Sustainable Eco-Management: Participatory Mechanisms and Institutions

Beneficiary participation is a special form of decentralized development management where all stakeholders would play an active role and enjoy equal status in the process of decision making and execution. The programs are mostly motivated by the livelihood approach with high values attached to an enhanced access to social capital. However, it has been shown by many social scientists that though the participatory approach is conceptually more democratic, its success potential is highly dependent on the local conditions. This chapter draws on a number of studies conducted between 2007 and 2014 on different rural, peri-urban and urban pockets of the state of West Bengal, India, focusing on ecologically sustainable management of natural resource and the environment like social forestry, wetland fisheries and municipal solid waste disposal in a co-management framework with active beneficiary participation. Since the contexts are distinct, there was variation in the notion of sustainable management itself and so was the composition of the stakeholder groups. All these studies were conducted to explore the context-specificity of the success probability of co-management practices in different situations. We documented particularly two different situations where otherwise suitable projects for participatory resource management failed to attain the intended result due to some peculiarities of the cases related to the presence of some built-in contradictions either in the composition of the stakeholder group leading to a deviation in the equal participation norms or in the regulatory setup comprising multiple authorities with inherent jurisdictional conflicts.