A REVIEW OF COMMUNITY-BASED NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

This paper reviews initiatives of Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) from 21 case studies in different countries. The study uses Ostrom's design principles and eight objective measures. These are empowerment, public participation, equity, conflict resolution mechanisms, similarities between misuse and establishment of rules for indigenous environments, effective monitoring, collective choice arrangements and sanctioning activities for the use of common resources to evaluate and compare the case studies to examine the cases. Based on the analyses, successes and failures of CBNRM were determined. Successes were evident in the management of water resources in Honduras, India, Kenya, Nepal and St Lucia. CBNRM was also successful in Fiji, in joint forest management in India and other instances such as in Alaska, China, Cambodia, Namibia, Malaysia, Mexico, Washington, and to a small extent in Papua New Guinea. However, CBNRM initiatives failed in managing wildlife conservation in Nepal and Kenya, and in Tanzania wildlife management, Uganda and Zimbabwe. CBNRM failure was attributed to the uneven distribution of the benefits of natural resources, lack of empowerment, low community participation, failure to resolve conflicts, among many factors. In this study, the recommendations is made that similar research should be conducted with a larger sample size and employ other techniques such as Principal Component Analysis for examining the characteristics that achieve effective and sustainable CBNRM initiatives.