Strategies for Regulating Use of Forest Resources: How Exclusive?
Amy R. Poteete
Indiana University
Comments welcome: apoteete@indiana.edu
Paper presented at a colloquium at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis,
Indiana University, Bloomington, on 8 October 2001. © Amy R. Poteete 2001.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 1
Strategies for Regulating Use of Forest Resources: How Exclusive?
Amy R. Poteete 1
Indiana University
ABSTRACT:
Regulation of renewable natural resources involves restriction of resource use, either by
limiting extraction by each resource user, limiting the number of resource users, or both.
The choice between distribution and exclusion affects the distribution of resource flows,
and thus impinges upon political, economic, and social relations. Research on natural
resource management and the organization of agrarian societies identifies a number of
factors likely to influence the inclusiveness of strategies for resource management:
demand for the resource, the difficulty of defending the resource, risk and risk aversion,
local conflicts, the presence of marginal groups, and the political opportunity structure.
This paper focuses on the probability of exclusionary tactics of forest management.
Analysis of data from the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI)
research program suggests that political relations among resource users and between
resource users and outside authorities are the most important predictors of exclusionary
efforts by local actors.
Economic theories of property rights predict that people will respond to
increasing scarcity and/or deteriorating resource conditions by striving to define property
rights more clearly (Alchian and Demsetz 1973). Market penetration, technical change,
and population growth are but a few of the factors that alter relative prices and prompt
efforts to define or alter property rights (ibid; Anderson and Hill 1973; Ensminger1992;
North 1981; cf., Hyden 1983). Because the definition of property rights bounds access,
the process is widely understood as one of exclusion. Indeed, instances of exclusion
1
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political
Science Association, Hilton San Francisco and Towers August 30 - September 2, 2001. A grant from the
Ford Foundation to the International Forestry Resources and Institutions research program at Indiana
University supported this research. Comments from Abwoli Banana, Clark Gibson, and Catherine Tucker
contributed to the quality of this paper; I bear full responsibility for its remaining flaws.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 2
abound (e.g., Agrawal 1999, 67 ff.; Ensminger 1992, Chapter Five; Norberg 1988; Peters
1994). Yet many groups or communities instead limit access by regulating the quantity
and distribution of resources harvested rather than by reducing the number of harvesters
(e.g., Agrawal 1999, 52 ff., Dayton-Johnson 2000; McKean 1992; Scott 1976).2 What
accounts for the choice of strategies for resource management?
The balance between limiting harvest size and the number of resource users
reflects current power relations in a society. Because these choices alter resource flows,
they also contribute to the evolution of political, economic, and social relations. Baland
and Platteau (2000 [1996]; cf., 1998) argue that exclusion occurs only if a clearly
identifiable subset of resource users exists, such as immigrants or some lower status
minority. Otherwise, risk aversion leads current resource users to reject exclusion for fear
of being among those excluded, and opt instead for rules for sharing that restrict total
resource use. Local understandings of community often exclude migrants, nomads,
women, youth, marginalized ethnic groups (e.g., indigenous populations), or lower
castes. Restrictive definitions of community or marginality within a community can
provide a basis for exclusion (Berry 1993, 117; Ensminger 1992, 133-4; Netting 1981;
78-9).
Although strangers and lower status groups are frequently enough treated as
scapegoats, heterogeneity also exists among groups that choose to redistribute resources
rather than exclude lower-status groups. Even if social or political status offers a good
predictor of which subsets of resource users are most likely to be disadvantaged, it does
not provide much insight into the choice of exclusion over quantity or access restrictions.
2
Failures to develop any system of regulation also occur, resulting in resource degradation (Hardin 1968).
This paper focuses on the nature of change in systems of regulation that already exist.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 3
Other factors that may affect this choice include environmental risk, attitudes towards
risks, the costs of monitoring and enforcing exclusion, the number of relevant forms of
heterogeneity, the relative organization of different sub-sets of resource users,
representation of various interests in decision-making bodies, and relations among the
various groups involved in resource use and management.
This paper is part of a larger project that evaluates the relative importance of a
variety of factors likely to affect the relationship between institutions and equity: demand
for the resource, ease of defending the resource, the degree of risk and risk aversion, the
presence of conflicts, the presence of marginal groups, and the externally defined
political opportunity structure. As a first step, I analyze the association between efforts to
exclude others from resource use and indicators of each of these factors. Analysis of data
on forest conditions, the people who use those forests, and their institutions for managing
forest resources in Africa, Asia, and the Americas suggests that exclusionary actions are
not mere reflections of perceived increases in scarcity or levels of heterogeneity among
forest users. Political relations among groups within a community and between subgroups and outside authorities are more important predictors of redistribution and
exclusion.
Choosing Between Restrictions on Extraction and Exclusion
Maintenance of renewable resources depends upon regulation of extraction to
allow regeneration. Resource use can be limited by restricting either the number of
resource users or the amount extracted by all resource users. When changing conditions
or patterns of use threaten maintenance of the resource base, the number of people
allowed to use the resource may be reduced while the amount extracted by each person
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 4
remains unchanged, or the amount extracted by each person may be reduced while the
number of people allowed to use the resource remains unchanged. Intermediate options
combine exclusion with redistribution. 3
Strategies of exclusion alter the definition of property rights. The focus on the
emergence of property rights in the economics literature presents this process as one of
specifying rights to resources more clearly (Alchian and Demsetz 1973). The dynamic of
sloughing off “excess” users also occurs where systems for resource management already
exist. Reduction of the set of individuals with recognized rights to a resource may involve
clarification of rights, but is as likely to involve redefinition of rights that were clear all
along. The degree of constriction and inequity involved in exclusionary tactics varies.
Exclusion often involves individualization of rights, although collective management
may continue with a more narrow definition of group membership. The smaller the
reduction in the number of resource users, the more important are quantity restrictions for
reducing total extraction. 4 Either way, changing a system for resource management
directly affects the distribution of resources. As such, it is inevitably a political process.
At least three broad categories of hypotheses about the choice of exclusionary
versus distributive strategies for managing natural resources can be distilled from the
diverse literature on property rights and social arrangements in agrarian societies. They
relate to demand for the resource relative to the difficulty of defending access to it,
3
Total exclusion is also an option. Nationally designated protected areas often restricted all harvests, at
least prior to the spread of community-based programs. Some communities completely curtail harvests in a
portion of their forest, designated fisheries, or part of the range. Select forms of use may persist, as when
medicinal herbs are collected from sacred groves but trees left intact. In other cases, harvests resume after
the resource regenerates. This paper focuses on decisions about how to divide a resource; it does not
systematically consider instances of total exclusion.
4
Neither exclusion nor redistribution guarantees maintenance of a renewable resource. When externalities
are important, exclusion may remove rather than improve incentives for maintaining resources.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 5
concerns about risk, and aspects of the political environment such as conflicts, the
existence of marginal groups, and the overarching political opportunity structure.
Demand for the Resource and Difficulty of Defense
The value of a resource relative to the cost of defining and defending rights over it
affects the degree of exclusion in property rights. Both exclusionary tactics and efforts at
redistribution seem unlikely to occur unless demand for a resource is relatively high.
Changes in population density and productive technology alter the value of and demand
for resources. Neoclassical economists expect individuals to respond to increases in
scarcity or productive value by attempting to establish more exclusive rights over
valuable resources (Alchian and Demsetz 1973). 5 Specification of property rights more
clearly defines the rights of some set of individuals to access and use resources, but also
defines the terms for excluding others. Shifts in relative prices may be the primary
motivation for seeking clearer specification of property rights, but outcomes can be
understood only by recognizing the frictions arising from transaction costs (North 1981,
1990). Among the more important transaction costs affecting changes in property rights
are those associated with the relative ease of defending a resource, the legitimacy of and
thus willingness to comply with new arrangements, and the degree of external legal
backing for changes.
At high population densities, although the value of the forest increases, more
severe collective action problems may thwart efforts to protect forest resources through
exclusion or other means. Very high levels of demand may undermine the feasibility of
improving the condition of forest resources through institutional change (cf., Ostrom
5
Perceived scarcity also affects evaluations of non-consumptive values associated with forests. Many nonconsumptive values are public goods, but some are amenable to exclusionary strategies of management.
Limited access to a forest may, for instance, enhance its value as a refuge from the bustle of daily life.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 6
1999). Population pressure also affects the severity of collective action problems.
Following Olson (1965), many researchers believe that small group size raises the
probability of successful collective action. The smallest groups, however, exert less
pressure upon the sustainability of their forest resources and thus have less need to act
collectively to alter their system for resource management. The value of concerted action
to tighten regulation of resource use increases with population pressure, but so does the
severity of collective action problems. Even if smaller groups would benefit from
tightening regulation of resource use, they may lack the resources needed to enforce
tighter rules (Agrawal and Goyal 2001). These sorts of countervailing pressures suggest a
curvilinear relationship between population pressure and changes in the regulation of
natural resources.
Once efforts at exclusion occur, effectiveness in reducing resource use depends on
monitoring and enforcement (Agrawal and Yadama 1997, 455; Anderson and Hill 1977;
Bruce and Migot-Adholla 1994). The costliness of monitoring and enforcement depends
upon the nature of the resource, including its size, spatial distribution, and predictability
(Ostrom 1999; Ruttan 2001; Schlager et al. 1994); technologies for observation and
enforcement (Anderson and Hill 1977; North 1981); and institutional arrangements. The
cost of defense is non-negligible for extensive resources, resources with obscured
visibility, and mobile and unpredictable resources. Changes in technology that facilitate
defense of valuable resources can be expected to prompt moves from cooperative to
exclusionary tactics in resource management, such as followed the introduction of barbed
wire in the American West (Anderson and Hill 1977).
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 7
The legitimacy of strategies for regulating resource use arises out of local political
conditions, including historical changes in relations among social actors. Likewise,
external legal backing for patterns of resource use and decisions about resource
management depend upon the overarching political context. These explicitly political
factors are discussed at greater length below.
Risk and Risk Aversion
According to the transaction costs approach, common property persists despite its
inefficiency because the costs of negotiating and enforcing more restrictive property
rights outweigh the benefits (North 1981, 26; cf., Baland and Platteau 1998, 645). But
even before taking transaction costs into consideration, the distribution of resources
within collective property arrangements meets or exceeds the efficiency achieved through
exclusion under some conditions. Economies of scale create diseconomies in monitoring
that limit the value captured through exclusionary tactics. Depending upon the nature of
the resource, environmental conditions, and technologies of production, collective
management may reduce the costs associated with monitoring and enforcing exclusion,
offer insurance against risk, achieve economies of scale or of scope,6 or facilitate
coordination with complementary aspects of production (Baland and Platteau 1998, 645 –
646; Netting 1981, 68 – 69; Quiggin 1993). Each of these factors increases the value of
collective management.
Cooperative systems of resource management are widely understood as responses
to environmental and economic risk. Ecological risk, when spatially distributed,
encourages use of resources on a larger scale. In arid rangelands, for example, utilization
6
Economies of scope exist when production of several goods jointly costs less than production of the same
goods by separate firms (Baumol, Panzar, and Willig 1982).
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 8
of grazing over a large territory can compensate for spatial and temporal variability in
rainfall and the quality of forage (Behnke and Scoones 1993; Dyson-Hudson 1985;
Western 1982). Ecological variability and the economic risk to which it gives rise also
encourage collective or reciprocal arrangements for resource management as ways to
spread risk.
Social arrangements in many rural societies have been characterized as moral
economies, or more generally as systems for spreading risk in subsistence economies
(Scott 1976, cf., Berry 1993; Hyden 1983). Risk may be natural in origin (e.g., floods,
droughts, plague, infestation), related to personal position (e.g., health, the ratio of
household size to productive assets), or arise from systemic factors (e.g., proportional
taxes or systems for allocating productive resources). The proximity of the poor to the
subsistence threshold produces a strong aversion to risk. The poor adopt productive
strategies that reduce risk, such as the use of multiple varieties of seeds or breeds and the
use of multiple ecological zones. But they also maintain social arrangements that reduce
risk, such as reciprocity, communal management of land, and labor exchanges (Scott
1976, 3 and 5; cf., Berry 1993). Even when individuals have the physical and legal ability
to exclude others, the presence of substantial ecological, economic, or personal risk
encourages the adoption of reciprocal strategies instead (cf., Rawls 1971; Segosebe 1997,
290 - 293).
Political Context: Local Conflicts and Supra-Local Political Opportunity Structure
Choices among strategies for regulating resource management reflect more than
the economics of demand and defense and the political economy of risk. Efforts to alter
systems for resource management cannot escape the general political context in which
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 9
they occur. The dynamics of collective decision-making reflect relations among the
people who use the resource base, particularly conflicts involving distinctive or marginal
groups, as well as relations between the local community or polity and larger-scale
political entities (e.g., “the state”).
Even when collective management is economically efficient, challenges of
regulating resource use must be addressed. Regulation through redistribution would seem
a natural strategy for groups with established systems for collective resource
management, but exclusion remains a viable option. Indeed, the transaction costs of
defending private property encourage strategies of partial exclusion. Limiting the number
of excluded people relative to those still using the resource lowers the costliness of
enforcement, especially if excluded individuals are not organized. If the resource base
can be maintained by excluding fewer than half of the beneficiaries, those who retain
access will have an interest in supporting the change while those excluded may be
unlikely to prevent it. But this calculus assumes common knowledge of the identity of
individuals to be excluded. Unless a clear sub-group can be targeted for exclusion, the
majority may oppose partial exclusion because of the possibility of being among those
excluded (Baland and Platteau 2000 [1996], 204 ff.).
Despite the rhetoric of community unity, even small-scale polities contain diverse
populations. Conflicts within a group can hamper collective action, or promote action that
disproportionately benefits subsets of the polity. Not all forms of social heterogeneity
give rise to politically relevant conflict. The presence of both exclusionary and
redistributive arrangements within highly unequal societies lead Baland and Platteau to
conclude that the degree of exclusion is not a function of inequalities in wealth (1999,
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 10
785). Gibson and Koontz argue that homogeneity in values is more important for
cooperative resource management (1998, 622-623). The substantive form of
heterogeneity may be less important than the number of dimensions along which internal
heterogeneity occurs (Quiggin 1993, 1130 – 1131). 7
Conflicts can be expected to affect strategies for resource management through
two dynamics. First, conflicts may hinder the ability to achieve the level of collective
agreement needed to alter systems of resource management. The level of agreement
needed to achieve effective collective decisions influences the significance of conflict.
When consensus or the support of a super-majority is required, conflict within a group
quickly becomes an obstacle to efforts to alter resource management, whether through
exclusionary or other means. Otherwise, conflict undermines more inclusive
arrangements and provides motivation for exclusionary tactics.
When rigid manifestations of heterogeneity yield distinctive communities within a
polity, decisions about resource management reflect and contribute to political relations
among these groups. When dominant groups depend upon cooperative relations with poor
and less organized groups to a considerable extent, they may retain or institute inclusive
arrangements for resource management even when they have the legal and political
wherewithal to impose exclusionary policies (cf., Scott 1976). Similarly, even in the
absence of degradation, a politically dominant group may adopt a biased strategy of
resource regulation in response to challenges, or as a way to head off such challenges (cf.,
Agrawal 1999, 53-7). Neither outcome would make sense unless the broader political
dynamics were taken into consideration.
7
Cf., formal models that show how multi-dimensionality constrains the probability of stable social choices,
as reviewed by Ordeshook (1986, 166 – 175).
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 11
Inequities in organization and access to resources affect the ability to mobilize.
The majority rarely manages to exclude wealthy and well-organized minorities while
minorities sometimes exclude politically and economically marginal groups (Baland and
Platteau 1998, 648). The presence of at least one marginal group appears to increase the
likelihood of efforts to regulate resource use through exclusion. Mobile groups can be
expected to face additional disadvantages, at least when other resource users lead
relatively more stationary lifestyles. Transience sets mobile populations off from
sedentary residents, marking them as precisely the sort of easily identifiable sub-group
vulnerable to exclusion. Interactions between sedentary and mobile populations occur
during limited periods and are of an intermittent nature, whereas interactions within each
population are more likely to be complex and on-going. Consequently, social capital
within each group facilitates cooperation, but the networks linking the groups together
are few and fragile (cf., Fearon and Laitin 1996, 725 ff.). If patterns of resource use by
mobile and sedentary populations differ, neither group may fully appreciate economies of
scope that encompass both sets of productive activities (Quiggin 1993). Geographicallybased institutions for decision-making further favor stationary groups, lowering their
costs of participating in decision-making while raising the costs of participation for
mobile groups. If exclusionary efforts typically target distinctive marginal groups, mobile
populations seem to be particularly at risk.
Ultimately, local decisions about resource management confront external political
authorities. National and regional laws, institutions, and political dynamics define the
political opportunity structure within which local-level decisions get made. The
distribution of formal authority by the overarching legal framework sets obstacles of
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 12
varying heights before social groups wishing to influence practices at the local level.
Relations between local and larger-scale actors can be seen as nesting, substitutive, or
conflicting. Nesting occurs when laws and institutions at larger-scales reinforce those at
smaller-scales of social organization (Ostrom 1990, 101-2). Although devolution of
decisions to the lowest feasible level (given externalities) of social aggregation has much
to commend it, external authorities preempt local decision-making all too frequently. If
external authorities have the capacity to enforce their decisions, local actors have less
incentive to mobilize to alter arrangements for resource management themselves.
Withdrawal of legal backing undermines locally based decisions. In the absence of
external backing, local decisions depend on strong local agreement or effective informal
arrangements for enforcement (Ghate 2000).
In Pursuit of Many Cases
The overarching political context may trump other factors, but it does not make
them irrelevant. Any effort to understand decisions about resource management should
consider the value of the resource, the difficulty of defending access to the resource,
concerns about risk, and the general political environment. Each of these explanatory
factors actually represents a number of distinctive variables. Any statistical analysis of
choices among strategies for managing renewable resources confronts the problem of
needing data on a large number of cases.
The International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) Database
The International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research program
offers a large cross-national database that makes feasible multivariate analysis of
questions related to local-level resource management. Founded in 1993, IFRI is a
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 13
network of collaborating research centers using a common set of methods to study
forests, the people who use forest resources, and their institutions for resource
management. The relational database captures the connections among forest systems, sets
of resource users, particular forest products, formal and informal rules for resource use,
and formal local and supra-local organizations. By the middle of 2001, the IFRI database
included data on 141 sites with 231 forests, 233 user groups, 94 forest associations, and
486 products. The large number of cases represented in the IFRI database allows analysis
of complicated social and biological phenomena affecting natural resources and their
management. IFRI offers a wealth of data related to strategies for resource management.
The database includes substantial historical background on particular forests and the
people who use them, as well as overviews of policies affecting forest use.
Despite these advantages, the IFRI database was not designed to investigate
whether strategies for modifying systems of resource management are exclusionary.
Rather, IFRI grew out of efforts to understand successes and failures in collective
management of natural resources (Ostrom 1990; Ostrom et al. 1994). This research
tradition identifies characteristics of groups associated with the development and survival
of institutions for managing renewable resources held in common, and furthers our
understanding of interactions among these characteristics. When one’s central research
questions concerns collective action within groups of individuals who use natural
resources, it makes sense to collect data with such groups as the main unit of analysis.
Thus, the basic social unit of analysis in IFRI is the user group, defined as a set of
individuals with the same rights and responsibilities to forest resources. This definition
does not require formal organization or collective action, since these features are
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 14
potential dependent variables. When residents of a settlement have differing rights and
responsibilities to forest resources, IFRI sees multiple user groups and records data for
each. A group with common rights and responsibilities to a forest may be homogeneous
or heterogeneous on many other dimensions with social and political relevance. This
strategy for data collection allows analysis of relationships between diverse forms of
social heterogeneity and collective action within groups with comparable rights to
resources.
The IFRI database contains data relevant for the study of exclusionary tactics for
resource management, but often in forms that are not immediately suitable for analysis.
Relations among user groups utilizing the same forest resources, for example, are not
immediately apparent. The structure of the database does not automatically capture links
among user groups or between user groups and associations (i.e., more explicit
organizations). These relationships can be reconstructed to some extent by drawing upon
an interorganizational inventory. Questions about conflicts with people outside each
group are also helpful in this regard.
Operationalization
When conducting analysis with a relational database, a case is not always – or
even often – simply a site. Instead, a case is defined by the relationship of interest. For
this analysis, a case is a user group – forest product – forest relationship. The possibility
of multiple relationships among entities means that the number of cases in a given
analysis can be larger than the number of records about any given entity. Data from 353
user group – forest product – forest relationships are used in the analysis.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 15
Extensive information about current rights to forests and particular forest products
can be found in the IFRI database. No existing variable, however, explicitly addresses
efforts to modify rules for forest use through exclusion. A dichotomous dependent
variable for this analysis was created by coding mentions of exclusionary efforts by a
user group in long text fields describing the history of each user group, noteworthy
changes in user groups, and changes in the policy environment that affect the forest.
Since none of these fields request information about exclusionary efforts, the dependent
variable most likely under-represents their frequency. On the other hand, exclusionary
efforts require considerable organizational investment and involve significant political
cost. The conflict associated with efforts to exclude others increases the likelihood that
research teams would notice and record such information. Examples of exclusionary
actions include the definition of restrictions on entry by forest management committees
or voluntary organizations formed on the initiative of local resource users, privatization,
attempts to curtail uses of forest products that were informally recognized in the past but
lack legal standing, and the displacement of subsets of local resource users following
violent clashes.
Measures of demand were more readily available. The value of forest resources
increases with population pressure, commercial value, and evidence of resource
depletion. The value of the forest at low population densities is unlikely to prompt efforts
to exclude others. The number of individuals in the user group per hectare of forest
provides a measure of population density (POPPRESS). The inclusion of population
pressure and population pressure squared (POPPRESS2) in the analysis tests for the
possibility of a curvilinear relationship. The proportion of individuals in each user group
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 16
who depend significantly upon the forest for income related to commercial activities
provides an estimation of the commercial significance of the forest (COMMERCE). IFRI
provides a number of measures of forest condition. Since some delay can be expected
between evidence of degradation and action to defend forest resources, the number of
species reported as having disappeared over the past twenty years seemed the most
appropriate (LOSTSPECIES).
The difficulty of defending forest resources is expected to increase with both the
size of the forest and the distance of the user group from the forest. The size of the forest
is recorded in hectares (SIZE). The average distance of the user group from the forest
(DISTANCE) has been classified as being within 1 km, between 1 – 5 km, between 5 and
10 km, and more than 10 km. Since proximity to the forest facilitates monitoring of forest
use, greater average distance should make exclusionary strategies more difficult to
enforce.
IFRI offers measures of ecological and economic risk. Predictability of annual
resource availability has been recorded for each product on a five-point scale (ECORISK)
that ranges from no to dramatic year-to-year variation. Economic risk is measured both
positively and negatively. The proportion of individuals in each user group with full-time
employment (EMPLOYED) should indicate a relatively low degree of economic risk. 8
Dependence on the forest for subsistence suggests the sort of proximity to the subsistence
threshold associated with risk aversion. The proportion of individuals in each user group
that depends significantly on the forest for subsistence (SUBSISTENCE) measures the
likely prevalence of such concerns within each user group.
8
Wage employment can raise economic risk if continued employment is undependable (Baland and
Platteau 1999, 775; Scott 1976, 35 ff.). Full-time employment is interpreted as an indication of relative
stability.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 17
Several variables capture aspects of the political context in which decisions about
exclusion occur. The severity of conflict within a user group is measured on a four-point
scale that ranges from no conflict to the presence of conflict that disrupts normal
activities (CONFLICT). Exclusionary efforts are expected to be less common when
conflict within a user group has become disruptive. No single existing variable
adequately captures conflict between a user group and other groups. This information
was gleaned from long text fields describing changes in policies affecting forest
management and the effects of conflicts among user groups upon use of the forest. A
dichotomous variable indicates whether any inter-group conflict was mentioned
(INTERGCONFL). To the extent possible, this measure distinguishes among the various
user groups associated with each forest and limits positive scores to those actually
involved in conflicts.
Three indicators of distinctive groups are included. One dichotomous variable
(MOBILE) indicates whether mobile groups use a forest. Another (WEALTHDIF)
measures whether great wealth differences exist, according to local definitions of wealth
and poverty, among households in the user group.9 The third (PARTRULE) identifies
situations in which some but not all members of a user group participate in making
decisions about management of forest resources.
Three dimensions of relations with state authorities are also represented. Mentions
of government action to exclude some or all people from use of forest resources appear in
long text responses about shifts in the policy environment and the history of user groups.
A dichotomous variable (GOVEXCLU) indicates whether external authorities had taken
9
The structure of the data does not allow assessments of wealth differences among individuals or
households who use the forest but belong to different user groups.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 18
any exclusionary action. Exclusionary government action preempts or overrides
exclusionary efforts by forest user groups. Communal tenure should offer user groups the
greatest authority to alter the rules for using forest resources without external
interventions. A dummy variable indicates ownership of a forest by a village or part of a
village (COMMUNITY).10 AMBIGLAW indicates situations in which resource use by
user groups lacks legal recognition but is not explicitly illegal. This sort of legal
ambiguity offers opportunities for user groups to attempt to redefine their rights to
resources. Efforts at excluding others are expected to be most common when the legality
of resource use is ambiguous.
Regulation of Natural Resources: More Political than Economic
The analysis suggests that, of the three broad categories under consideration,
political factors outweigh cost-benefit calculations and risk in local-level strategies for
regulating natural resources. Demand for forest resources and the difficulty of defending
them are important, but not determinant. The role of risk, if any, is ambiguous. Local
political factors are important and robust predictors of efforts to exclude others from the
use of forest resources, but the externally defined political opportunity structure emerged
as the most important and predictor of exclusionary action.
The results of the logit model,11 reported in Table One, demonstrate that efforts at
exclusion cannot be attributed to any one set of factors, but that political conditions are
the most important predictors of exclusionary action. Demand for forest resources, ease
of defense, risk, political conflict, and legal status all affect the probability that a user
10
Although labeled COMMUNITY, this variable does not encompass all forms of collective management.
In particular, this variable does not count forests owned by cooperatives, religious orders, or corporations
as communal.
11
Expectation of a non-normal distribution prompted use of a logit model.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 19
group will attempt to exclude others from use of forest resources. Indicators within each
category of independent variables differ considerably in importance. Population density,
the external political context, and the disruptiveness of conflicts emerge as the most
important predictors of efforts to exclude others from forest resources. The results affirm
the importance of demographic pressures, but also the essentially political nature of
exclusionary actions. Modifications of the model to check for robustness (see Appendix)
confirm that the most important factors are political.
[Insert Table One about here]
Demand and Defense: Important but not Determinant
Among the indicators of demand for forest resources, only population density and
its value squared reach levels of statistical and substantive significance. The significance
of both variables and their signs confirm the curvilinear nature of the relationship with
exclusionary action. The probability of exclusionary efforts increases with moves from
low to moderate population density, but decreases with moves from moderate to high
population density. The decline in efforts at exclusion at high population densities may
reflect the growing difficulty of collective action in larger groups (Olson 1965). Or higher
population densities may coincide with levels of degradation too high to justify
exclusionary efforts (cf., Ostrom 1999).
An increase in the proportion of a population that depends upon forest resources
for income from commercial activities was expected to increase the likelihood of
exclusionary action, as was an increase in the number of species noted as having
disappeared over the past twenty years. Not only are these measures statistically and
substantively insignificant, the directions of the relationships are opposite that predicted.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 20
A change from 0 to 1 in the proportion of a user group with commercial interest in the
forest corresponds with a meager decline in the likelihood of exclusionary effort of 0.07 –
an effect statistically indistinguishable from 0. The likelihood of efforts to exclude
declines by 0.32 with an increase from 0 to 15 in the number of species noticed as having
disappeared from a forest over the past twenty years. Although substantively sizeable, the
relationship is not statistically significant and even the direction of the relationship lacks
statistical stability. Perhaps species disappear too rarely to make this a useful indicator of
resource deterioration. Exclusionary action may be more likely when degradation is
evident but species have not actually disappeared.
The model includes two indicators of the difficulty of defending forest resources:
the size of the forest and the average distance of residences from the forest. As expected,
the likelihood of exclusionary action declines as the average distance from the forest –
and thus the difficulty of monitoring forest use – increases. A shift in the average distance
of residences from the forest from within 1 km to more than more than 10 km
corresponds with a decline of 0.19 in the likelihood of exclusionary action by a user
group. Contrary to expectations, however, exclusionary action grows more likely as
forest size increases. An immense increase in forest size, from 2 to 22,700 hectares, is
needed to increase the probability of exclusion by 0.22. Nonetheless, the association of
increased forest size with increased exclusion suggests that economies of scale for
various forest uses outweigh diseconomies of scale in defending forest resources.
The Ambiguous Role of Risk
Theory and case studies suggest that high levels of ecological and economic risk
inculcate risk-aversion, encourage reciprocity and redistribution in resource management,
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 21
and discourage exclusionary regulation of resources. The model provides little support
for this hypothesis, although it directly addresses only the third part. Unpredictable
availability of forest products and high levels of dependence upon forest resources for
subsistence correspond with lower probabilities of exclusionary action. The relationships,
however, are neither substantively noteworthy nor statistically significant. Ecological risk
has been measured at the level of forest products rather than the forest as a whole; riskaversion may emerge only when ecological risk occurs at the level of the forest system.
Although the risk associated with subsistence livelihoods yielded little predictive
leverage, the dampening of economic risk associated with high levels of full-time
employment proves to be significant. More research is needed to untangle the seemingly
contradictory relationship between economic risk and strategies for regulating forest
resources.
Political Context
The existence of conflict, the presence of clearly distinctive and marginal groups,
and relations with external political authorities were expected to affect the probability
that a user group would attempt to exclude others. The model confirms the importance of
conflict and relations with external political authorities, but calls into question the
significance of distinctive or marginal groups.
Two measures distinguished between conflicts within and among user groups. It
was suggested that conflicts within groups would lower the ability to act collectively to
exclude others whereas conflicts between groups encourage efforts at exclusion to head
off political challenges. The model shows that all conflicts, whether within or between
groups, increase the probability of exclusionary action. User groups encompass
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 22
individuals with the same rights and responsibilities to a forest and its resources. As
noted above, commonality in rights does not preclude other forms of politically relevant
heterogeneity. Perhaps because the within-group measure of conflict assesses the
disruptiveness as well as the existence of conflict, it yields substantively and statistically
significant results while the between-group measure of conflict does not. A move from no
conflict to conflict disruptive of day-to-day activities corresponds with a 0.27 increase in
the likelihood of exclusionary action.
Of three measures of distinctive or marginal groups, none have substantively or
statistically significant relationships with the likelihood of exclusion, and only two have
the predicted sign. Neither the presence of mobile groups, large differences in wealth, nor
partial participation in decision-making has much bearing upon efforts to exclude others
from forest resources.
Indicators of the larger political context loom much larger. Government action to
exclude resource users from forest resources, recognized village tenure, and ambiguity in
the legal standing of harvesting forest products are all substantively and statistically
noteworthy predictors of exclusionary action. Government action to exclude people from
use of forest resources appears to preempt exclusionary action by groups of citizen who
use those resources. The likelihood of exclusionary action by a user group decreases by
0.14 when the government adopts exclusionary policies. Village tenure over the forest, on
the other hand, increases the likelihood of exclusionary action by user groups by 0.46.
Substantively, this is the most important factor other than population density.
Exclusionary actions become more probable (by 0.14) when use of forest products is
neither legally recognized nor forbidden.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 23
Robustness and Summary of Data Analysis
The key findings are robust to modifications of the model to check for biases
arising from the relational structure of the database and the uneven geographic
distribution of sites. The most important predictors of exclusionary action in the modified
model are forest size, the presence of mobile groups, village tenure, and ambiguous legal
standing of resource use. The appearance of mobile groups as statistically significant in
the modified model provides some support for the expectation that marginal groups are
particularly vulnerable to exclusion, but also suggests that indicators of marginality vary
according to the context. Population density and distance from the forest prove not to be
statistically robust predictors of exclusionary actions. Disruptive conflict remains
statistically significant, but at the weaker 0.10 standard for statistical significance. The
details are reported in the appendix.
Political factors emerge as the most substantively important and statistically
robust categories of predictors of efforts to regulate forest use through exclusion. Two of
the three most robust predictors of exclusionary action by user groups are political in
nature: village tenure over forested land and ambiguous legal status for current patterns
of resource use. The third statistically robust predictor is the size of the forest. This
relationship strongly counters expectations that the difficulty of defending larger forests
discourages exclusionary efforts. Perhaps economies of scale in forest use outweighs
diseconomies of scale in forest defense. The interaction of these opposing forces deserves
closer attention in subsequent research. Other substantively important factors include
local political conditions like disruptive conflicts and the presence of mobile groups,
demand for forest products as reflected by population density, and the existence of
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 24
government policies or actions to exclude people from forests. The statistical significance
of these relationships, however, depends upon the specification of the model.
Political Context and Strategies for Regulating Resources
Critics have repeatedly noted the prominence and limits of case studies in
research on natural resource management at the local level (Agrawal forthcoming;
Baland and Platteau 2000 [1996], 184; Bardhan and Dayton-Johnson 2000, 14; DaytonJohnson 2000, 20; Ostrom 1990, xiv-xv). The current project moves beyond both case
studies and databases constructed by coding case studies (cf., Agrawal and Yadama 1997;
Dayton-Johnson 2000). Use of the relatively large IFRI database allowed empirical
assessment of five alternative hypotheses (i.e., demand and defense, risk aversion,
conflicts, marginal groups, and political opportunity structure) and several alternative
interpretations of each hypothesis. The analysis suggests that explanations of
exclusionary tactics based on political conditions at a scale larger than the study site are
more informative than explanations based on economic value, the difficulty of defending
resources, assessments of risk, local conflicts, or the presence of marginal groups.
Instead of dismissing the relevance of local-level factors, the model evaluates the
relative influence of different aspects of each hypothesized relationship. Among
indicators of resource value, land value associated with population pressure played a
more important role than reliance on the forest for commercial activities. The alleviation
of risk through full-time wage employment more closely corresponds with exclusion than
either unpredictability of forest products or reliance on the forest for subsistence does
with the absence of exclusion. Marginality in the form of mobile groups predicts
exclusionary action better than either differences in wealth or arrangements for decision-
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 25
making that include only a fraction of resource users. Among measures of external
political context, exclusionary action by the government yielded less predictive value
than ambiguous legal standing of resource use and village tenure. These findings do not
exhaust possible interpretations of the hypotheses under consideration, but do provide
some sense of which local-level relationships have the strongest bearing upon
exclusionary actions across country settings.
My findings heighten suspicions that larger-scale context conditions local-level
decisions about resource management. Decisions about tenure over forests and the
legality of resource use generally get made at some level above the forest-using
community or set of communities. The implications are manifold. If political factors
defined at larger scales of political organization condition local strategies for resource
management to such an extent, what is the best way to conduct comparative research on
these questions? Many studies of natural resource management at the local level,
particularly those which focus on resources held in common, attempt to analyze the
relative importance of local-level variables while ignoring larger-scale political or
economic conditions. The findings presented above provide some sense of the folly of
ignoring macro-level dynamics. 12 Analyses that omit important variables produce
unreliable results. Artifacts of larger-scale conditions may appear to be significant, while
the importance of other factors may be obscured by the absence of larger-scale controls.
The importance of regional or national context raises questions about the best way
to research questions about strategies for resource management (Agrawal forthcoming).
The concern with the inequity associated with exclusion is general, validating the search
12
A comparable argument can be made about analyses at the regional or national level that ignore
dynamics at the local level
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 26
for relationships that hold across national boundaries. If strategies for resource
management are contingent upon context, patterns that hold within each context would
seem to be at least as interesting theoretically and practically as patterns that exist across
contexts. It would be important to know, for example, whether the absence of instances
of exclusion in Uganda is a product of high levels of migration and disruptions to social
organization associated with that country’s turbulent political history.
Political factors figure among the most important local-level predictors of
exclusionary actions. The influence of conflicts upon exclusionary action underlines the
inherently political nature of natural resource regulation. That redefinition of access and
distribution of resources generates political struggle comes as no surprise. The relative
unimportance of economic indicators raises another more controversial possibility.
Redefinition of rights to resources is not merely influenced by political struggles; but
seems to be motivated by political struggle (cf., Agrawal 1999, 59-60). Confirming the
generality of this dynamic requires more detailed analysis of particular cases.
This paper takes a first step in assessing the relative importance of a variety of
political and economic factors for exclusionary strategies, but many miles lie ahead. The
analysis affirms the importance of formal rights and decision-making authority. It also
confirms suspicions that inequalities in wealth provide little insight into decisions about
resource management (cf., Baland and Platteau 1999). Not all findings met expectations.
Because larger forests are thought to be more difficult to defend, exclusionary efforts
were expected to decrease with forest size. Instead, the likelihood of exclusion increased
with the size of the forest. Are marginal groups at particular risk for exclusion? Are
efforts at exclusion better understood as products of political conflict than efforts to lay
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 27
claim to valuable resources? The data are ambivalent on these points. And the findings
presented here do not address inclusive strategies for managing resource use by
regulating the distribution of a limited quantity of produce. Future research will have to
determine whether the factors most important for strategies of exclusion are also the most
important for more inclusive strategies.
With more than two options for regulating natural resources, we cannot assume
that the variables with the strongest bearing upon exclusion are also the most important
predictors of each alternative to exclusion. Risk aversion could strongly influence the
adoption of redistributive strategies, for instance, despite its weak relationship with
exclusionary efforts. I have focused on strategies of exclusion as a starting point. The
long-term goal is to understand exclusion relative to other strategies for resource
management, such as exclusion of all local resource users by the government, restricted
quantities distributed by various rules (e.g., equal share, by past use, by assets or need),
and reductions in quantities harvested that follow various rules (e.g., equal versus
proportional reductions). Exclusionary actions are not mere reflections of perceived
increases in scarcity, levels of environmental or economic risk, or the degree of
heterogeneity among forest users. These factors are important, but political relations
among groups within a community and between resource users and outside authorities are
more reliable predictors of efforts to exclude others from forest resources. Even if the
most important site-level variables depends upon the strategy for regulating resources,
political relations define the overarching context for all of these decisions.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 28
Table One: Logit Analysis of Efforts to Exclude Others from Forest Resources
Variables
Predicted
Sign
POPPRESS
+
POPPRESS2
-
COMMERCE
Coefficients
(Standard Error)
(0.0177)
2.188433
-0.0004**
(0.0002)
-4.349123
+
-0.9148
(0.8909)
-0.076721
LOSTSPECIES
+
-0.2546
(0.1517)
0.320285
SIZE
-
0.0006*
(0.0003)
0.221751
DISTANCE
-
-0.7659*
(0.3218)
-0.192695
ECORISK
-
-0.1534
(0.2422)
-0.051464
EMPLOYED
+
(0.9607)
0.217247
SUBSISTENCE
-
(0.4978)
-0.002129
CONFLICT
-
1.0647***
(0.2784)
0.267881
INTERGCONFL
+
0.7641
(0.4406)
0.071338
MOBILE
+
1.2176
(0.7678)
0.151608
WEALTHDIF
+
0.2782
(0.5154)
0.023335
PARTRULE
+
-0.7181
(0.6915)
-0.052583
GOVEXCLU
-
-1.9295***
(0.6151)
-0.143671
COMMUNITY
+
2.8477***
(0.6567)
0.462273
AMBIGLAW
+
1.3052***
(0.4059)
0.142173
Constant
N
= 353
Log-likelihood = -119.31498
Pseudo R 2
=
0.4329
0.0750***
Effect of a Change from Min.
to Max., Other Variables at Mean
2.5905**
-0.0254
-3.6068
(0.9426)
chi-squared = 182.17
Prob > chi-squared =
0.0000
Notes:
Data source: International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) database.
Six failures and 0 successes were completely determined.
Italicized variable names highlight relationships that run contrary to prediction.
*
**
***
P < 0.05
P < 0.01
P < 0.005
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 29
Appendix: Robustness of Results
Many-to-many relationships exist among user groups, forest products, and forests
in IFRI’s relational database. As a result, user groups and forests often appear more than
the once in the data, with the number of repeat appearances depending upon the number
of forests each user group uses and the number of forest products obtained from each
forest by each user group. In some sites, a single user group uses one or two forest
products from a single forest. Elsewhere, each user group may use two or more forests
for several different products. Sites with complex relationships among user groups,
products, and forests will be represented more frequently in the analysis than sites with
fewer entities and fewer relationships among entities. If independent variables are also
correlated with the complexity of the sites, the results may be misleading.
The nature of the IFRI research network presents additional sources of potential
bias. The IFRI network was launched with three collaborating research centers in 1993
and has grown over time. The database currently stores data collected in twelve countries:
Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal, Uganda,
the USA, and Tanzania. 13 The oldest centers account for a disproportionately large
number of the cases. Of 141 sites in the database, 25.5% are in Uganda, another 25.5% in
Nepal, and 16.3% in the USA. 14 Disproportional representation of countries is even
higher for some entities and relationships. Nepal, for example, accounts for 44.2% of the
user group - forest product – forest relationships that serve as cases for my analysis. If
overarching political conditions affect the likelihood of efforts to exclude others from use
13
There are thirteen centers in the IFRI network, but not all centers have existed long enough for their data
to be entered into the common database.
14
If distributed uniformly across countries, 8.3% of the sites would be located in each country.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 30
of forest resources, the uneven distribution of sites across countries with diverse political
systems and histories can be expected to affect the results. The USA is not overrepresented with 6.8% of the cases. Political and economic conditions distinguish the
USA from the other countries to such an extent, however, that it could be conceived as a
different type altogether. Uganda, where no efforts at exclusion by user groups were
recorded, presents a potential source of bias as well. Although Uganda is not unique in
having no mentions of exclusionary action for any of its sites, it accounts for a far larger
proportion of the data (16.1%) than any other such country.
To check for sensitivity to the location of sites, cases from Uganda were dropped
and dummy variables for Nepal and the USA were added to the model. Calculation of
robust standard errors corrects for clustering on a particular variable, and thus accounts
for bias emerging from the relational nature of the database. The modified model has
been calculated with standard methods and with standard errors corrected for clustering
on user groups; both sets of standard errors appear in Table Two.
[Insert Table Two about here]
The main conclusion, that political factors are the most important predictors of
exclusionary action, is not simply an artifact of the database structure or sampling. The
most important predictors of exclusionary action in the modified model are forest size,
the presence of mobile groups, village tenure, and ambiguous legal standing of resource
use. Population density, distance from the forest, and disruptive conflict fail to meet the
0.05 threshold of statistical threshold after corrections have been made for clustering on
user group, although disruptive conflict remains statistically significant at the weaker
0.10 standard.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 31
The emergence of mobile groups as statistically significant predictors of
exclusionary action represents the most important finding in Table Two. If exclusionary
action is more likely to target distinctive and marginal groups, mobile groups should be
particularly vulnerable. The original model, however, provided little support for either the
general expectation that the presence of marginal groups increases the likelihood of
exclusion or the specific expectation about the vulnerability of mobile groups. The
presence of mobile groups increased the likelihood of exclusion by 0.15, but this
relationship lacked statistical significance. Only with the exclusion of data from Uganda
and the inclusion of dummy variables for Nepal and the USA does the presence of mobile
groups take on a statistically as well as substantively significant role. The statistical
significance of the relationship survives the correction for clustering on user group.
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 32
Table Two: Logit Analysis of Efforts to Exclude Others from Forest Resources
Checking for Autocorrelation with Nepal or the USA
Dropping Cases from Uganda
Adjusting Standard Errors for Clustering on User Group
Variables
POPPRESS
Coefficients
0.0596
POPPRESS2
-0.0003
0.0002
(0.0002)
COMMERCE
-0.6222
0.9820
(2.1531)
LOSTSPECIES
-0.1848
0.1678
(0.0009)
0.0005***
(0.0009)*
SIZE
0.0022
Standard Errors
0.0193***
(Robust Standard Error)
(0.0391)
DISTANCE
-0.6832
0.3320*
(0.7267)
ECORISK
-0.1421
0.2710
(0.2024)
2.2791
1.7648
(3.0991)
-0.3646
0.6182
(1.3220)
EMPLOYED
SUBSISTENCE
CONFLICT
0.9662
0.2818***
(0.5576)
INTERGCONFL
0.0650
0.5287
(1.1827)
MOBILE
3.0739
1.0699***
(1.3320)*
WEALTHDIF
0.2259
0.5599
(1.4390)
PARTRULE
-0.6172
0.7088
(1.4611)
GOVEXCLU
-1.7928
0.6710**
(1.5348)
COMMUNITY
4.4522
1.0681***
(2.1608)*
AMBIGLAW
1.6888
0.4696***
(0.8390)*
NEPAL
2.3129
1.0215*
(2.2381)
USA
1.3882
1.4536
(3.3913)
1.3953***
(2.4480)*
Constant
-5.2039
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 33
N
= 296
For Standard Logit Model
LR chi-squared = 162.06
Log-likelihood = -108.2871
Pseudo R 2 =
0.4280
Prob > chi-squared =
0.0000
For Logit Model with Robust Standard Errors
Wald chi-squared = 39.56
Prob > chi-squared =
0.0037
Notes:
Data source: International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) database.
Six failures and 0 successes were completely determined.
Location of a site in Uganda perfectly predicts the absence of exclusionary action. To
check sensitivity of results, 57 cases from Uganda are dropped from the above analysis.
*
**
***
P < 0.05
P < 0.01
P < 0.005
POTEETE – Exclusion in forest management 34
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