Community-Based Natural Resource Management Network (CBNRM Net): Webhosting, CPRNet, CPRNet and CBNRM

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The Community-Based Natural Resource Management Network

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Community-based natural resource management

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is an approach to managing renewable natural resources (on the relationship between CPRs and CBNRM, click here). It encompasses a large amount of experimentation and regional variation, and it involves much learning by doing. CBNRM starts with communities as a foundation, and it also ends with communities as a focus. It addresses the way in which local natural resources are utilized and managed through local institutions, and how co-management arrangements - involving communities and the state - are necessary in order to achieve sustainable management of the local resources in question.

CBNRM needs to be institutionalized to be effective. While the structure of each situation will be different, involving different sets of actors and interests, there is a need for an institutional framework that builds upon the shared values of communities while providing positive incentives for individual action. Four related elements of any institutional framework include:

Effective community-based groups, both at the local level and scaled up to the regional level
Effective operational linkages between the public sector, the private sector, and community-based groups in management of natural resources
Effective approaches to conflict management with regard to use of natural resources, at all levels
An enabling policy and institutional environment, at macro and micro levels, that fosters support of existing community-based institutions, or the emergence of new institutions, to manage natural resources locally

Successful reform in each of these areas is also dependent on the ability to develop legitimate fora and process for addressing these issues - processes which have the highest level of political commitment, which involves all legitimate stakeholders, and which is transparent and accountable.

Such institutional reform processes also needs to be supplemented by concerted efforts to build human capacity at all levels - from community-based organizations to central government agencies - both to realize the above institutional arrangements as well as administer them over time.