Catalyzing self-governance: Addressing multi-faceted collective action dilemmas in densely settled agrarian landscapes

This paper summarizes lessons learnt from efforts to pilot institutional innovations to address locally salient natural resource management challenges in the eastern African highlands, where dense human settlement and steep slopes lead to a tight coupling of interactions among adjacent land users, landholdings and property regimes. The collective action problems present in these heterogeneous landscapes include common pool resource dilemmas, as well as other “commons-like problems” involving shared or intertwined interests that cut across a range of property regimes. By creatively embedding design principles derived from long-enduring common property regimes into facilitation strategies, solutions to longstanding, relatively intractable resource management challenges (e.g. pest management, erosion) were forged through collective choice arrangements. Solutions involved not just restricting access and creating incentives for users to invest in a shared resource (e.g., through clear allocation of rights and duties), but negotiating creative solutions to match provisioning with diverse forms of benefit or to minimize/offset losses that would otherwise accrue from efforts to minimize harm to others. The paper’s contributions are threefold. First, it illustrates how self-governance is not just a feature of long-enduring common property regimes, but may be catalyzed in many situations in which it is absent. It also illustrates the applicability of Ostrom’s design principles in a complex and heterogeneous landscapes involving a diversity of natural resource forms, tenure regimes and collective action problems. Finally, it illustrates the crucial importance of bringing an institutional lens to bear on classic “technological” challenges such as soil erosion control, pest management and loss of on-farm biodiversity.