Environmental Entitlements

The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen created an entitlement approach to the analysis of hunger and poverty, by which people are entitled to bundles of commodities by virtue of their inherent legal rights. The concept of environmental entitlements is a broadening of Sen's approach. It is an extension not only in terms of linking economic entitlements to environmental resources, but the environmental entitlements perspective stretches much further, integrating actor-oriented approaches, theories of conflict, power and entitlement distribution, and discursive debates over the meaning of entitlements. In a seminal paper on environmental entitlements, Melissa Leach, Robin Mearns, and Ian Scoones started with a fundamental critique of the then prevailing narratives around community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), an approach that had emerged in the 1990s as a local-level, community-centered, and participatory concept to achieve sustainable development in rural areas of developing countries. The authors initiated their inquiry by asking why CBNRM initiatives had so often failed or fallen short of expectations.

The critique centered mainly on the flawed conceptualizations of both village communities and local environments, the categories that are central to the development efforts to support local-level sustainable development. The authors argued that CBNRM frames communities as well as local environments as basically distinct, undifferentiated, [Page 922]and relatively stable entities. Moreover, a common image underlying people-environment relations in CBNRM is blamed as one of harmony, equilibrium, or balance between livelihoods and natural resources. Interrogating these basic assumptions on communities, the authors proposed an alternative framework that highlighted social difference and dynamics, people's agency, and the fundamentally contradictory and contested nature of local-level community-environment relations. They spoke to the ways in which gender, caste, wealth, age, origin, and other aspects of social identity divide and crosscut community boundaries. Also, they emphasized that communities are composed of people who actively monitor, interpret, and shape the environments around them. Social change, in this context, has to be framed as manifold processes of interactions between external and internal actors and events, in which path dependencies and contingencies play a significant part.

In a parallel strand of critique, the authors also challenged the conventional framing of local ecologies. On the basis of recent advances in the emerging field of “new ecology,” they argued that a high degree of variability in space and time characterizes local environments and that historical dynamics and disturbance regimes have to be recognized in order to grasp the dynamics of environmental change at a variety of timescales and spatial levels.