Abstract
Environmentalists and conservationists have often advocated communal control of natural resources as a way to ensure its judicious and sustainable use (Colchester, 1994; Kothari, 2011). Since the early 1980s, economists, sociologists and cultural anthropologists have documented cases of sustainable natural resource management by local communities (Acheson, 1988; Ostrom, 1990; Berkes, 1986). This was followed by sophisticated theoretical models that showed that ‘commons’ — resources that are jointly managed — often follow trajectories that are not ‘tragic’ (Sethi and Somanathan, 1996; Chichilnisky, 1994). Once Ostrom and others had demolished the infallibility of the Tragedy of the Commons, policymakers around the world started viewing communal control as a panacea to solve all kinds of natural resource problems.
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© 2013 Ashokankur Datta and Gunnar Köhlin
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Datta, A., Köhlin, G. (2013). Tenure and Forest Management in India: Impacts on Equity and Efficiency of Van Panchayats in Uttarakhand. In: Holden, S.T., Otsuka, K., Deininger, K. (eds) Land Tenure Reform in Asia and Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343819_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343819_10
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