Explaining Success on the Commons: Community Forest Governance in the Indian Himalayas

By Arun Agrawal, Ashwini Chhatre
World Development | January 2006

DOI

doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2005.07.013

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Citation

Agrawal, Arun., Chhatre, Ashwini. Explaining Success on the Commons: Community Forest Governance in the Indian Himalayas World Development doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2005.07.013.

World Development, 2006

Abstract

In the past two decades, scholarship on resource use and management has emphasized the key role of institutions, communities, and socio-economic factors. Although much of this writing acknowledges the importance of a large number of different causal variables and processes, knowledge about the magnitude, relative contribution, and even direction of influence of different causal processes on resource management outcomes is still poor at best. This paper addresses existing gaps in theory and knowledge by conducting a context-sensitive statistical analysis of 95 cases of decentralized, community-based, forest governance in Himachal Pradesh, and showing how a range of causal influences shape forest conditions in diverse ecological and institutional settings in the Indian Himalaya. In focusing attention on a large number of cases, but drawing on findings from case studies to motivate our analysis and choice of causal influences, our study seeks to combine the strengths of single case-oriented approaches and larger-N studies, and thereby contributes to a more thorough understanding of effective resource governance.

Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.

Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.

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