Background

As the products of previous conflicts and confrontations, institutions have embedded in them the sediments of earlier struggles.
Florencia E. Mallon

Decentralization in natural resource management is centrally concerned with community agency. Concepts such as ‘participatory development’, ‘community-based conservation’, and ‘social capital’ all imply that a collectivity of actors in place-based relationships has the willingness and capacity to act collectively towards desired goals. Where capacity is lacking, it is usually sought to be improved through program interventions. The success of ‘participatory’ projects is crucially dependent upon the collective agency of participants. While the significance of community agency is obvious and accepted, the sources for such agency are less clear. There is evidence that some project and policy interventions build community capacity, but this effect is variable across different communities, and it is hardly plausible that the target communities had no capacity or agency before the interventions. Participatory institutions at the local level are also often designed with the additional objective of capacity-building, again overlooking the sources of pre-existing capacity and agency.

Strategy

To assure that decentralization reforms currently sweeping the developing world promote market access for resource-dependent communities, local benefit retention and reinvestment, poverty reduction, equitable representation in natural resource decision making, and environmental sustainability, the Market Access and Institutional Choice Project conducts research on economic and political-administrative decentralization to identify best practices and opportunities for improvement in the design and implementation of decentralization policies. Based on practice under current decentralization reforms, the project identifies principles to guide the selection of local institutions, the transfer of the right degree and mix of powers, and reforms for equitable market access and increased benefit retention.
The project aims to change how donors and policymakers view the effects of natural resource decentralization on markets, democracy and the environment. This project also supports capacity building and learning through high-quality policy-research collaboration. The current work includes collaborations in China, Cameroon, Senegal, Uganda, Nicaragua, and Guatemala as well as a global meeting to assure the robustness of our findings by drawing on additional comparative cases and experiences from across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Accomplishments

Our recommendations led World Bank and Dutch projects to help forest villagers to sell their charcoal directly to consumers in the cities–thus circumventing the policy barriers and enabling them to also collect the oligopsony rents formerly reserved for a narrow elite. The first truckloads of charcoal owned by poor forest villagers rolled into Senegals cities this last year. In addition, this analysis convinced Senegals Minister for Environment that broader reforms were needed, and he has promised to eliminate the quota system within three years.

For several years, WRI and the Center for International Forestry Research in Guatemala have been collaborating on forest decentralization research. CIFOR has developed the findings of this research into a booklet, which highlights the complexities of indigenous represention in Guatemala and pointed out substantial differences in vision between forestry professionals and grassroots communities.

Documents produced by our democratic decentralization policy research are currently being used in unversities throughout the world - for example, in the US (UC Berkeley and Yale), UK (Cambridge), in Africa (Cheikh Anta Diop University), and in Asia (China Agricultural University).