Common property, forest management

and the Indian Himalaya

Arun Agrawal

This article examines contributions to the literature on common property regimes that
govern natural resources. The article also seeks to analyse the relevance of this literature
for resource management in the Indian Himalaya. Writings on common property have
been instrumental in developing a theoretical justification for decentralisation of envir-
onmental policies around the world. Nonetheless, they have been relatively inattentive
to issues of power and the larger socio-political context within which most common prop-

erty regimes are embedded. Research in the Himalayan mountains not only stands to
benefit from using theoretical approaches based on studies of common property, but
can also enrich the study of common property because of the long history of commons

management in the region.

In the last twenty years, the literature on common property has grown
swiftly, finding stimulus in increasing concerns regarding resource
degradation and depletion, and drawing upon developments in game
theory, ethnographic writings and critical social analyses. Insights
from work on the commons are especially relevant on the Indian context,
both because a large proportion of India’s poor depend in such resources
(Jodha 1986. 1992) and also because a number of South Asianist schol-
ars have made important contributions to this stream of work (Agarwal

1994; CSE 1982, 1985; Gadgil and Guha 1992; Gadgil and Malhotra
1982; Guha 1989; Gupta 1985; Ostrom 1990; Sundar 1997; Wade 1994).
This article, in reviewing some of the major themes in the writings on the
commons, seeks to assess critically some of the achievements of these
writings, especially as they are relevant to the use and management of
forest resources in the Indian Himalaya. The continued outpouring of

Arun Agrawal is at the Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT
06511, USA.
182

research from within the common property paradigm and the vitality of
research on mountain ecologies ensures that a review of the literature on
these themes can only attempt to strike a moving target. Yet, the very
enormity of the work indicates the need for some stocktaking.
The subject of common property has provoked research for a long
time, and scholarship from such fields as economic history, human ecol-
ogy, cultural ecology, resource economics and rural sociology has pro-
vided investigations that have had very similar concerns as do the
writings that constitute the field of common property today. The trick-
ling literature on common property turned into a flood, beginning from
the mid-1980s, especially after the publication in 1986 of the Proceedings
of the Conference on Common Property Resources, organised under
the auspices of the National Research Council in 1985 (NRC 1986).
Many of the scholars whose work was represented in this collection
were instrumental in the formation of the International Association

for the Study of Common Property in 1989, and in altering some of the
earlier perceptions about the commons. Punctuated by important recent
works, several of them edited collections (Berkes 1989; Bromley 1992a;
McCay and Acheson 1987; NRC 1986; Netting 1981; Ostrom 1990;
Peters 1994; Pinkerton 1989; Stevenson 1991; Wade 1994), the literature
on common property can lay claim to a quite significant achievement:

spreading the awareness that local communities can manage resources

effectively, sometimes more effectively than governments or private
owners. Drawing upon theoretical insights from writings on property

rights and collective action, often using game-theoretical models and

statistical techniques to generate insights about resource use in develop-
ing countries, scholars of common property have successfully provoked
interest in alternative regimes of resource use among scholars and
policy-makers alike. Together with writings about indigenous knowledge
and peoples, the common property literature has helped erode the per-
ception that rural communities are traditional and inefficient users of
resources (Brokensha et al. 1980; Gupta 1992; Warren et al. 1991). In
no small measure, the work of common property scholars has led to
new policy initiatives in more than fifty countries whose governments
claim today to be advancing towards greater involvement of commu-
nities in their resource management programmes (FAO 1999). To men-
tion these achievements of the common property literature is not to
gloss over some of its weaknesses. Indeed, only by understanding such
omissions and occlusions might it be possible to suggest directions for
further research.
 183

The next section discusses some of the significant elements in the

intellectual and methodological pedigree of the literature on the com-
mons. A greater concern with dwindling renewable resources, and a
shared disbelief that local communities are the primary culprits in
declining resource bases, motivate much research on the commons.
The second section examines the major conclusions and achievements
of this literature. The third section shifts the focus, paying critical
attention to some weaknesses. These weaknesses, I suggest, result
from a rather exclusive focus on the community and, as such, can
be explained by the particular objectives of the researchers of the
commons. Resource use and management in the Indian Himalaya,

especially in relation to forests, is the subject of the fourth section.

This section also discusses how the terrain of forest management in
the Indian Himalaya presents a splendid opportunity to carry out
research that can help address some of the weaknesses in the literature
on the commons.

I
Intellectual and methodological precursors
Current writings on the commons are a collaborative enterprise in which
cultural anthropologists, students of comparative politics, resource econo-
mists, economic historians and social historians have played a highly
significant role. The origins of contemporary writings on the commons
can be traced to three motivations. The first of these has occurred in

response to a raft of scholarship that saw common ownership as the source

of inefficiencies and common property as the hallmark of tradition.
Perhaps the best-known work that portrayed the commons as inefficient
is Garrett Hardin’s (1968) flawed analysis of the ’tragedy of the com-
mons’ that found wide popular acceptance, and now has been thoroughly
repudiated by serious social science scholars.
The substantive motivation of the literature on the commons, no
doubt, can be seen as the reaction to the widely held belief that commu-
nal ownership of resources is traditional and inefficient. But to counter
successfully the belief in the inefficiency of common property, it is
necessary: (a) to identify conditions under which collective action to
build commons institutions and use resources can take place in relatively
small groups of people; and (b) to explore and delineate the importance
of different forms of property rights, more generally institutions, on
multiple types of renewable resources (forests, fisheries, irrigation and
 184

drinking water, and pastures). These two objectives are precisely the task
that scholars of common property have set themselves.
To move successfully towards answering the host of questions that
these two goals raise, scholars of commons have usually pursued case
studies and compiled ethnographic descriptions of an immense number
of communities from around the world. In orienting their studies they
have used two somewhat different methodological and theoretical per-
spectives. One of these uses assumptions and techniques of analysis
from what may broadly be called the rational choice approach, chief
among them being new institutionalism, property rights and transaction
costs frameworks. The other approach possesses a more descriptive
orientation, relies far more on ethnographic field methods, and ascribes
I
to historical and socio-cultural factors greater explanatory power.’
The first trickle of writings from the rational choice perspective on the
commons had already begun to appear in the 1950s. Alchian’s (1950)

analysis of the emergence of organisational forms used evolutionary

theory to suggest that more efficient organisations will, over time, displace
those that are less efficient. This insight was picked up in much later work
belonging to new institutional economics, helping to confirm the belief
that common property, being traditional, is less efficient. Gordon’s
(1954) work on open access resources showed how their economic rents
could be dissipated by individuals competing with each other. He
analysed fisheries but used a general model that could be extended to
other resource types. His use of the phrase ’common-property’ to denote
an open access regime, however, was used later by Demsetz (1967), and

also influenced Hardin’s mistaken analysis of pastures (1968).

Beginning from the early 1980s, the orientation of many scholars
working on the commons began to change. Dahlman (1980) and
,

McCloskey (1990) wrote on the open field system to show the efficiency
of open fields for pasture and scattering for agricultural production.’
These systems of cultivation disappeared in England with industrialisa-
tion, but the reasons for their disappearance are a complex combination
of factors, including political strategies used by sheep-owners to pro-
mote enclosures. Similarly, the distinction between common property
and open access resources is now well recognised. Recent work on the

1
Many studies of the commons have consciously utilised elements from both these
approaches (Agrawal 1999; Ostrom 1990; Ostrom et al. 1994).
2See Agrawal (1996) for a comparative static analysis of the relative efficacy of com-
munity, private and state institutions in helping to manage forest resources in the Indian
Himalayas.
 185

commons has often relied extensively on game theory and rational choice
analyses, and has focused on the relationship between individual prefer-
ences, incentive structures and the aggregation of individual preferences
into social outcomes. Much of this work has demonstrated the complex
relationship between tenure and resource use, in the process showing the
hastiness inherent in positing a straightforward relationship between out-
come characteristics such as efficiency, equity or sustainability; resources
of different types; and property forms such as private, public or common.33
However, a number of concrete achievements have also resulted from

highly abstract analyses that rely on quite restrictive assumptions about

individuals, states of the world, and incentive structures (see Section II).
Writings sharing a more socio-cultural and descriptive orientation have
been available from anthropologists and historians since even before the
1950s. Earlier works often appeared as ethnographies that described entire
peoples and their livelihoods, including the extent to which cooperative
strategies formed part of the repertoire of survival (Berreman 1972 [1963];
Mead 1961 [ 1937]; Netting 1981; Turnbull 1961). More recent writings
(Buck 1989; Little 1985; McCay and Acheson 1987; McKean 1992;
W. Mitchell 1976) have provided detailed accounts of how rural residents
around the world use commonly shared renewable resources. These writ-
ings had earlier been criticised for not taking sufficient account of history
in detailing the lives of their subjects, but we now possess a significant
body of work that recognises and shows the dynamic and changing nature
of customary tenurial systems, the changes such systems undergo even
without external contact, and their relationship with higher levels of
authority within the macro-political systems in which they are located.’

II
,
,
Findings and accomplishments
of the commons literature
The literature on common property has had a strong theoretical core and
practical orientation. Whereas many earlier writings on the environment
3
For work that demonstrates the complexity of tenure among land based
empirical
resources, Fortmann and Riddell (1985) and Singh (1986).
see
4
See, for example, Baviskar ( 1995), Lansing (1991), Leach (1994), Ortner (1989),
Peluso (1992), Rigby (1985) and Tsing (1993). Although many of these scholars may not
self-identify as writing about common property, their work provides ample evidence on
how different groups use resources that are not owned by a single entity, and the changes
that use and management patterns register over time.
186

and its management, after lamenting the loss of natural resources and
environmental degradation, pointed to the state or the market as the
natural alternatives depending on the ideological persuasion of the ana-
lyst (de Alessi 1980; G. Hardin 1978; Heilbroner 1974; Ophuls 1973),
commons theorists have identified a third alternative that is rooted in the

practices of millions of households around the world, but resonates with

the theoretical puzzles that also concern scholars of social movements
and revolutions, voting and other forms of political participation, collu-
sion and cheating, formation of institutions and their maintenance, cooper-
ation and conflict. Participants in all these situations attempt to solve
problems related to collective action. By investigating the conditions
under which users of renewable resources cooperate towards efficient
management (or fail to do so), the literature on common property has
created the grounds on which its findings can resonate with broader
concerns in the social sciences.

By locating themselves in the literatures on property rights and col-

lective action, and by using abstract game-theoretic models to represent
strategic choice, commons theorists have ensured that their contributions
resonate with those of scholars who are also interested in using similar
models of choice. Thus, the work on common property has been well
received by scholars of international relations and institution formation,
in part because of their willingness to use such games as the Prisoners’
Dilemma, Chicken, Assurance and Coordination.’ The literature on the
commons has also contributed significantly to discussions of property

by emphasising property as a relation among persons with respect to

things, rather than being a thing itself, by recognising multiple forms of
property because of differences in tenurial systems, and by showing
that property is not a single indivisible thing, but a collection of enforce-
able claims. Common property theorists have also demonstrated that no
single form of property can be efficient across historical and social
contexts.’ Although many of these assertions are fast becoming part of
conventional wisdom within academic writing, their acceptance is in
large measure a consequence of the vast empirical work conducted by
scholars of the commons.

5
Ostrom’s work on micro-level common property resource management has resonated
closely with the work of theorists of international relations such as Robert Keohane,
Duncan Snidal and Oran Young. See the papers by these authors in the special issue of the
Journal of theoretical politics, October 1994.
6
See Bromley (1992b), Feeny (1992), McKean (1996), Naughton-Treves and
Sanderson (1995) and Ostrom (1992b).
 187

Commons theorists, in investigating the impact of different institutional

structures on resource management, have made a critical contribution in
showing the importance of formal and informal institutions as an influ-
ence on human behaviour. They have drawn and built upon the works of
other property rights theorists and institutionalists such as Barzel (1989),
Bates (1989), Knight (1992), Libecap (1990), North (1990), but have
produced additional evidence to show that institutions exert an enor-
mous influence over human actions. Because they have conceptualised
institutions deliberately in an abstract manner, as sets of enforceable
rules that facilitate and constrain human action, their conclusions about
property rights, a subset of institutions, possess significant generalis-
ability. Property rights institutions, conceptualised as sets of rules that
define access, use, exclusion, management, monitoring, sanctioning and
the arbitration behaviour of users with respect to specific resources
(Schlager and Ostrom 1992), are not only highly significant in govern-
ing patterns of use, but are also the principal policy mechanism to reori-
ent human actions in regard to these same resources (Alchian and
Demsetz 1973; de Alessi 1980; Furubotn and Pejovich 1974).
Many scholars of the commons have also emphasised the political
nature of institutions. Institutions come into being as consequences of
human actions, and allow specific individuals and groups to reap advan-
tages from altered social circumstances rather than allowing societies as
a whole to capture efficiency gains. In this connection, the work of

Knight (1992) and Bates (1981, 1989) is especially important in high-

lighting the influence of politics. Earlier property rights theorists had
suggested, using a functionalist evolutionary logic, that over time ineffi-
cient institutions are eliminated and efficient institutions survive
(Alchian 1950; Barzel 1989; Demsetz 1967; Friedman 1953; North and
Thomas 1973). Now, scholars recognise the fact that institutions are not
only instrumental in facilitating production but are also critical alloca-
tive and political entities. Because institutions change as a result of
attempts by specific social actors, institutional change is likely to occur
only when actors perceive gains from change, and the emergence of new
institutions is a highly political affair (Gibson 1999). Whether new insti-
tutions that emerge will also be efficient for a society depends on the
extent to which the interests of groups attempting institutional change
match those of the larger collectivity.
Rational choice approaches to the study of the commons, by their clear
focus on decision-making and institutions, at least have the potential
to enrich ethnographic studies of commons use. The most interesting
188

possibilities of mutual enrichment exist in theof power, and in

analysis
the study of how political asymmetries social groups affect
across
their interactions and resource management related outcomes. Ethno-
graphically thick approaches are critical to a better understanding of how
power informs and shapes relations among people and collectivities.
They are necessary, if not always sufficient, to produce insights about the
hidden agendas of different actors and the motivations that might impel
action. Rational choice approaches, on the other hand, promise the tech-
nical means through which to analyse these relationships more generally.
In terms of empirical research, by producing impressive docu-
mentation from around the world on the capacity of communities to
manage resources, commons scholars have contributed to a groundswell
of altered policy orientation towards local communities. Studies of suc-
cessful community management of coastal fisheries, forests, pastures,
irrigation and ground water,’ in conjunction with other writings on
people’s participation and indigenous knowledge, have encouraged many
governments around the world to attempt resource co-management pro-
grammes which would legally assign local communities some share in
control over and benefits from resources such as wildlife, forests, pas-
tures, irrigation and rural infrastructures (Agrawal and Gibson 2001;
Agrawal and Ribot 1999; FAO 1999). Clearly, in many of these cases
local communities possess only very limited authority, and gain only
small amounts. But the altered policy environment constitutes a sub-
stantial change over the situation two decades ago when resource degrad-
ation was often viewed as a direct consequence of the destructive and
erosive activities of local communities and small peasants (G. Hardin
1968). Increasing the stakes of communities in the management of
common pool resources is seen by governments today as an effective

policy instrument to manage resources.

Commons scholars have also attempted to intervene in the charged
debate on overpopulation and resource degradation by arguing that insti-
tutions always mediate the effects of macro-structural and demographic
7
The empirical and case literature on commons is far too large to receive even a repre-
sentative mention in this article. Some of the best sources for this literature are the volumes
of collected papers edited by Berkes (1989), Bromley (1992a), McCay and Acheson (1987),
NRC (1986), Pinkerton (1989) and Western and Wright (1994). The journal Human ecology
has been an effective vehicle for research on common property over the last decade-and-a-
half. For relatively recent works on irrigation see Ostrom (1992a) and Tang (1992); for fish-
eries, see Schlager (1990); for ground water, see Blomquist (1992); for rural infrastructure,
see Ostrom et al. (1993); for forestry, see Ascher (1995) and Brower (1987); and for pastures,
see Agrawal (1999), Galaty and Bonte (1991), Galaty and Johnson (1990) and Peters (1994).
 189

factors on resource use patterns. As such, the manner and extent of the
influence of large demographic and economic changes will always be
mediated through local-level institutions. Without attention to the precise
ways in which local institutions modulate larger changes, one cannot hope
to arrive at useful inferences about the impact of population, market and
other economic forces on resource conditions (Agrawal andYadama 1997).
These modifications in perceptions about the role of institutions have
been founded upon solid theoretical and empirical research. This research
recognises the role of incentives and interests in shaping human behav-
iour. As it treats individuals as decision-makers, it recognises Marx’s
admonition that their decisions take place in conditions that are not of
their own choosing, but that humans possess the capacity to sometimes
alter their circumstances. Thus a number of writings have undertaken
important theoretical development to focus on the commons dilemmas
that confront communities of users (Cheung 1970; Ciriacy-Wantrup and
Bishop 1975; Dasgupta and Heal 1979; R. Hardin 1982; Oakerson 1992;
Ostrom 1986, 1990; Runge 1981, 1984). These writings have helped
clarify the nature of resources that are used jointly, how technological or
institutional aspects of use can influence resource characteristics, and
how the structure of the situations in which resources are utilised affects
use and management decisions and use patterns.

Indeed, it is the institutional nature of the analysis conducted by com-

mon property theorists that makes their work so valuable in recent dis-
cussions of the decentralisation of environmental management. Around
the world, more than fifty countries have now begun to involve local
communities and lower-level decision-making units in protecting and
managing the environment (FAO 1999). These new policy trends are
based on the recognition that the fiscal capacity of the state to undertake
coercive conservation is limited and that communities can often manage
their resources better than private actors negotiating through market
based exchanges. In many cases, communities are seen also to be
characterised by high levels of social capital that permits them to under-
take collective tasks far more efficiently in comparison to state bureau-
cracies, and to do so far more equitably than market based solutions.
Indeed, recent work on common property has begun to draw upon the
vast literature on social capital (Putnam 1993). Several scholars have
begun to examine the extent to which common property institutions are
based upon stocks of social capital and whether and how they enhance
the networks through which social capital is generated (Katz 2000;
Muldavin 2000; Pretty and Ward 2001; Robbins 2000).
190

III
Weaknesses of the commons literature
Despite their significant achievements, writings on commons suffer
from several shortcomings. Some problems can be addressed within the
current framework of research, perhaps with minor adjustments in the
strategies of research, greater attention to theoretical rigour and/or an
expansion of the scope of analysis. Others are less likely to get resolved
so easily. In attempting to understand some of the weaknesses of the
literature on the commons, one can explore two types of criticisms, each
stemming from very different theoretical positions and epistemological
concerns. The first accepts the basic assumptions and questions that
commons theorists use to proceed with their analyses: How can one best
understand different types of institutional arrangements? What are the
physical and social characteristics of resources that influence their use
and management? And, is it possible to discern systematic regularities
in resource use and property regimes that make some forms of property
superior to others in governing resource use within given spatio-temporal
configurations? These questions, in turn, take certain assumptions about
individuals and their social context for granted. Some of these assump-
tions can be stated concisely: ’Individuals know their interests and these
interests define their goals;’ ’individuals calculate costs and benefits to
choose between alternatives and decide on strategies best suited to
achieve chosen alternatives;’ and ’efficiency, equity, and sustainability
are worthwhile individual and social goals.’ Criticisms flowing from the
second approach accept neither these assumptions as the most appropri-
ate, nor, consequently, the questions as the most relevant ones.
If one accepts the basic epistemological and ontological presumptions
of the commons literature, four main lines of critique can be identified. The
most telling of these are, paradoxically, based on precisely those aspects of
the commons discourse that account for its achievements in the advocacy
of communal management: the focus on the community, and the use of
rigorous methodological tools. Their focus on communities, and the con-
sideration of the larger context only to the extent that outside forces may
undermine a community’s ability to manage resources, has often prevented
commons scholars from investigating the complex relationships of com-
munities to macro-political and social phenomena such as the state and
social movements, and politics and differentiation within communities.
In much of the literature on common property, outside forces appear pri-
marily as agents of change. Usually the change they prompt is deleterious.
 191

Whether outside forces are in the form of markets or state interventions,

they tend to be viewed as disruptive. In the work of commons scholars,
they often unsettle the balance communities can precariously achieve to
manage their resources. This view of the commons regimes has two unfor-
tunate consequences. One, it fails to acknowledge the possibility that in
many instances the balance that communities might achieve in using their
resources might be a product of interactions with the state; a result of

enabling policies pursued by the state in earlier periods. Even market

exchanges might play an important and constructive role in the constitution
and creation of viable resource use patterns.’ If communities are ultimately
located within the networks of power and exchange relations constituted at
least in part by the policies pursued by a state and the economic forces gen-
erated by marketplaces, then state and markets are likely to be quite signifi-
cant influences even in what appears on the surface to be community and
community-based resource management. The analytical lesson is apparent.
The role of markets and states, even when they seem absent, needs greater
attention in analyses of successful communal resource management, rather
than being a factor only when local communities are unable to manage
their resources. A related point is the need for commons scholars to focus
more critically on the relations of communities with markets and states
rather than seeing these social phenomena as independent, or somehow in
a contradictory relation with each other (but see Peluso 1992).

While markets and states form part of the descriptive and analytical
terrain in the work of commons theorists, other social phenomena such
as social movements, protests, agrarian unrest and local resistance seldom

articulate with community in their account of resource management. Yet,

in many areas of the world where studies of commons are undertaken,
the presence of these social phenomena is pervasive. Even the theoretic-
al tools that commons theorists have used to analyse community action
and management-game theory, collective action theory and institu-
tional analysis-are conducive to the study of these larger protest move-
ments. The studies of commons and social movements, however, seem
to proceed according to independent logics where neither the objects of

8
Markets are often credited with enlarging the possibilities for sale of products
harvested from commonly managed resources. One can at least imagine, however, that they
may also facilitate constraints upon harvesting common resources: availability of kerosene
can reduce the need for locally produced fuelwood or charcoal; markets in foodgrains might

reduce the pressure on agricultural land and consequently reduce the demand for manure and
leaf litter from forests; availability of cheap meat from domesticated animals can lead to a
decline in the capture and killing of wild animals.
 192

analysis nor the phenomena being investigated seem related to each

other in meaningful manner.
a

Seeing change as primarily a consequence of external forces implies

a second unfortunate narrowing of focus. It leads scholars of commons
to appreciate only to a limited extent the independently dynamic nature
of the communities that they study.’ What Dirks et al. remark about cul-
tural systems might, with some modification and a great deal of truth,
apply to the way commons scholars have depicted the communities they
study: ’The virtual absence of historical investigation in anthropology,
until recently, has meant that cultural systems have, indeed, appeared
timeless, at least until ruptured by &dquo;culture contact&dquo;’ (1994: 3). As the
work of a number of theorists suggests, communities and their patterns
of interactions can be quite stable, but in many cases the apparent sta-
bility is an artifact of what Hobsbawm and Ranger have called ’the
invention of tradition’ (1983).
Perhaps it is because commons scholars focus primarily on the
effectiveness of communities in managing resources that issues of dis-
sent and differentiation within the community receive rather limited
attention. Certainly, the analytical structure of investigation and the
theoretical foundations of the commons literature do not preclude
- attention to internal differences within the community.&dquo; Further,
issues of heterogeneity among users are often the subject of theoretic-
al investigation among scholars of commons. Yet, an unintended con-
sequence of focusing on the achievements of communities in
managing resources successfully has been to highlight commonly
managed resources as having an equitable nature. Thus, Jodha’s influ-
ential studies of the commons in the South Asian context depict
common property as channelling proportionately greater benefits to

poor residents of the village (1986, 1992). Somanathan’s study of the

forest councils in the Kumaon shows them as being highly effective in

9
In thinking about how local communities can alter the rules of the games that
guide their interactions, however, Ostrom’s work has attempted, even within a game-
theoretic paradigm, to address the issue of change initiated within a community (1990:
15-18).
10
In Oakerson’s (1992) framework, which is perhaps the most widely used single tool
to frame case studies on the commons (having been used both in the edited volume by
NRC [1986] as well as Bromley’s [1992a] volume), inequalities are associated far more
closely with outcomes than with decision-making arrangements or patterns of interactions.
The model, clearly, does not preclude a consideration of inequalities, but neither does it
pay special attention to them.
 193

benefiting village communities as a whole (1990). is It must, however, be

admitted that recent scholarship has begun to take internal differenti-
ation within communities seriously and has presented interesting analy-
ses of the differing interests and actions of social groups within what is
often seen as a community (Gibson and Stuart 1995; Moore 1998b;
Neumann 1995; Peluso 1995; Rangan 1995; Rocheleau and Ross 1995).
Despite some attention to political struggles and issues of equity
within the community, one oversight is the failure of commons scholars
to pay adequate attention to the influence of gender on resource use
and management. Since livelihood tasks are differentiated by gender
in many subsistence oriented societies, it is reasonable to ask how gender
roles in these societies influence the utilisation of and control over com-
mon resources. For the most part, however, the mainstream of commons
scholars has paid only scant attention to gender in their analyses. An
immense literature on gender in development and resource management
is simply crying out for attention from students of the commons.&dquo;
Recognition of the multiple ways in which communities managing
resources are linked with and depend upon market forces, other social

actors/phenomena, and political actors comprising the state would

tend to blur the boundaries between communities and other social
aggregations. This might, in part, explain why commons scholars have
tended not to investigate the relations of communities with external
groups. But it has also meant that the literature on the commons has
continued to remain fascinated with a small number of different forms
of property rights institutions-most commonly, private, communal
and public, but at times including open access, corporations and co-
operatives as other possible forms of property.&dquo; In seeing forms of
property as being comprised by a small number of categories, scholars
11
Presentation of community resource management as being equitable by commons
scholars has, perhaps, inadvertently been aided by the studies belonging to a moral eco-
nomy perspective where communities, owing to norms of generalised reciprocity, try to
ensure that all members get at least a minimum level of subsistence. For a discussion of
the ’moral economy’ see Scott (1976) and Thompson (1971). See also Polanyi’s discus-
sion of premarket and market economies (1957).
12
Among the more careful analyses of gender and property relations in the context of
the broad conceptual formation of environment/development are works by scholars such
as Agarwal (1997, 1998), Jewett (2000) and Locke (1999).
13
Thus, even as he argues for a more nuanced understanding of property regimes,
Bromley tends to suggest that the relevant comparison is among private, state and common
property (1992b: 4).
194

of common property tend to inadvertently restrict the potential of their

own institutional analysis. 14

In addition, a methodological criticism can also be advanced. 15

Scholars of commons generally focus on single communities when con-
ducting empirical work. But their conclusions with respect to these com-
munities become harder to generalise without comparative work across
resource types, historical periods and spatial locations, or without taking
the effects of these variations into account. There are very few studies
of the commons that have attempted systematically to draw conclusions
on the basis of variations across cases. One of the reasons Elinor
Ostrom’s Governing the commons has found an appreciative readership
is precisely that it uses cases differing on a number of dimensions to
make inferences about when community management of resources
might be successful.’6
These criticisms, it can persuasively be argued, do not apply to all
writings within the commons literature. Several of the questions raised
here have been voiced by theorists of the commons themselves. Further,
because there are disciplinary, theoretical and methodological differ-
ences among those working on the commons, the above criticisms

14
The focus on state, market and community can also potentially lead to a blurring of
the analytical distinction between actors and rules, especially, but sometimes also between
resource characteristics. A number of theorists of the commons have emphasised the need

to consider actors, rules and resource characteristics as separate analytic categories, but
the very term ’common property resources’, as commons scholars recognise, refers simul-
taneously to a regime of rules, and a type of resource. Since the term ’common manage-
ment’ is really a metaphorical synonym for an immense range of pattèrns of use and
control, and types of outcomes, it might make sense to use the term more in its metaphor-
ical rather than in an analytical sense. The same can be argued in the cases of private and
state (public) management of resources (Ostrom, personal communication).
15
A second possible criticism thatI do not discuss is as old as the hoary debate between
formalists and substantivists. Attempts by commons scholars to use formal methods of
analysis can be criticised on the grounds that such strategies are highly reductionist and do
not take into account contextual variables that might be relevant in influencing resource man-
agement outcomes, or in and of themselves. While the criticism might well apply to specific
pieces of research, it does not apply to the literature on the commons as a whole, since many
of its practitioners are anthropologists and other scholars who are specifically concerned to
present a wealth of materials on the context in which communities use their resources.
16
Wade’s study of common management of pasture and irrigation in south Indian
villages forms another instance of comparative case work but within a single area (1994
[1988]). A more recent extensive comparative work is Baland and Platteau (1996). For the
most part, commons scholars have used edited volumes containing essays on multiple
cases and resource types. The strategy, however, is not as successful in permitting careful

comparative analysis.
 195

should be treated more as statements of general tendencies rather than as

literally applicable to all work on the commons.
The second set of criticisms, however, applies more widely to much
of the research on the commons. Recent developments in social theory,
especially in the shape of contributions from Foucault and other post-
structuralists, have provided the grounds for some trenchant critiques of
the scholarship on common property. Influenced by themes in the works
of recent scholarship on resistance and subalternity,&dquo; new criticisms
question the notion of an autonomous subject, problematise the con-
struction of development, progress and modernisation as inevitable or
desirable, focus on how subgroups within local communities resist and
subvert the goals of development practitioners, and assert the need to
examine the interstitial and pervasive influences of power in the discur-
sive strategies that stand for development and conservation. Thus,
Goldman (1997) directly questions the politics of scholars working on
common property regimes. Such questioning can be found as well in
works that treat development as discursive practice (Escobar 1995;
Ferguson 1994 [1990]), focus on how concepts such as the state are the
product of discursive practices (T. Mitchell 1991a [1988], 1991b), or
look at the literature on conservation as being unavoidably implicated in
relations of power (Vandergeest 1996).
Perhaps the most striking note of critique has been struck through the
observation that commons theorists, especially those who use rational
choice assumptions, have paid relatively little attention to issues of power
and resistance in their research, and have, thereby, failed to examine the
effects of some of their basic assumptions regarding the desirability of
development, conservation and efficiency. By not examining the internally
differentiated nature of the communities they study, commons scholars, it
may be suggested, have assumed that all members of these communities
17
See the exchange of views among Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell
and Nancy Fraser (1995); the volume edited by Butler and Scott (1992); and Fraser (1989)
for provocative insights from feminist theorists on the notion of the subject; and Fish
(1989), Gates (1986) and Said (1979) for some of the themes upon which current decon-
structions of the commons and development discourse are based. An introduction to
Subaltern Studies is perhaps best pursued through the volume edited by Guha and Spivak
(1988). See also the recent discussion in American historical review (Cooper 1994; Mallon
1994; Prakash 1994), and Sivaramakrishnan (1995). For a critical introduction to Foucault,
see especially the essays on governmentality and discourse in Burchell et al. (1991), the
review of Foucault’s work edited by Hoy (1986), and the assessment of Foucault by
Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983), especially Foucault’s essay in the volume on the subject
and power. An accessible introduction to Foucault’s thought is also available in his inter-
views (C. Gordon 1980).
196

are similarly receptive to ideas of development and efficient resource

management, progress and modernisation. But the processes of develop-
ment and modernisation and attempts to make the use and management of
commons more efficient can end up benefiting primarily those who are
already privileged, and increasing state capacities to control and intervene
in local affairs. By focusing on how common resources can be more effi-
ciently managed, scholars of commons become enmeshed in the same
logic of greater productivity that advocates of privatisation talk about
(Goldman 1997). This critique of the commons borrows extensively from
Foucault’s arguments about biopower and biopolitics, effectively
deployed by such authors as T. Mitchell ( 1991 a [ 1988]) to critique colon-
isation and modernisation in Egypt, by Escobar (1995) to problematise
development, and by Ferguson (1994 [1990]) to question development
projects initiated by agencies like the World Bank.
Foucault’s arguments about biopower point to technologies that
developed in Europe in the 18th century to permit increasing control
over the economic processes whereby populations of human beings
could be adjusted to available resources (1990 [1978]: 138ff). Viewing
biopower as the ensemble of regulatory disciplines and techniques for
’subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’ (ibid.: 140),
Foucault suggests that the emergence of demography and the evaluation
of the relationship between resources and inhabitants was critical to the
ability to control populations. The state, according to Foucault, might
have been important in ensuring the maintenance of production rela-
tions, but techniques of biopower operate at every level of the social
body and have ’brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of
explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transform-
ation of human life’ (ibid.: 143).
Foucault’s arguments are based on social and political developments in
18th and 19th century Europe, but recent writers on development and con-
servation have sought to extend the import of his argument by pointing to
how development and efficient management of resources are also reliant
on the same technologies of biopower that Foucault highlighted: demo-

graphic statistics, resource use patterns, evaluation of relations between

resources and populations (carrying capacity), and so forth. Commons

scholars, because they are substantially invested in the same broad enter-
prise of investigating how resources can be more efficiently managed, can
be viewed as being subject to the critique that Foucault advances.
The observation that commons scholars are unreflexive about how
their research valorises the objectives of modernisation, efficiency and
 197

progress (Goldman 1997) can become compelling only when it marshals

greater evidence in support of this proposition. While Escobar and
Ferguson have shown how development experts and officials often
ignore ’failures’ and the impact of such failures on increased capacities
of governments, the same critique cannot easily be levelled against
commons scholars whose very research focus is aimed at valorising
communities at the expense of governments and market institutions
alike. To the extent that strengthening communities works against the
centralisation of state power, the privatisation of resources and the
increasing influence of markets, the literature on the commons actively
undermines discourses on modernisation and teleological assumptions
regarding progress.
Commons scholars, however, do need to attend better to how power,
domination and resistance unfold within communities. Appreciating
that there are groups and actors endowed with asymmetrical access to
power and resources within a community is to take note of the enor-
mous literature that in recent years has focused in resistance, domin-
ation and the subaltern. These writings, sparked by the ’Subaltern
School’ of historians and the works of James Scott (1985) and Michael
Adas (1981) in Southeast Asia, began to gain scholarly attention at
about the same time as the work on common property (Colburn 1989).
Despite the shared focus of both groups of scholars on those who are
marginal and the obvious relevance of the work on resistance to the
enterprise of commons scholars, the different theoretical preoccupa-
tions have prevented much exchange of ideas.
A greater focus on power within communities can help strengthen
considerably the force of writings on commons property. On the one
hand, such a shift in focus would facilitate a better understanding of
how power and status are related to access and use of resources; on the
other, it would complement the exclusive focus of common property
theorists on institutions and rules with a greater attention to power and
process. Ultimately, we must realise that power is not just what plan-
ning and management attempt to exclude, but that power and polit-
ics imbue the process of management thoroughly and unavoidably.
Management is not just about providing technical solutions to object-
ive problems of development and environmental conservation. Rather,
these problems are themselves politically generated, and without
attention to the politics that inheres in them it would be impossible to
produce ways of addressing poverty, underdevelopment and environ-
mental degradation.
198

If existing institutions are the expression of past political alignments,

attention to current political relationships within communities can help
us gain a better understanding of how existing institutions are being

contested, and what the shape of future institutions might be. Institutional
arrangements for allocating resources are best viewed as an expression
of what the idealised status quo would be like. Actual human behaviour,
even in the context of well-enforced institutional rules, is unlikely to
conform precisely to institutional contours. Perfect enforcement is far
too costly ever to be achieved. When resources devoted to enforcement
of institutions are limited, resource use patterns are far more likely to
diverge from what the rules specify. Attention to power and micro-
politics within communities is therefore critical to understanding how
resources are used and managed (Agrawal 1994a, 1999; Gibson 1999;
Moore 1998a, 1998b, 1999).
But it is not just the need to explicate better the relationship between
property and politics that would be served by greater attention to
processes of domination and resistance. The question possesses signifi-
cant inherent theoretical and practical merit, as subaltern scholars and
writers on everyday protest have argued. Attention to strategies followed
by subaltern actors in relation to resource use is critical in beginning to
understand how attempts at control and regulation are always challenged
by those who are subjected to control. Issues of agency, the mutually
productive relationship between domination and resistance, and the cre-
ation of hegemonic institutional arrangements can be understood only
with greater attention to micro-politics. Such a shift in focus can also
help address the criticism that scholars of common property have, hith-
erto, ignored how rural residents can shape attempts by outside agents
such as the state or aid agencies to intervene in their lives and modify
existing patterns of resource use.
In this context, the micro-foundational focus of common property
scholars on human agents can find productive complementarity with
those who insist on the transformative capacities of subordinated groups.
If intentions and independent actions are critical in reformulating and
renegotiating the terrain of resource management imposed by the state
(or as it obtains historically), the attempt by commons scholars to under-
stand the strategies whereby village residents craft new institutions to
manage local resources may prove to be instrumental in creating new
insights about the attempts by these same villagers to reorient develop-
ment and state interventions.
 199

IV
Potential contributions from the context of forest .

management in the Indian Himalayas

As scholars have realised that, despite their majesty and grandeur, the
Himalayan mountains may be ecologically fragile owing to geological,
biophysical as well as human causes, the focus of writings on the
Himalaya has shifted to examining how environmental changes in the
region can potentially destabilise existing human-resource relation-
ships, and how the environment can be influenced. One of the most sig-
nificant set of writings has tended to assess the role of local populations
in forest use, conservation and exploitation. This section focuses pri-
marily on community forest use and management in the Uttar Pradesh
hills in India (Uttarakhand), but uses existing research on other parts of
the Himalaya to situate this region in a comparative perspective.
Recent work on the Himalaya underlines nothing as much as the fact that
our knowledge about the Himalaya is limited and uncertain. Scholars such
as Bajracharya (1983), Carson (1985), Hamilton (1987), Hofer (1993),
Ives and Messerli (1989), Mahat et al. ( 1986a, 1986b, 1987a, 1987b) and
Thompson et al. (1986) among others have contested the various aspects
of the ’Theory on Himalayan environmental degradation’. They have
pointed to woefully inadequate and contradictory empirical data sources
on biophysical and socio-economic processes in the mountains. Their

arguments cast doubt on assertions that blame subsistence activities of

smallholders for environmental degradation. They question the relation-
ship between deforestation and surface erosion in the upper regions of the
Himalayan mountains, and flooding and sediment deposition in the lower
reaches of the Himalayan rivers. In the wake of this comprehensive inter-
rogation of accepted dogmas about forest management in the mountains,
several new research issues have emerged. They bear a close complemen-
tary relationship with writings on common property.
The most important of these, perhaps, is the significant reorientation
of research on forest use in the Himalaya to take into account the inter-
ests and activities of local populations. Although early ethnographers
have provided many studies of local systems of resource management
(Berreman 1972; Hitchcock 1966; Nitzberg 1970), an explicit focus on
communities and user group forestry has emerged in the past two
decades reflecting the perception that without extensive involvement and
empowerment of Himalayan villagers, successful forest management is
 200

likely to remain a chimera. 18 The long history of local forest management

in the Indian Middle Himalaya, and the active involvement of villagers
in forest use and management owing to the critical role of forests in
subsistence (Agrawal and Yadama 1997; Ballabh and Singh 1988;
Guha 1989; Somanathan 1991), provide the basic precondition for using
insights from the commons literature to research forest management in
the mountains-thousands of semi-autonomous village forest councils
(van panchayats) help manage large areas of forests collectively for the
village community in Kumaon and Garhwal.
Research in these van panchayats has explored some of the basic
thrusts of the common property literature already. Agrawal and Yadama
(1997), Ballabh and Singh (1988) and Somanathan (1991) have investi-
gated the extent to which the panchayats, and communal management
more generally, might be efficient in helping villagers manage forest
resources. But research on community forest management in the hills can

also help answer more fruitfully some of the problems faced by commons
scholars. Because hill villagers have the right to many of the rules for
managing their forests, historical studies of their evolving institutional
arrangements can help illuminate how internal dynamics of village com-
munities lead to significant shifts in patterns of resource use. Further,
statistical and comparative studies of the forest pallchayats can help
address criticisms that suggest that the commons literature has tended to
focus primarily on single cases. Indeed, the emergence of a large litera-
ture on local management of forests in the Lesser and Middle Himalaya
in Pakistan, Nepal and India now permits detailed and rigorous compara-
tive studies of local collective management of forests as well.’9
’
Relatively recent changes in government policies on forest management
in the mountains, certainly in India (Sanwal 1989), but also in Nepal,
Bhutan and Pakistan, create the possibility of comparative research
that would examine the effect of macro-level institutional changes on

18
Indeed, some research already suggests that villagers, in the face of increasing
scarcity, are likely to take matters into their own hands and plant trees without much exter-
nal stimulus (A.S. Carter and Gilmour 1989; E.J. Carter 1992; Griffin 1988; Hofer 1993;
Virgo and Subba 1994). Such research that examines the conditions under which villagers
would plant new trees is extremely important for defining the limits of deterioration of the
quality of publicly used forest lands.
19
See Cernea (1981, 1985), Dani et al. (1987) and Dove and Rao (1986) for some stud-
ies of local forest management from Pakistan. For Nepal, see Brower (1990), Chhetri and
Pandey (1992), Exo (1990), Metz (1990) and Zurick (1990). An annotated bibliography on
common forest management from Messerschmidt (1993) is a useful source as well. The
review by Arnold and Stewart (1991) ties together some of the important themes in the
pre-1990 work on common property in India.
 201

micro-level institutions, forest use practices and forest conditions. In

the context of the Uttar Pradesh hills, the forest department and
panchayat regulations have altered substantially in recent years, and
valuable resources for research are available in the form of data on such
policy changes, their impact on village forest councils as reflected in
records of council meetings maintained at the village level, annual reports
on the forest panchayats and their productivity, and reports on the
activities of the forest department and the state of the forests it manages.
Investigations of the relationship between micro-level community
institutions and macro-level state initiatives will help address a persist-
ent criticism of the commons literature-that it has tended to remain
focused on the community at the cost of a better understanding of the
ways in which the community is located in a network of social relations
which the state shapes to a great extent. But the Kumaon and Garhwal
region also constitute an important arena for commons scholars to exam-
ine another aspect of the relations between broader social forces and
institutional arrangements. Research on ecological movements in the
Uttarakhand (Berreman 1989; Guha 1989; Jain 1984; Rangan 1~3,
2001; Shiva and Bandopadhyay 1989; Weber 1989), and the movement
for the separate province of Uttaranchal (Mawdsley 1 &dquo;97, 1998, 1999),
demonstrate the pervasive ubiquity of social movements in the region.
Indeed, as Agrawal and Yadama (1997) and Agrawal (2001) point out,
the birth of commons institutions such as the forest councils of Kumaon
is a result of prolonged protests by the Kumaoni. The context of Kumaon
and Garhwal thus presents a tremendous opportunity to examine the
relationship between community institutions and social movements.
Such research can significantly advance our knowledge about how insti-
tutions and social movements connect with each other to facilitate con-
tinuing collective action.
As far as the situation in the Indian Himalaya forming a significant
opportunity to investigate internal differenccs within communities is
concerned, two points might be in order. First, a number of authors have
pointed to relatively low hierarchical and class differences in Garhwal
and Kumaon (Guha 1989; Pant 1935; Sanwal 1976). This might seem to
imply that the opportunity to study class and caste differentiation in the
Indian Himalaya is limited. This, however, should not be taken to mean
that asymmetries in resources and power play a more limited role in the
hills. As Foucault asserts, ’A society without power relations can only be
an abstraction’ (1983: 222-23). Although the forces that shape how indi-
viduals and groups relate to each other vary depending on history and
context, there is no escaping the grip of power. What attenuated caste
202

and class differences in the hills imply is not the absence of power, but
simply that its influence may assume subtler forms.
Examples might make the point clearer. Where caste and class expli-
citly enter social status, and a community is highly polarised along these
dimensions, power might be exercised more in the sense of brute force.2o
Where these differences are less obvious, the exercise of power might
take place through far subtler means-seemingly equitable strategies
that, nonetheless, are biased against those who are socially or economic-
ally disadvantaged. Auctions of products from the commons to the
highest bidder or high levels of monetary fines as punishment for break-
ing institutional rules related to commons are two possible examples.
The first rule would inevitably lead to richer residents of the village cor-
nering the bulk of benefits from the commons, since poorer members of
the community are unlikely to be able to bid even close to the value of
the benefits from the entire commons (Agrawal 1994b). The second rule
would punish those individuals disproportionately who possess limited
private resources, and are therefore forced to resort to harvesting from
the commons more often.
Second, despite the fact that power is not polarised along some obvi-
ous dimensions in the hill society, the presence of thousands of van pan-

chayats in Uttarakhand presents a highly variegated institutional

landscape of power whose investigation could help uncover the relation-
ships between societal power and how it congeals along nodes consti-
tuted by institutional arrangements. In this sense, the very multiplicity of
institutions would assist the investigations of power and politics, as long
as one keeps in mind the admonition that ’the analysis of power relations
within a society cannot be reduced to the study of a series of institutions,
not even to the study of all those institutions which would merit the
name &dquo;political&dquo;’ (Foucault 1983: 224).
In this context, the relationship between gender roles and power
would form an illuminating area of analysis. While gender roles are
quite different in the hill subsistence and production economy, and one
can expect these differences to significantly affect forest use and

management, women’s activities regarding harvesting, use and

management of forests need greater documentation and elaboration.
The increasing attention to women’s work in the hills, therefore, can

20
See Lukes’ thoughtful review of three different views of power (1974). Lukes (1986)
provides a useful collection of writings on power. Contemporary efforts to theorise
power, especially its more diffused and subtle manifestations, must consider Foucault’s
interventions.
 203

contribute to filling oneimportant lacunae in the scholarship on

of the
the commons-the importance of gender in common property man-
agement (see Agarwal 1986, 1994; Byers and Sainju 1994; Hewitt
1989; Saksena et al. 1995).

V
Conclusions

This article has reviewed the literature on common property by examin-

ing its origins, major themes and weaknesses. Scholarship on common
property has an old vintage, but it has exploded since the mid-1980s. It
has been crucial in establishing the role of community versus market
or state in resource management. Some of the chief weaknesses of the
literature relate to its relative neglect of the social and political relation-
ships within which local communities are located, and of the internal
politics that characterise all communities.
One of the objectives of this review has been to examine the extent to
which forest management in the Indian Himalaya provides research
agendas that can help address some of the weaknesses in the commons
discourse. The study concludes that the Middle and Lower Himalayas
constitute a fertile source of potentially new insights regarding internal
differentiation within communities, the relationship between the state
and other sites of political authority, the interactions between power and
institutions, and how social movements are related to institutions of
resource management.

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