Local Enforcement and Better Forests

By C. Gibson, J. Williams, Elinor Ostrom. World Development, 2005

610 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Current studies of local resource management examine many factors thought to be associated with good resource conditions. Despite the number of studies and the importance of such resources to millions of people worldwide, a lack of theory and hypothesis testing beyond the case level limits the lessons empirical studies offer. We argue that regular monitoring and sanctioning of rules—rule enforcement—is a necessary condition for successful resource management. We test our theory using data regarding 178 user groups and by pairing rule enforcement with other important factors: social capital, formal organization, and dependence on forest products.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4a223aa06936d713e09341958ebb3338dfb0c553

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Safety Research

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Gender and Sustainable Forest Management in East Africa and Latin America (2011, background): “For example, where resource users regularly monitor and sanction resource use, the condition of forest resources will likely be better than where rules are not enforced (Banana and Gombya-Ssembajjwe 2000, Gibson et al. 2005).”
Outcomes of State- vs. Community-Based Mangrove Management in Southern Thailand (2008, background): “Monitoring and sanctions Monitoring is well known to be an important facilitator of long-term sustainable management of resources (Gibson et al. 2005).”
Assessing community-based conservation projects: A systematic review and multilevel analysis of attitudinal, behavioral, ecological, and economic outcomes (2013, background): “Useful initial advances in this area (see [21,35,36]) suggest the utility of this approach, highlighting various sets of biophysical, social, economic and institutional considerations to be important in different contexts.”
Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems (2010, positive): “…are sustainable over long periods of time, and how larger institutional arrangements enhance or detract from the capabilities of individuals at smaller scales to solve problems efficiently and sustainably (see, for example, Agrawal and Gibson 2001; Gibson et al. 2005; Schlager and Blomquist 2008).”
The challenge of understanding decisions in experimental studies of common pool resource governance (2011, background): “A robust finding across many studies, for example, is the importance of users monitoring one another (Gibson et al., 2005; Hayes, 2006; Ostrom and Nagendra, 2006; Coleman, 2009).”