Browsing by Author "Leach, M."

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Challenges to community-based sustainable development: Dynamics, entitlements, institutions
    Leach, M.; Mearns, R.; Scoones, I. (UK: Institute of Development Studies, 1997)
    For all the emphasis given to community-based approaches within recent environment and development policy debates, results in practice have often been disappointing both from the perspectives of implementing agencies, and of certain sections of the 'communities' concerned. This article suggests that among many possible reasons, key problems relate to shortcomings in the underlying assumptions about 'community', 'environment', and the relationships between them which inform current approaches. An alternative perspective, forwarded here, starts from the politics of resource access and control among diverse social actors, and sees patterns of environmental change as the outcomes of negotiation, or contestation, between social actors who may have very different priorities. As the authors go on to show, the notion of 'environmental entitlements' encapsulates this shift in perspective. Specifying people's entitlements and the ways they are shaped by diverse institutions offers a useful approach to the analysis of situations with which community-based sustainable development attempts to engage.
  • Environmental entitlements: Dynamics and institutions in community-based natural resource management
    Leach, M.; Mearns, R.; Scoones, I. (Great Britain: Pergamon Press, 1999)
    While community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) now attracts widespread international attention, its practical implementation frequently falls short of expectations. This paper contributes to emerging critiques by focusing on the implications of intracommunity dynamics and ecological heterogeneity. It builds a conceptual framework highlighting the central role of institutions - regularized patterns of behavior between individuals and groups in society - in mediating environment-society relationships. Grounded in an extended form of entitlements analysis, the framework explores how differently positioned social actors command environmental goods and services that are instrumental to their well-being. Further insights are drawn from analyses of social difference; "new"; dynamic ecology; new institutional economics; structuration theory; and landscape history. The theoretical argument is illustrated with case material from India, South Africa, and Ghana. --Elsevier Science Ltd.
  • Fashioned forest pasts, occluded histories? International environmental analysis in West African locales
    Leach, M.; Fairhead, J. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2000)
    This article considers how environmental problems are produced and interpreted, using case material from West Africa's humid forest zone. Examining the experiences of several countries over the long term, it is possible to identify a deforestation discourse produced through national and international institutions. This represents forest and social history in particular ways that structure forest conservation but which obscure the experience and knowledge of resource users. Using fine-grained ethnography to explore how such discourse is experienced and interpreted in a particular locale, the article uncovers problems with 'discourse' perspectives which produce analytical dichotomies which confront state and villager, and scientific and 'local' knowledges. The authors explore the day-to-day encounters between villagers and administrators, and the social and historical experiences which condition these. Instances where the deforestation discourse becomes juxtaposed with villagers' alternative ideas about landscape history prove relatively few and insignificant, while the powerful material effects of the discourse tend to be interpreted locally within other frames. These findings present departures from the ways relations between citizen sciences and expert institutions have been conceived in recent work on the sociology of science and public policy.
  • Institutions, consensus and conflict: Implications for policy and practice
    Leach, M.; Mearns, R.; Scoones, I. (UK: Institute of Development Studies, 1997)
    This article is a summation of the sustainable development special issue of the IDS Bulletin (Vol. 28, no. 4). Sustainable development is being heralded by institutions and organizations at varied levels. Sustainable resource management cannot be achieved without recognizing that: 1) multiple institutions are involved in resource management (e.g. village elders and kinship networks both confer access to land), 2) different people rely on different institutions to support their claims to environmental goods and services, 3) the nature of many institutions is informal and are characterized by a regular instead of fixed set of norms and 4) institutions and organizations are not independent of community power and authority relations. To address these issues, it is suggested that a "learning process approach" be followed to guide and empower subordinate groups. Through the process of empowerment, conflict will arise and negotiation is suggested as a path to resolution. Negotiations will have to take into consideration differential power relations and modes of operation. In practice and policy arenas, actors need be assured of uncertainty in relation to outcomes. Policy cannot be directed at a specific outcome given the different actors, their definitions of sustainability and their access to other agents of change. It is suggested that, in certain contexts, idealization of past community relations to environment should be utilized to further the goals of the community (e.g., decentralized control of resources).
  • Misreading African landscapes: Society and ecology in a forest-savanna mosaic
    Fairhead, J.; Leach, M. (Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
    Islands of dense forest in the savanna of 'forest' Guinea have long been regarded by both scientists and policy-makers as the last relics of a once more extensive forest cover, degraded and degrading fast due to its inhabitants' land use. Through meticulous use of historical sources, and close investigation of inhabitants' technical knowledge and practices, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach question these entrenched assumptions. They show, on the contrary, that people have created forest islands around their villages, and have turned fallow vegetation more woody, so that population growth has implied more forest, not less. They also consider the origins, persistence and consequences of a century of erroneous policy. Interweaving historical, social anthropological and ecological data, this unique study advances a novel theoretical framework for ecological anthropology, forcing a radical re-examination of some central tenants in each of these disciplines. ---Series abstract