Co-management in a landscape of resistance : The political ecology of wildlife management in Western Alaska

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

IntroductionIn many parts of the world, local communities with long histories of occupancy developed local systems of land tenure, ecological knowledge and resource use that continue to the present (Berkes 1989; Bromley 1992; Freeman and Carbyn 1988; McCay and Acheson 1987). For many such communities, however, interactions with state structures for resource control are increasingly unavoidable.1 With the rise of the global economy, centralized governments have asserted control over previously ignored hinterland areas. Through the assertion of state claims to land and resources, previously autonomous communities have become encapsulated within the political economy of modern nation states (Feit 1988). As a result, pure communal resource management is no longer possible in many places (Berkes 1989; McCay and Acheson 1987; Ostrom 1990).In Arctic North America, as well as in many parts of the developing world, co-management has emerged as the dominant strategy for resolving resource conflicts and building partnerships in conservation and management between local communities and government agencies. Co-management (also called co-operative management) has been highly effective in some cases where neither local management nor exclusive government control provides for sustainable and equitable common property management. Co-management has thus become one of the principle means by which formerly isolated or autonomous communities are linked, or manage their linkages, to nation states.Co-management refers to decentralized institutional arrangements involving the sharing of management responsibilities between community-level and state-level actors (Osherenko 1988; Pinkerton 1989). Pinkerton (1992: 331) defines it as sharing in the exercise of resource management between a government agency and a community or organization of stakeholders, while Osherenko's (1988) definition focusses on the formal dimensions of this approach, stating that co-operative agreements between government agencies and user groups apply to a specific species and/or a geographic region and include:1. A system of rights and obligations for those interested in the resource;2. A collection of rules indicating actions that subjects are expected to take under various circumstances;3. Procedures for making collective decisions affecting the interest of government actors, use organizations and individual users (ibid: 94).Since regulators and resource users at both local and national levels must frequently interact, co-management agreements can be viewed as a process of institutionalizing the de facto interdependence which exists between local users and authorities and state-level authorities and the users they authorize (McCay and Acheson 1987). Over the past decade a growing body of literature has analyzed successful examples of the co-management or cooperative management of common property resources (Lloyd 1986; Marks 1991; Pinkerton 1989; Richard and Pike 1993; Usher 1991). These studies have shown that in some cases, local users are able to increase their influence over the management of resources upon which they depend, while government agencies realize the benefits of reduced social conflict and greater user compliance with regime rules (Pinkerton 1989).This paper examines the evolution, structure and operation of co-operative management systems for caribou and brown bear in Alaska through the lens of political ecology. After a brief overview of political ecology and the social and ecological contexts of Western Alaska, I examine first the origins of resource conflicts which precede co-management, and secondly how the emergence of new institutional arrangements alters existing power relationships and property regimes in both formal and informal arenas. I argue that these joint management institutions can be best understood within the context of a history of competing claims to wildlands and wildlife, local repertoires of resistance and divergent perceptions of animals and their ecology. …