Year: 1996
Type: report
Abstract: Forest policy and environmental policy amalgamate in local politics.The way in which both are accepted by the public opinion and shared in and performed as daily social life has to be referred to as the background for decisions concerning the environment.Whether it will or will not be binding for most of the members of whatever community, will be the result of the process of negotiations over socially legitimate rules of access and use.These negotiations between and within local communities in areas prone to natural calamities, scarcity and administrational neglect cannot be overrated as the foundation to come to terms of locally approved patterns of environmental management.Once this process proceeds, it will unavoidably lead to changes in national forest policies.The scope of nation-wide community forestry schemes will have been overcome in their technical and utilitarian pretensions.Thus the use of forests is a contest in a transitional period of social change and a process to identify a political legitimacy that reflects the prevalent situation of local environments as new socio-political contexts.Another prominent idea put forward by the author of this paper is the balance of power between central and local authorities and their respective legitimacy at the national and local level.The development of a political margin to enact the broadest possible scope of democratic decision-making is another important step to what a community can be, not only in a utilitarian, but in an ultimate political sense of the term.The contribution of Dr. Seeland on what is nowdays still widely perceived as community forestry, covers important aspects of forest management all over the world and in developing countries in particular.The constitution of user groups within communities raises questions whether synthetic social institutions that have been either induced or sometimes even imposed on local village communites are prone to social and/or ethnic conflicts.The legitimate access to the use of forest and forest products is disputed wherever generally accepted and paramount power structures cease to exist.Modernization in the remote hills of the Himalayas may thus mean the social and cultural evolution of appropriate codes of conduct to manage one's surroundings on the basis of a new type of mutual consent.To share a common sense on a legitimate use of a common environment across ethnic boundaries and caste barriers with respect to an agreed mode of consumption could be one step forward towards sustainable resource management.F. Schmithüsen
Author: Seeland, Klaus
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1594123979