Non-governmental organisations today, as part of civil society, have come to play a prominent role in South Asia in the context of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). This book examines the theory and practice of NGO-driven CBNRM within the framework of emerging critiques of dominant discourses of development, the micro-politics of decentralisation and the projection of community development. The book breaks new ground by contextualising these critiques using six detailed cases of CBNRM initiatives.
The authors delve into the extent to which CBNRM offers a vision for the future and question what role, if any, could NGOs paly in this. They seek to understand the insights into CBNRM that intervening agencies generate through their work, by examining the outcomes of the interventions and the strategies used to achieve them.
The book concludes that though these CBNRM efforts have made significant contributions to livelihood enhancement, the results gained are limited in the equitable access to benefits, sustainability of resource use, and in terms of democratic decentralisation.
Ajit Menon is Associate Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. He was formerly a Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development (CISED), Bangalore. His research interests include the political economy of natural resource management, environmental politics and decentralized governance in India.
Praveen Singh is Visiting Fellow at CISED. A historian, his area of interest is the history of flood control and agro-ecological change in the Indian floodplains during the colonial and post-independence period.
Esha Shah is Research Fellow with the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She was formerly a Fellow at CISED. She has authored a book Social Designs: Tank Irrigation Technology and Agrarian Transformation in Karnataka. Esha is an environmental engineer turned social scientist whose main research interest involves anthropology and history of science and technology. Her recent research activities include politics of knowledge generation, risk and uncertainty of new and emerging technologies in developing societies, and history of the green revolution.
Sharachchandra Lélé is Coordinator and Senior Fellow at CISED which he co-founded. He has held senior positions at the Pacific Institute of SIDES and Tata Energy Research Institute, and was a Bullard Fellow at Harvard University. He is also a founder-member of the Indian Society for Ecological Economics and has served on its Executive Committee. His work spans conceptual issues in sustainable development and sustainability, and institutional, economic, ecological and technological issues in forest, energy and water resource management.
Suhas Paranjape is Visiting Fellow at CISED and Senior Fellow with the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM), Pune. He is also founding member of the Lok Vidnyan Sanghatana. His interests cover the area of water, energy and biomass resources. He has co-authored a number of books in these areas: Sustainable Technology: Making the Sardar Sarovar Project Viable; Banking on Biomass: A New Strategy for Sustainable Prosperity Based on Renewable Energy and Dispersed Industrialisation; Watershed Based Development: A Source Book and the forthcoming Water Conflicts in India: A Million Revolts in the Making.
