News from IASC 2011

Dear All,
Sharing with all of you some articles that have come after the IASC 2011 conference for your reading. Hope you find the same interesting too..

Best,
Subrata Singh


Understanding The Concept Of Commons: A Shared Responsibility

By Marianne de Nazareth

04 February, 2011
Countercurrents.org

How many of us who sit in the comfort of our homes typing or surfing the net on our computers in one of the bigger metropolises in the country, are aware of the ‘commons’. What ARE the commons was the question that came to my mind when I first heard about the IASC Conference held in Hyderabad in January 2011. What did the term commons actually mean to us the common man?

Listening in to several key note speakers and panel discussions during the IASC conference, realisation dawned that the commons are areas which include forests, water bodies and grazing lands which sustain the large rural community in our country. I heard erudite speakers like Elinor Ostrom the American political scientist who was awarded the nobel laureate for Economics in 2009 say in her keynote address that “ In forests across the world people who use the commons, monitor it better than government agencies. One can find a synergy between the local people and the great job of carbon sequestration by the forests. If they are made responsible to handle the rules governing the forest, it will work.” She felt Collective Action theory was at the core of social sciences and policy making. Collective Action Theory seeks to understand how groups of people are able to cooperate to overcome social dilemmas.

Several panel discussions focussed on certain areas in the country where traditional pastoral communities reared cattle, sheep and goats depending on the commons like forests, revenue lands, agricultural fallows and tanks and lakes for grazing and feeding their livestock. However when land is now becoming scarce with surging population figures our cities have begun to burgeon outwards into rural areas bringing with that, several new laws that are coming into force throwing out of balance old customs and practices which supported rural communities.Ghotge Nitya S and Pandharipande Kaustubh of Anthra shared their paper called ‘Unequal rights on Common lands’ from which I have been able to glean a lot for this piece about the commons.

“While owner ship of land is most often central to the agricultural debate many migratory and nomadic communities including migratory pastoralists do not necessarily subscribe to the concept of private ownership of land or the fact that the earths natural resources or nature can be owned. This being quite in contrast to the attempts in recent times to privatize our water ways and even the air we breathe. When these opposing values come face to face they lead to conflicts over use and abuse, rights and responsibilities and iniquities surface,” they state.

In their paper interestingly Ghotge and Pandharipande go back to Mughal times when the practice of the land tenure stystem which the British strenghtened by creating the Land Acquisition Act enabled them to transfer any land they desired to the British Crown. This was discontinued after independence, but the government has been unable to help these nomadic pastoralists who constitute 7% of the population, graze and manage their live stock on common land.

Interestingly the nomadic pastoralists provided agriculturists with animals and animal produce, which were used to plough the land and manure it as well. Non pastoral nomads whom we are more familiar with in our towns, “ provided salt , trinkets, medicinal plants , spices ,animal manure and even entertainment and sometimes cash. Most of these communities did not own private land , they migrated annually using resources otherwise considered waste or useless by others such as land unsuitable for agriculture , dry lands and fallows ,wet lands and swamps and dried up rivers beds,” explain Ghotge and Pandharipande.

As each decade passed new development plans and programmes were initiated by the government blurring the lines between revenue, forest and waste land. India’s population has grown alarmingly and with it, agriculture has expanded and encroached on what was considered common property thereby reducing open lands.
The paper went on to say that with the growth of so many more mouths to feed, the fallows which traditionally served as village commons to graze animals earlier, were turned into agricultural holdings and crops began to be grown on them, keeping the pastoralists out. Then new irrigation schemes came about and to feed a growing population, and the birth of the green revolution led to an enormous increase in agriculture.

That was not all - to contol droughts the government formulated the DPAP or the Drought Prone Area Programme which was initiated as a land and water conservation programme which evolved into the Watershed programmes. With this programme, bans were imposed on grazing on the fallows which for centuries were used as the village commons to graze animals.

With the water shed programmes coming into force,bans also were imposed besides on grazing , on the cutting of firewood and fodder as well. Thus, those communities who were land less and depended on the commons migrated out of these water shed areas. The government also began to green barren areas thus bringing village forest lands under social forestry programmes.This move cut out the pastoralist completely as the fast growing species, which were planted did not have any special value as fodder or firewood and grazers were kept out of these areas. Eucalyptus was the species widely planted which benefited the paper industry but destroyed the ground water table and native species of plants. To combat desertification in Rajasthan and Gujarat the forest department planted Prosopis juliflora or the babool which is a very thorny species which lifestock find hard to eat.

Over time, the wildlife protection act of 1972 and Project Tiger also further displaced these marginal communities, pushing them below the conservation efforts of biodiversity. Certain tribes who were hunters by tradition were forced out of the lands they found their sustenance from.This turned them into poachers making them ‘criminals’ in the eyes of the law. Instead their hands on awareness of biodiversity and wildlife in the forests could have been used profitably by the government to understand complex eco systems of the jungles.

However it is all not negative and there is a possibilty of both the government and the pastoralists working together as Sagari Ramdas explained in her talk , “Working for the common good’ at the IASC 2011. Her presentation focussed on the shepherds and other livestock rearers of the Rishi Valley Special Development Area in AP. The region had been notified by the government of Andhra Pradesh as the Rishi Valley Special Development Area (RVSDA) and was given to the Rishi Valley Education Centre to re-vegetate this drought prone and dry area in 2008. This order covered 33 hamlets in the area. These pastoralists according to Ramdas were harassed by the Forest Department to pay fines of Rs 2 lakhs to enter the Horsely Hills with no receipts given for the payment. Gopaligutta was identified as the alternate hillock where they could graze their animals but the access route was blocked by the RVEC and the sarpanch holdings. After discussions, in March 2010 a five foot acess route was given to the herders. Since June 2009, Anthra and organization that Ramdas works with in association with the RVEC have begun to work on a common property resource (CPR) management in the area to support the herders. Using the FRA 2006 (Forest Rights Act), Anthra has been able to confirm the pastoralists grazing rights in forests. Now along with NREGS support the hillock Darimindigutta is being protected and re -vegetated according to the shepherd’s community plan which includes local plant species.


So therefore, for ecological sustainibility of these grazing lands and the future of the communities that depend on them, Anthra suggests a more inclusive approach where the communities are included in the protection of the area for the future. Alienating the pastoralists has proved counter productive, so the government must look at age old grazing and watering practices to develop a shared and evolving strategy for the overall development of the commons which will lead to a win- win situation for both the commons and the environment.

(The writer attended the IASC2011 as a media fellow of the FES and is the former Assistant Editor of the Deccan Herald and teaches Journalism to Mass Media students in St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore)





Protect The Commons

17th January 2011 - Marianne de Nazareth, Countercurrents

The 13th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) 2011 held in the heritage city of Hyderabad from the 10-14th January 2011 was an eye opener with regard to the critical role that the commons such as forests, water bodies, and grazing lands play in sustaining the rural economy in any country in the world including India. The reason Andhra Pradesh was chosen as the venue was because the government is piloting a regional programme that will integrate the development and restoration of what is known as common lands in the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and the Community Forest Management arrangements in AP are also path breaking in terms of scale, initiative and institutional design. In urban minds, common lands are treated as ‘waste lands’ but they are most often the only means of livelihood to the poor.

“Often commons face neglect or are unappreciated for discussions around them, and fall between the cracks in our reductionist approach to understanding natural resources. While in reality strikingly similar issues are faced by forests, water, pastures and other common regimes. To address a diversity of issues across resources and across disciplnes there are eleven panel series around seven sub-themes planned. Some of which are: The commons, Poverty and social exclusion; Globalisation, commercialisation and the commons,” said Jagdeesh Rao Puppala the Co-chair of the conference.

At the opening ceremony on 10 January at Shilparamam, the guest of honour was Jairam Ramesh, Minister of State for Environment and Forests and the Keynote address was made by Dr. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences (2009).

Minister Jairam Ramesh in his signature green jacket over a white kurta was the star of the evening saying that ministers have a hard job bridging the gap between the academic world and the real world. Academics measure anything they do slowly in years while he has to work in months, maybe days, to take decisions. When asked what is standing in the way of implementing the laws of the land when it comes to managing common pool resources, Ramesh explained that archaic laws in the country need to be re-examined. “The Indian Forest law came into force in 1927. We have not challenged that intellectual edifice and we should. Unless you have the local forest community given an economic stake in the forest to look after them at a local level you cannot be successful. At the moment forest dwellers are looked at like criminals.”The statement drew a round of applause from an audience with representatives from 69 different countries.

“All our laws to do with the environment are national, therefore if anyone asks me about pollution or forests or water, I say ask that particular state government. We need to have split responsibilities only then we can come to grips with problems.”The minister felt that the country needed to give recognition to those states that implement environment laws seriously so that they are lauded for their efforts. The biggest constraint he felt was in the mindset of the people implementing the laws. He felt if that changed, everything would change.

In her keynote address Dr. Ostrom, explained that “In forests across the world people who use it, monitor it better than government agencies. One can find a synergy between the local people and the great job of carbon sequestration by the forests. If they are made responsible to handle the rules governing the forest, it will work.” She felt Collective Action theory was at the core of social sciences and policy making. Collective Action Theory seeks to understand how groups of people are able to cooperate to overcome social dilemmas.

Ruth Meinzen-Dick, the President of the IASC and Herman Roza Chavez the new minister of the environment of El Salvadore delvered the key note addresses on the second day. Dick revealed this was her dream to come back to India where she grew up in Tamil Nadu and did her thesis on tank irrigation. But today she looks back in analysis of how not an individual, but a group like the IASC can make an impact made on governing the commons equitably.

“Today the commons has been given recognition only because of the work of Dr. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences (2009). It is because of her work and the Nobel prize that the commons are being recognised and laws are being enacted to save them.”In November 2010 there was a meeting in Berlin on the new commons which include urban digital and electronic and any other shared resource that is commons or a common pool resource. New areas of commons such as culture, health and global resources are also being explored. She felt the collective expertise that the association can mobilise from over 90 countries fuels policy debates of global significance. Whether the issue is intellectual property, network neutrality, global warming, land reform, legal empowerment of the poor, or reforming the international financial system, the association strongly believes that research and lessons from working in and with commons regimes are important in shaping governance systems that will benefit as many people as possible, simultaneously preserving resources at hand for future generations.

Then the newly appointed minister of the Environment and Natural Resources in El Salvadore, Herman Roza Chavez, in his address said, “I also have a strong sense of urgency at the problems affecting our planet and our developing world countries. I have newly been appointed and the expectations of change by my countrymen are very high. I also have to be careful and look at risk reduction rather than threaten the growth of our economy. Risk reduction is the only way forward and I try to use the knowledge community’s research in my work. El Salvadore is just a small country of 2 million hectares which is a perfect laboratory for Professor Ostrom, to consider!”

Quoting from Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: A Framework For Assessment (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Series) by Gretchen Daily, he said, and that all ecosystems provide critical eco services for human well being. In El Salvadore builders are given guidelines to minimise impacts and corporate responsibility goes beyond just green washing he said. In conclusion he requested fervently that Elinor Ostrom help him and El Salvadore make the right policy decisions which were paramount for the environment.

The third day of 13th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons began in Hyderabad with the key note speeches made by David Bollier and Bina Agarwal. David Bollier is a journalist, activist and consultant from the US.

According to Bollier there are two general types of commons. The finite and the infinite- the twin area of neo liberal economic policy says Bollier are scarce commons which are air, water and land which are treated as infinite. And limitless commons which are creative works, which are treated as scarce due to copyright and patent laws. Bollier talked of the commons as being the new political culture. Mankind has to look at a new narrative to reclaim what is free and unfettered and belonging to all. “The attitude towards the commons should be- this land is our land and let us fight to regain the commons. We have to build better public policy to build a better commons. The state and market look at how they can exploit the commons, and many common pool resources are being privatised. Some people talk about privatisation but enclosure is the right way to describe it,” he said.

Bollier revealed that he is going back into the history of the commons which is forgotten. “Without legislature it is hard for commoners to argue in court about the commons, so we want to regenerate a body of common laws and I am convinced that recognition of the history of the commons can help us understand the victims of enclosure and those who depend on the commons for subsistence,” he explained.

He ended his lecture with urging scholars and activists to support and strengthen each others work. “Let us step away from the fringes and open new conversations and build new alliances,” he urged the gathering.

Bina Agarwal the second speaker is the Director and Professor of Economics, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi. In her address she said, “Economists studying environmental collective action and green governance have paid little attention to gender. Research on gender and green governance in other disciplines has focused mainly on women's near absence from forestry institutions. In my newest book, Gender and Green governance, I ask if women's inclusion in forest governance, undeniably important for equity, also affect decisions on forest use and outcomes for conservation and subsistence,” she said.

Bina talked about her work and how it showed that if women were given more responsibility of looking after tracts in the forest those tracts would fare better than the others in a year. She revealed that women allow limited extraction,they would patrol forests with more vigilance and women’s knowledge of species and extraction without denuding a resource was all superior to men. By allowing some forest extraction it is beneficial to remove incendiary undergrowth which prevents forest fires and leads to a win- win situation she said. As a result, according to Bina, this leads to a positive outcome, with a thicker forest canopy, rather than a patchy one, which is more effective to control Green House Gas emissions.

The floor was then thrown open to questions and it led to a lively debate which included climate change and its effects on the commons.

The fourth and final day of 13th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons began with Ashish Khotari as the key note speaker. Khotari is the Founder member of Kalpavriksh, a 30 year environmental research and action group in India which is involved in people’s movements against destructive development projects including the Narmada dams.

“My first lesson about the commons was 25 years ago when I walked in the Himalayan foothills along with the Chipko movement, which was a resistance to the destruction of forests in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. That was my first lesson about how the common man can galvanise positive action to safeguard the commons.”

He went on to say that the commons are becoming increasingly uncommon and there is a continuous erosion of the commons due to various reasons. Khotari is concerned that the juggernaut of ‘development’ will erode them over the next few decades until we as humans dig in our heels and reassert our rights over the commons. There is no accurate answer as to when the revival may begin, but it a question we have to mull over and discuss he said. From 1985 to 2000 there has been a doubling of the forest area under community ownership and governance which is helping to bring back a lot of the bio-diversity that we have lost. It is the indigenous people who have now begun to save wetlands, mountain areas and forests by reasserting their spiritual connection with nature and their historical rights over decades. He reiterated that this was a more ‘grass roots’ democracy which is more effective than bureaucracy.

An increased voice in retaining control and regaining what was lost with colonial policies or government exclusion is an important global trend which has been strengthened by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the assembly in 2007. Movements to encourage reassertion of common rights are growing he said. Mongolia opened up pastoral rights to shepherds in 2007, Dalit women working toward reasserting rights on seed production critical to the poor and marginalised in India, El Salvador’s repatriation of 250 different varieties of potatoes in Peru, pastoralists in the Niger claiming a million hectares of land for pastoralism were some of the actual successful empirical examples he cited.

To conclude Khotari asked if there was hope for the commons? He stated that all the fake new market mechanisms like bio-fuels, geo-engineering and REDD could cause a lot of erosion of the commons and the eco labels put on them are not the real solution. Instead he urged people to look at decentralization and get the local communities embedded in managing the landscape. This would bring back a sense of responsibility to the human race, towards the planets resources, a radical ecological democracy where we value reciprocity and non- violence and go by the principles of equity and sharing.

The conference concluded on a more positive note since the Indian minister of environment showed a willingness and an enthusiasm to work towards a more inclusive commons in India. If handled right these commons could reduce poverty levels of the marginalised and the poor who depend on them for their livelihood and sustenance.

Global Commons Idea Navigates Public Private Split
14th January 2011 - Christopher D. Cook

America’s bitterly divided discourse about government and the public sector is all but absent here at the global commons conference in Hyderabad, India where criticisms of government seem driven more by an impulse to protect communities from state-corporate takings of common lands than by the urge to eliminate taxes and regulation.

The question of who can best preserve common resources — and defining what these ‘commons’ are — is a prevailing theme here, with widespread criticism heaped on governments in India and other ‘developing’ nations for prioritizing GDP and large-scale industrial growth over community-based economic survival.

In the Tamil Nadu province in India’s south, for instance, the Adivasi forest tribes have battled government agencies — often representing private industrial interests — for their survival in traditional forest harvesting areas. “The state forest department has systematically undermined traditional rights and uses,” explained Kunjam Pandu Dora, a forest tribes activist presenting at the conference.

Indian pastoralists and forest tribes have been summarily kicked out of new national parklands, and their traditional harvesting has become illegal, creating new pressures for tribes to enter the agrarian economy while spurring clashes with other pastoralists and farmers.

Such contested terrains and colliding interests are everywhere; how, for instance, does India supply power, technological and industrial development to its ever-rising middle-class (and even peasant communities) without radically scouring and imperiling its resources and increasing its carbon footprint?

“You have a middle class in India that’s as large as the population of the U.S. and they want electricity 24 hours a day. Gee, imagine that,” said outgoing IASC president Ruth Meinzen-Dick.

The commons concept is hard to pin down: it incorporates an intriguing (if sometimes confusing) blend of state, community, and market forces, and doesn’t eschew any of them. “There’s no one breakfast,” said Meinzen-Dick in her keynote speech, “but there are many elements of a good breakfast” for the movement to borrow from — a smorgasbord of ideas and practices that cross disciplines and ideologies.

In a speech at the IASC’s inaugural event, Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom critiqued the “dominant policy paradigm” of turning resources over to either government or private forces. In one study of 450 irrigation management cases, Ostrom reported, “Only 42 percent of the government irrigation systems were high-performing, even with fancy engineering.” Meanwhile, 75 percent of farmer-run irrigation projects created favorable results.

Ostrom, a key intellectual architect whose Nobel has helped elevate the commons movement profile, argues that the key is not public or private control, but community engagement, communication, trust, and sustained cooperation. “Panaceas are not to be recommended. We need to deal with complexity.”

In a flashy picturesque video following the inaugural speeches, the screen flashed these words in defining what the commons is not: “Not private. Not public. Not government. Not business. Not communist. Not yours. Not mine.” So the question becomes, whose is it? What are the commons, why are they important, how do we preserve them, and for whom?

“The question is how do you get collective action and how do you get it working with the state?” Meinzen-Dick said in an interview. It’s “not about shunting government aside. It’s not even always shunting market aside.”

Throughout the conference, I asked participants this: How can India, China, and other nations ‘develop’ U.S.-style, with ever-expanding growth and industrial production and consumption, without plunging the planet deeper into climatologic and social-economic chaos. And what role can the public sector play in preventing rather than encouraging this downward spiral?

India’s erudite and controversial Minister of Environment and Forests, Shri Jairam Ramesh, has endured “severe criticism and opposition” for blocking major hydro projects that would dam the upper Ganges River, and lamented that, in India, merely implementing the law creates big, splashy headlines and trouble. He told a rapt conference crowd, “It is time for India to accept that 9 percent economic growth has ecological consequences. There is a trade-off.”

Ramesh added, “The first thing standing in the way of implementing our laws is the development imperative.”

Yet in the same speech, Minister Ramesh cited an “army of regulators who have become part of the problem” getting in the way of sustainable, community-based development. He asked the crowd, “Do regulations require regulators?”

While Ramesh is considered somewhat of a hero for environmental and common lands protection, the minister said he also encountered “huge resistance by civil society groups” when he released a paper advocating market-based approaches to environmental management.

“Our laws are based on institutional monocultures,” Ramesh told the commons crowd. “We need to allow for different ways.” India is “enormously diverse” both economically and ecologically, “yet we still insist on the primacy of the state.”

In my sampling of numerous workshops and dozens of interviews, the commons conference appeared to emphasize more criticism of the public sector than the private. Several delegates I spoke with expressed frustration about this tilt. One attendee remarked, “I’m surprised we hear nothing about capitalism here, nothing about the larger underlying forces.” This sentiment was repeated several times in discussions with delegates.

“Too often we focus on getting the rules just right, but we don’t focus on the larger political environment and context,” said Ben Cousins, a land reform expert and activist in South Africa.

But the IASC conference marked significant progress on numerous fronts. With the appearance of environmental ministers from India and El Salvador, Ostrom’s Nobel Prize, and several instances of the commons movement gaining audiences with government leaders and key policymakers, it’s clear the commons movement has grown from a largely intellectual and academic station to playing a significant role influencing policy and practices on the ground.

Despite ongoing threats to common lands that are critical to both ecologies and communities, the commons movement is providing answers.

In Oaxaca Mexico, which suffered 50 percent deforestation between 1970-1990, community forest management efforts emphasizing control by forest village groups has proven “more effective than top-down schemes,” reported activist and scholar Leticia Merino, who says the approach has produced at least as much forest recovery as government-protected conservation areas.

Throughout the conference there has been a strong emphasis on human-nature relationships — moving away from the idea of nature as an idyll that must be segregated from human activity. Report after report suggested at least anecdotal evidence that when communities are engaged and entrusted with lands, rather than separated from them, both the people and the land benefit.

***

I ask Meinzen-Dick about the dilemma of ‘developing’ economies and expanding opportunities in the context of global climate change and the need to radically reduce emissions. “We cannot become frozen by that,” she says, “then it becomes an excuse not to do anything.”

Over a late dinner of daal, chicken masala, and potato curry, a woman from the Bangalore region of India tells me about her project, run through the Catholic church and funded by India’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (whose program associates include the World Bank, OPEC, and rural agricultural credit programs), which she says is boosting incomes and opening new options for destitute peasants in 260 villages. It sounds genuinely remarkable and laudable — using a self-help model, training, and employment, the program provides small farming plots and helps people grow their own food and build income. “They are now buying televisions,” she says as a marker of progress.

On our way home from dinner, I ask a Ghanaian delegate about his country’s economy. He boasts proudly of 7 percent GDP growth, “one of the strongest in all of Africa.” I ask him which key sectors are driving the boom. Along with agriculture, he ticks off timber, mining, and an expanding oil industry as the chief engines of growth there. “Hopefully the oil is going to keep growing,” he says, though adding a moment later without much irony, “Sometimes oil can be a curse.”

***

(A group of us visited two area pastoral villages that are encountering land encroachment from large sugar cane plantations and power plants fueling Hyderabad’s ongoing growth. In an upcoming report, I’ll tell the tale of a fascinating and eye-opening trip to these villages, which feature the contrasts of cell phones and satellite dishes alongside chickens and oxen parading through dirt paths and pastoral villager tents made of cloth and plastic bags. The villagers are working with the Foundation for Ecological Security and other groups to find new markets for their wool and milk in order to survive.)

Christopher D. Cook is an award-winning journalist and writer who has written for Harper's, The Economist, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere. He is author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis. See more of his work at www.christopherdcook.com.