Institutional analysis of enabling conditions for sustainable management of common-pool resources: empirical evidence from participatory forest management of Ethiopia

During the last decades, it has become evident that the conventional resource-centered, protectionist approach to natural resource management has failed to sustain the resource system and unable to contribute to the livelihoods of those most immediately affected by conservation outcomes. The increased recognition of the incapability and incompetence of the classical natural resource management model, together with the growing demand for environmental conservation, urged policy-makers and practitioners to shift to a participatory approach that can balance social, environmental, and economic objectives. Within this wider global move toward participatory and grass-root development, the government of Ethiopia and some non-governmental organizations initiated participatory approach to forest management in the late 1990s. The scheme recruited local communities living in and around the forest as partners in joint resource management. Other than the general intuition that the new approach is promising both for the resources and resource dependent communities, systematical analysis of the outcomes of the interventions, the relationships between intervention and outcome variables, and the role of socio-political and economic context within which the system is operating, is missing. However, this knowledge is highly valuable both for practitioners to successfully implement the strategy and for scholars to develop explanatory models to better explain the connection between intervention and outcome variables. This thesis, thus, diachronically analyzed how institutional intervention variables or enabling conditions influence outcome variables (success of the institution). The study revealed that the success of participatory approach in common-pool resource management depends on intervention and moderator variables. These variables are characterized by: levels of actors' participation in designing the common institution, the fairness and objectivity of the rule governing the institution, the credibility of monitors executing the rules, clear property right regime, the strength and reliability of wider legal and political environment, and the trustful relation between actors working together. For this study, cooperation between actors to fulfill the common objective, which is measured in terms of actors' compliance to the common rule, actors' commitment to fulfill the common goal, and actors' long term plant and investment on the common, is used as proxy for successful common resource management regimes. The study concludes that development initiatives or common-pool resource institution that adequately entertains those intervention and moderator variables are sustainable and are sustainable and are likely to sustain the resource the resource system and improve the livelihood of the resource dependent communities.