Agrawal, Arun. 2003. Sustainable governance of common-pool resources: Context, methods, and politics. Annual Review of Anthropology 32, 243-262.
In this paper, Agrawal addresses the question: what accounts for successful and sustainable resource use? Agrawal points out that the most neglected aspect of sustainable governance of CPRs is the “changing relationship between the environment and human beings who use environmental resources.”
To illustrate the causality between population growth and ecological degradation, Ehrlich (1968) and Malthus (1960) work is evoked.
Three foundational CPR studies by Robert Wade (1994), Elinor Ostrom (1990) and Jean‐Marie Baland and Jean‐Philippe Platteau (1996) are analyzed in the paper. These three works are used to support an analysis of local community‐based efforts to manage and govern common pool resources. Two summary tables are developed based on the three CPR studies. Table 1 provides a synthesis of facilitating conditions for sustainable governance. Table 2 provides a further analysis of the critical enabling conditions for sustainability of the commons.
Market instruments are suggested to be a thin means to explain and provide normative solutions. Colchester (1994) and Young (1994) comment that “integration with markets usually has an adverse impact on the management of common‐pool resources”.
Agrawal argues that markets are not to be characterized as solutions to the problem of sustainable governance of common‐pool resources. Moreover, Agrawal’s exploration of sustainable governance is supported by Oates’ (1999) reasoning suggesting that changes in markets and new technology might prompt existing resource management regimes that are not “bloodless or innocent process.”
The author argues that context provides a very important element to analyzing the characteristics of sustainable governance and the nature of local‐state relations requires more careful exploration commenting that the study of local justice “is a very messy business.”
Two areas of further research are suggested as priorities to support the development of institutional solutions to CPR dilemmas. First, there is a requirement for further theoretically motivated comparative studies (case analyses) to identify and explore the causal mechanisms and narrow the range of relevant theoretical variables and their interactions. Second, there is a need to conduct studies with large populations (n‐values) in order to identify the strength of causal relationships.
