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How are we to account for the conservationist attitude displayed in the aforementioned societies and, above all, how are we to reconcile such evidence with the one adduced in the previous section and with the interpretative analysis offered in the same? There are apparently two ways of explaining conservation-mindedness in type-III societies that are consistent with our interpretation of the case of type-II societies. First, it can be contended that type-III societies differ in nature from type-II societies, more specifically, the latter are hunter-gatherer societies while the former are agricultural societies in which people's perceptions of their relationships with the surrounding environment are much more conducive to resource management practices. Second, it may be pointed out that societies can learn over time the need to conserve their resources when these become scarce. Or else, the two explanations can be combined by stressing that some kinds of society learn better or more quickly than others how to adjust to a changing environment.
Authors of many of the case-studies referred to above have actually expressed the opinion that a learning process has clearly been at work in the societies concerned. Yet, there is significant variation in the way these authors have characterized the learning process. Some seem to suggest that societies learn quite quickly about the changing nature of their environment and about the kind of response required of them, implying that, contrary to what we have argued in the previous section, they may optimally adjust to evolving environmental challenges confronting them. For example, Messerschmidt writes that, in Nepal, the villagers of Ghasa 'recognised in the 1960s that their local Ramjung pine forest was rapidly being depleted by overcutting, indiscriminate grazing, and general abuse'. As a result, they decided to close off approximately five hectares to allow regeneration; other measures quickly followed (Messerschmidt, 1986: 461). Unfortunately, we are not told in this case how villagers became aware of their new environmental problems and how they came to effectively respond to them.
Other authors appear to think that, if village communities learn quickly about new challenges emerging from increased pressure on natural resources, they may possibly fail to respond practically in the appropriate way because of some sort of collective action problem. Thus, again with reference to Nepal, Arnold and Campbell remark: 'Awareness of the problems created by deforestation is widespread and well understood. However, there is considerable variation in villagers' conviction that remedial action could be successful' (Arnold and Campbell, 1986: 438). The same authors nevertheless also observe that effective forest management responses are unlikely to be forthcoming where shortages of fuel and fodder have become 'so severe that they could no longer be remedied by using the remaining resource, even if it were more effectively managed'. On the contrary, 'management systems have developed in areas where small shortages of fuel and fodder had emerged' (ibid. 434; see also 436). A pertinent question to ask is then why, in some cases, management responses have failed to arise in time, that is, when they could still be productive. A possibility is clearly that, awareness building only slowly, it may come out when appropriate incentives to conservation measures have disappeared. To conserve local resources, users need special incentives provided by an external agency (see below Chapter 12).
Revealingly, authors who have gone more deeply into the history of the societies studied usually propose an analysis in which the learning process explicitly appears as much more lengthy and hazardous than in the above-quoted works. At this stage, it is useful to return to McKean's outstanding study of traditional common lands in Japan (1986). On the one hand, McKean clearly suggests that critical pressure on natural resources may induce the people concerned to adopt management measures to protect these resources from depletion/degradation. Thus, according to her, an important conclusion emerging from her casestudy of three villages during the Tokugawa era is that 'as demand for the products of the commons—whether that demand reflected wealth or poverty—approached the maximum sustainable yield of the commons, portions of the commons would be set aside as reserves and the rules would be progressively lightened' (McKean, 1986: 558). This conclusion no doubt rings like a straightforward application of the theory of induced institutional innovation: new rules or institutions tend to evolve whenever changes of factor endowments and/or technical change create discernible disequilibria between the marginal returns and the marginal costs of factor inputs (see, e.g., North and Thomas, 1973; North, 1981, 1989; Kikuchi and Hayami, 1980; Hayami and Kikuchi, 1981; Ruttan and Hayami, 1984; Hayami and Ruttan, 1985). Here, increasing scarcity of (forest) land induces village communities to tighten the rules regulating access to, and use of, the land.
When seen in perspective, McKean's analysis is actually much more subtle. As a matter of fact, before turning to her village case-studies, she has been careful enough to sketch the historical context in which conservation of common lands has taken place in Tokugawa Japan. Here, we learn that throughout Japan in the seventeenth century considerable deforestation occurred due to a sudden surge in the demand for timber caused by the rapid construction of cities and castles after the return of peace conditions (during the sixteenth century the country had been devastated by a widespread civil war). On the one hand, the appetite of daimyo (feudal lords) for timber led them to get hold of the best village forests and to deplete them in a short time (after a while, the daimyo realized the extent of the ecological crisis and started experimenting with conservation). On the other hand, there was increased environmental pressure on remaining common lands which caused serious degradation of village forests. In fact, 'this encounter with environmental degradation may be the reason that so much common land today turns out to be grassland and meadow—this land was probably prime forest before the 17th century' (McKean, 1986: 547). It is the opinion of McKean that this traumatic experience of ecological crisis actually induced village communities to take active steps to prevent it from occurring again:
For our purposes, the significance of this episode of deforestation during the 17th century is threefold: visible deforestation seems to have made villagers aware of the very real risks of overuse and enabled them to develop and enforce stricter rules for conservation on their own initiative to save their forests and commons from the same fate. Rather than destroying the commons, deforestation resulted in increased institutionalization of village rights to common land. And it promoted the development of literally thousands of highly codified sets of regulations for the conservation of forests and the use of all commons. (McKean, 1986: 549)
It is particularly interesting to note that, in response to this visible experience of deforestation, Japanese villages have chosen not only to adopt strict conservation measures but also to regulate access to common lands in such a way as to discourage population growth. Thus, households and not individuals were the unit of accounting and villages possessed the power to determine which households could be granted rights of access to the commons. Moreover, large households had no advantage over small ones and, in particular, they could not claim an enlarged share of benefits from the commons: such benefits were accorded irrespective of the household size. In addition, large households could not obtain advantages by splitting into several households since permission to form a branch household from the main household had to be obtained from village authorities and the latter 'recognised that creating an additional household would enlarge the number of claimants on the commons without enlarging the commons' end were therefore reluctant to grant such permission. Records from some villages actually show that, about midway through the Tokugawa period, the number of formally constituted households did not increase 'because no new households were permitted unless an old one died out for lack of heirs'. Consequently, 'users of the commons did not try to increase their numbers in order to increase their share of the commons, nor did anyone count on the benefits from the commons to bail them out after a period of irresponsible procreation'. 'Slow judicious' population growth was the rule during the Tokugawa period. In actual fact, it is clear from the contents of village and domain legal codes that 'everyone was conscious of a sense of "limits"' (McKean, 1986: 551-3). And if awareness of ecological stress could lead to effective collective response, it was because the historical evolution of villages 'gave each village a sturdy internal structure and a strong sense of identity by the early Tokugawa period' (ibid. 549).
In the same vein, a recent study about forest management in Imperial China points out that in the region of Nanping (Fujian province), people realized in the middle of the nineteenth century that their forests had been depleted by indiscriminate cutting. As revealed by an inscription on a stone stele discovered in the city of Nanping, the people then decided to carefully regulate cutting of timber in the surrounding mountains and to impose fines on all offenders (Menzies, 1994: 78). The same idea that learning is a timeconsuming and hazardous process also comes out of the already-cited study by Brightman on the ecological attitudes and practices among Boreal forest Algonquians (1987). In this study, we are informed that, following intensified exploitation, limited-access land tenure and conservation eventually appeared as adjustments to depleted environments. Conservation was actually 'e postcontact innovation that did not develop on any scale prior to game depletions in the early 1800s' (Brightman, 1987: 126). Contrary to what was observed in Japan, it does not seem to have generated from within the hunters' groups but as a result of the exogenous intervention of the Hudson's Bay Company. Still, the question remains as to why Crees and other groups eventually accepted the Company's conservation policies whereas, before, they circumvented them 'when and how they could' (ibid. 137-8).
The answer provided by Brightman is that continuous and visible experiences of game shortages slowly led Algonquians to question their traditional beliefs and, after a certain point, to reinterpret them in a way more consistent with the changed circumstances. When old beliefs could obviously no more account for what was there for everybody to see, they had to be adapted so as to acknowledge an explicit link between overhunting and game depletion, and to make (fur-bearing) animals appear as manageable. In the works of Brightman, 'Crees encountered in the game shortages a contradiction of cosmic proportions: despite conventional ritual treatment, animals were not renewing themselves but were disappearing'. Game shortages therefore 'motivated a reinterpretation of indiscriminate or "wasteful" hunting and trapping as offensive to animals and to the spirit entities regulating each species'. These spirit entities—the 'Great Moose', the 'Great Beaver', the 'Great Lynx', etc.—were now imagined to interfere with the harvests of hunters who trapped unselectively or wasted the products of animals. For example, among Labrador Naskapi, when in 1914 the main herd of caribou failed to migrate south along its usual route, the ensuing famine was attributed to the anger of the caribou spirit at prior waste and overhunting (Brightman, 1987: 136-8). Conservation was thus redefined as a religious obligation the violation of which caused severe punishment by the game spirits or the animals themselves in the form of game shortages. In conformity with an ancient belief, depletion of animals was understood 'less as an objective decrease in the numbers of animals present than as a limitation on their visibility to the hunter and on his access to them' (ibid. 139).
It therefore appears that in traditional village societies awareness of ecological stress under increasing human pressure on natural resources grows only slowly and typically requires concrete, visible experiences of depletion or degradation to be stimulated. Effects must be highly visible before people realize what is happening. In other words, abstract reasoning and explanations do not have much impact here. This finding is quite in agreement with Bourdieu's analysis of the structure of time consciousness in such societies. According to Bourdieu, indeed, villagers are well capable of setting their sights on a distant future provided that this future is susceptible of being bound up or connected with the present and the past through organic links directly suggested by daily experience. What proves much more difficult for them is to conceive of the future as a point in time where an infinite number of abstract and indeterminate possibilities can occur, that is, where humans can project things which they believe could come true if they only decided to make them arise. This is so because such a concept of the future presupposes that people are able to suspend their routine adherence to the customary data of day-to-day experiences, that is, to distance themselves from how they live in the present and how they or their ancestors have lived in the past (Bourdieu, 1963).
If the above analysis is correct, rural people can obviously destroy their future sources of subsistence whenever new circumstances have emerged to which they have not been accustomed through a long-established experience. The problem is then that the right level of ecological awareness may arise late and even too late. This point has been recently emphasized in a report issued by the World Bank:
Rural people deplete their forest and soil capital, often unaware that they are destroying their future source of fuel, fodder, and soil protection. The people do not realize the danger until the local forest is nearly gone and they must go farther into the countryside to find fuelwood. When the stock is eventually used up, . . . the extent of the crisis becomes evident . . . There is no 'fast fix' when this happens . . . Deforestation by local people using wood for local uses can be a slow and largely unnoticed process; realization of the damage may come too late for them to do anything about it without significant outside intervention. (Gregersen, Draper, and Elz, 1989: 9, 144)
In the same vein, Arnold and Campbell have noted that in Nepal: 'People are only now seeing the consequences of these pressures on a scale sufficient to persuade them to evolve new methods of resource conservation in common lands' (Arnold and Campbell, 1986: 429-30; see also Cernea, 1989: 30).
The same lack of, or delayed, awareness accounts for the oft-noted difficulty in establishing village woodlots in rural communities whose tradition has been long centred on the priority of (communal) pasturage. In some of these communities woodlots are established in the face of considerable opposition which can occasionally lead to the purposeful destruction of fencing and of young trees, but will most commonly manifest itself in the current damage caused by 'individual stock owners and herdboys seeking grazing for their animals and unimpressed by the need to protect the woodlot' (Bruce, 1986: 166).
This being said, and given the importance of visibility in triggering off awareness of ecological stress, we may expect this awareness to develop more rapidly in those societies in which 'a sense of limits' has already entered people's minds due to previous experiences of scarcity. Thus, other things being equal, awareness of newly arising stress in the commons is more likely to develop in agricultural societies, especially so if intensive or semi-intensive agricultural practices are being used. In the circumstances, indeed, villagers know by experience that to remain productive land must be either allowed to rest some time or replenished with organic manure or chemical fertilizers. Presumably, they should then be able to use this body of experience to understand by analogy the risks of depletion/degradation and the need for conservation in village forests, meadows, or rivers. At least, they are apparently in a better position to reach such an understanding than, say, hunter-gatherers who cannot draw on a store of analogous experiences to help them assess correctly ongoing processes of game or fruit depletion. Thus, for example, Arnold and Campbell note: 'when a small number of highly desirable or visible seedlings are planted in a forest area, the need to restrict grazing until the seedlings are established is apparent to all the villagers in the area. Once planted, the existing natural forest is transformed from an area that did not depend on humans for its reproduction to a "cultivated" area needing protection from livestock, and management becomes meaningful to people who for generations were accustomed to alternative land use pasterns' (Arnold and Campbell, 1986: 447).
In the same connection, like Ostrom (1990), Cernea lays stress on the fact that an important condition for success of group farm forestry schemes is that a clear link is created 'between a well-defined small group and a well-defined tract of forest land that is to be protected or planted', so that the impact of efforts can be measured and a clear correlation between people's contributions and the returns they get can easily emerge (Cernea, 1989: 61). Also, it is perhaps significant that Mende tribesmen in the Gola Forest (Sierra Leone), who are deemed by Davies and Richards to be 'accurately aware of the major changes taking place with the passing of the forest frontier and subsequent population increase' (Davies and Richards, 1991: 63; see also Richards, forthcoming: 152), have been (shifting) rice cultivators for generations, wellaccustomed to the complex ecology of rotational bush-fallowing.
Also, we may safely predict, again for the same reason ease of visibility—that awareness of ecological stress will build up more easily when the impact of overexploitation on the resource stock is more visible and when the connection between use behaviour and the level of this stock is more evident and more predictable. This is why the emergence of such awareness depends on the physical and geographical nature of the resource. It will thus more easily emerge with respect to a localized, visible, and predictable resource than in the case of a resource that stretches over vast and seasonally changing geographic areas, is largely unpredictable, and hardly visible. For example, inland fishermen may more easily understand their role as determinant of ecological change than maritime fishermen who operate in the open sea. Through experience and observation, the former easily come to know, say, that fish spawn in the tributaries that feed into the river's main stem and that they must therefore avoid fishing in these zones to let the resource grow and reach maturity. By converting the spawning areas into sacred places considered to be defended by local water spirits, they may then ensure that nobody is tempted into entering them and transmit their knowledge to future generations.
Marine fishing is a much more complex affair, especially in tropical areas where there are innumerable fish species whose biological habits and movements are still poorly known and whose mutual interactions are infinitely intricate. When fish stocks fluctuate unpredictably and their population dynamics is not well understood, it is obviously difficult, even for scientists, to establish clear and predictable connections between fishermen's harvesting behaviour and the state of the resource. Also, while setting aggregate quotas for a whole fishery, they are liable to make gross mistakes which may have disastrous consequences if estimates of the maximum sustainable yield have been too optimistic (such as recently happened in New Zealand).
Clearly, signs of depletion may be very hard to interpret and causes of depletion may be very difficult to determine. How could we expect fishermen to form a correct idea about their own responsibilities for a decline of fish catches when climatic factors beyond their control might well account for it? In Kerala, for instance, a marked decrease in total fish landings occurred in the mid-1970s and persisted throughout the 1980s. Small-scale fishermen's organizations and activists put the blame for such decline on the rapacious operations of a sizeable fleet of trawlers which entered the sector by the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Their lobbying action even led the government eventually to decide on a seasonal ban on trawling in the early 1990s. Yet, in 1991, due to the abundant presence of pelagic fish species off the coast of Kerala, there has been a sudden and unexpected increase in the aggregate catch which more or less equalled the peak average level attained in 1971-75. Obviously, since the upsurge of fish landings took place so quickly after the ban had been brought into effect, this conservation measure cannot account for the fishery's recovery.
In the same way, and to the complete surprise of the scientific community, the lobster resource has tripled over the last two decades in Eastern Canada's waters despite the fact that exploitation rates on legal-size lobsters is estimated to be as high as 90 per cent (Belliveau, 1994: 3). In the other direction, in the North Atlantic there is a natural phenomenon known as the 'Northern oscillation' which caused a cooling down of the Canadian seas in the early 1980s and led to a significant decline of fish stock levels in coastal fisheries. However, the most wellknown climatic disturbance that occurred during recent decades, the 'El Nino' phenomenon, had the opposite effect of heating up waters through the abnormal invasion of warm waters low in salt content (as a consequence of fluctuations of atmospheric pressure and wind systems). It struck the south-east Pacific during the years 1982-3 and caused a sudden collapse of the anchovetta fishery in Peru (which was then the world's top producer of fish with a yearly total catch of 12 million tons) and severe depression in the Equatorian fishery as well. The previous occurrence of a similar event was probably more than 18 million years ago!
This being said, there is enough solid evidence to show that in many fisheries the disastrous experience of resource depletion during the post-war era has largely been caused by overfishing (see above, Chapter 2). Present trends in developing countries are unfortunately pointing to similar disasters also caused by human overexploitation, as exemplified by the degradation of many inshore fisheries under the impact of rapid technological modernization (including that of artisanal techniques), widespread use of ecologically harmful fishing methods, and high growth rates of the fishing workforce. (This certainly applies to the above-mentioned case of Kerala with respect to prawn resources.)
Hence the emphasis of some economists upon the necessity 'to get fishermen to understand the need for fishery-management measures, and to understand the long term effects on fish stocks of not complying with the management measures in place' (Sutinen, Rieser, and Gauvin, 1990: 366).
Fishery is not the only natural-resource sector in which erroneous analyses of environmental change are possible. Thus, in a recent piece of research, Melissa Leach and James Fairhead have argued that, in part of Guinea, environmental policy has been misinformed by the erroneous idea of an ongoing savannization of tropical forest. According to the authors, this misinformation has resulted from the fact that 'observers have been tempted to see each zone as the anthropogenically degraded derivate of a vegetation type not found further south' (Leach and Fairhead, 1994: 81). By thus analysing the forest-savanna mosaic in the Kissidougou region as the degraded outcome of a prior natural forest formation, botanists did not consider the possibility that 'transition woodland could represent a stable intermediate form, the establishment of forest in savanna, or the complex outcome of local management strategies' (ibid.: 82). Preconceived ideas of vegetation change and a prejudiced view of local users as environment destroyers have led both national and international experts to pay too much attention to apparent processes of degradation readily observable in the short term (for example, the clearing and burning of wooded lands for farming, and the setting on fire by hunters and herders) and too little attention to processes of regeneration and the impact of local practice on them (ibid.: 85). This tendency, Leach and Fairhead note, is actually reinforced by the unhappy fact that 'presenting a degrading or threatened environment has become an imperative to gain access to donors' funds' and that, often, 'the environmental problem is built into the very terms of reference of consultants who have neither the time nor the social position to investigate village naturalresource management and its changes on any other terms' (ibid.: 84, 86).
Note carefully that in the analysis of Leach and Fairhead, misinformation about the causes of environmental change is attributed to experts while peasants are considered to be perfectly informed. This is not necessarily true, as we have already illustrated, and one must always be wary about the romantic bias which consists in systematically placing the burden of responsibility for mistakes on experts and bureaucrats (a bias which also characterizes the peasant view of the outside world). A striking case where local users are typically misinformed about ecological stress and the mechanism of resource overexploitation is that of groundwater resources. As rightly pointed out by Moench, in this case it is hard to know who is using the resource, how much water users are extracting, and what is the relationship between actions and consequences. The problem is again exacerbated by the fact that wells and pumps tend to be located on private lands and individually owned. In this context, 'it is extremely difficult for an understanding of resource dynamics to emerge at a community level. Individuals may understand the behaviour of their own wells but they are rarely able to put this behaviour in the context of other's use patterns at least until major disruptions have already occurred.' As a consequence, 'few communities are aware of the potential for overdevelopment until it occurs and, when it does occur, they tend to resist any management actions which would infringe on established patterns of individual use' (Moench, 1992: A-7-8). Together with inappropriate state policies—pricing of elec tricity at subsidized rates for irrigation pumping; electricity pricing structure conducive to overexploitation (the use of a flat horsepower-based annual fee makes the marginal cost of pumping water nil); subsidized credit programmes for well development by individuals—the above difficulty helps account for the dangerous processes of falling water-tables, saline intrusion, and depletion of economically accessible groundwater reserves in several parts of the Indian subcontinent, most notably in the districts of Mehsana (Gujarat) (Bhatia and Drèze, 1992; Moench, 1992).
Flexible access rules and conservation: the case of type-lV societies
Here is no doubt a problematic case in so far as, in the absence of strict access rules, it may prove difficult to ensure that conservation measures will be followed by resource users: for example, if people can freely enter into a forest (or in the sea) without being checked at any point, it will be a fortiori difficult to control their use behaviour when they are in the forest (at sea). None the less, if resource users adhere to a moral code and if they have properly internalized it each user abides by a set of rules enjoining certain modes of using the resource and he (she) does so because of a personal attitude about the act itself—type-IV combination can actually occur. This is the result of the fact that moral norms may serve as a substitute for monitoring devices inasmuch as they are followed even though violation would be undetected (see above, Chapter 6).
This kind of situation is perhaps not as exceptional as it may appear at first sight. Thus, it is well known that in the open sea—a resource domain the access to which is particularly costly to regulate—fishermen often obey a moral, gentlemen's code of behaviour not only in the case of emergencies (when certain forms of helping behaviour are prescribed) but also with respect to voyage routes, choice of fishing spots, and fishing practices (see, e.g., White, 1977). Such professional codes, which are inculcated through secondary socialization processes and sometimes even during (early) childhood, are typical examples of generalized or abstract morality as we have defined it in Chapter 6. Adherence to generalized moral values has the effect of binding users together even in the absence of any formal organization to monitor and regulate their behaviour.
It is worth stressing that type-IV combination points to a solution to complex problems of environmental management in the context of non-excludable resources or resource domains. Think, for example, of the risks represented by the dumping of toxic products or the release of obnoxious effluents into the sea (on these environmental risks, see Ruddle, 1982), or the use of environmentally destructive methods such as dynamite to catch fish. Here are clearly harmful acts which are extremely difficult to monitor effectively. If people could be convinced to behave out of a moral sense while they use resources or while they are in a position to affect a resource stock by producing externalities, resources would be better preserved despite the lack of external control. It is thus evident that type-IV situations are unlikely to arise at the level of well-localized village commons where, as we have seen, access rights are usually defined by local communities (see type-I, -II, and -III situations). This explains why we could not find any convincing examples of this kind of situation in the socio-anthropological literature dealing with village CPRs.