Community-Based Natural Resource Management

CBNRM as a Practice

In practice, CBNRM is probably best recognized in innumerable community forests that exist throughout the world, some of which, as with Italy's Magnifica Comunita di Fiemme, have existed for many centuries. Fish and game have also commonly been subject to community scale management, as exemplified by Zimbabwe's Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE), through which small-scale rural district councils manage lucrative sport hunting of elephant and other wildlife and the harvest of lesser local resources such as crocodile eggs, timber, and river sand. The defining feature of these and other cases of CBNRM is that local landholders own, or at least gain access and use rights to, valued local resources, which they manage in their interests. This feature makes CBNRM distinct from comanagement (whereby communities share authority with governments), citizen-based environmental [Page 550]management (whereby governments manage resources based on citizen input or, as in the case of California's “Ballot Box Planning” approach, voter dictates), and even civic environmentalism (whereby community groups assume responsibility for the cleanup of local environmental problems).

Beyond this core criterion of ownership or access rights, reviewers have regularly identified, or at least promoted, several other defining characteristics of CBNRM, such as the use of participatory models of decision making within the community; the promotion of social equity and justice, especially for traditionally disadvantaged community members; the inclusion of traditional knowledge and values in the management of community resources; and the reconciling of the typically antithetical objectives of economic development and resource conservation.

Unfortunately, real-world cases of CBNRM have often been challenged to achieve these laudable goals, and indeed, many have never sought to. Research on community forestry as practiced around the world offers insight. While not capturing all instances, reviewers have come to identify three distinct forms:

• 1.
  Community forestry as ecological forestry, whereby managers seek to halt deforestation and improve ecological conditions
• 2.
  Community forestry as social forestry, whereby timber and nontimber resources are promoted as a basis for improved subsistence or modest commercial enterprise among poorer strata
• 3.
  Community forestry as essentially small-scale industrial forestry, whereby the unapologetic avowed goal is economic gain

In other words, CBNRM is commonly characterized in geographic and other disciplinary scholarship in idealized terms that may not match its real-world practice.

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