affairs are not the same, as they appear. In …
The famous work of Hardin on 'The Tragedy of the Commons' explains why the Common Pool Resources (CPR) or Open Access Resources are over-exploited, degraded or depleted. The economic reason explains that "unregulated access to the CPR creates a decision making environment in which private benefits to an individual from …
The term, 'environment', has many connotations. In this paper, by 'environment' we mean the natural environment, which encompasses all the biotic and abiotic elements that form our surroundings, that is, the air, the land, the water, the forests, the seas. In India, more than three-fourths of its population depends directly …
Official development economics reflects the rest of the discipline, in that it too neglects nature's place in economic development. The neglect looks odd to ecologists, who are trained to study the slow processes that influence long-term development possibilities. A seemingly natural retort to ecologists is that people come first and …
In the recent past, two major policy interventions have been made to resettle and rehabilitate persons displaced as a result of acquisition of land for development projects. While the government of Orissa brought out its policy in 2006, the Central Government notified a new policy in 2007. Both policies suffer …
