Collective Action, Property Rights, and Devolution of Forest and Protected Area Management

This paper aims to accomplish two tasks: One, it presents a framework to help analyze the devolution of the use, management, and governance of resources. It does so by bringing together several strands of work on institutional analysis and property rights, and building on theories of collective action. These writings are highly relevant to our understanding of governance and devolution, but their relationship to devolution and governance requires closer examination than it has previously received. Two, the paper provides empirical evidence from two cases on devolution of forest use from India and Nepal to illustrate and examine the offered framework. The devolution of forest use in Kumaon in India and efforts to involve local population in the management of protected areas in the Terai of Nepal form the two contrasting studies of the origins and implementation of devolution. Studying these contrasting cases enables us to examine the propositions we advance about the relationships between characteristics of devolutionary initiatives, the likelihood of an initiative being implemented successfully, and resource-related outcomes. Devolution of resource management is part of a larger conversation about decentralization of authority away from central government offices and officials. Writings on decentralization and its effects have a long pedigree in development studies but they have gained a wider audience in the past two decades in comparison to the years immediately following the Second World War. Indeed, one can argue that this shift, in search for alternatives to the acknowledged failures of state-based solutions to problems of governance, has characterized writings related to development and resource management more generally (Agrawal 1999). A review of writings on devolution reveals two significant lacunae. First, these studies often talk of decentralization/devolution as a gross concept that signifies changes in authority structures but do not further investigate the specific dynamics of devolution, or its relationship to institutions through which it occurs. Advocating for