jp8589 WRI.qxd - World Resources Institute

WORLD RESOURCES 2005
also common in forests, such as India’s Joint Forestry
Management agreements, where communities are granted
limited management and use rights on state forest lands. The
challenge for co-management regimes is to assure that the
state cedes sufficient rights and authority to local communities
but does not abandon them, leaving the communities
without proper support.
5. Accounting for the scale challenge. Inherent in the
management of ecosystems is the problem of scale.
Ecosystems can exist simultaneously at different scales, from
a forest block in a single watershed to interconnected forest
tracts extending a thousand kilometers. Sustaining ecosystems
requires keeping in mind the interconnections between
these scales, from micro to macro. Forest management
in one community’s watershed may affect downstream
communities and adjacent forests. Local communities
cannot be expected to manage well at this macroscale, and
thus the state retains an essential role here. This means
helping to coordinate management plans in adjacent
communities—and across the nation—so that they do
not conflict or overemphasize a single kind of use
(Shyamsundar et al. 2004:20). The state also has an
oversight responsibility to make sure that local management
aligns with national environmental laws, and even with
international treaties such as the Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).
6. Monitoring and enforcement. Good ecosystem management
relies on keeping harvest activities, tourist use, or
other impacts within the ecosystem’s tolerances. This in
turn demands an attempt to monitor the state of the ecosystem
or the intensity of the impacts so that management
decisions can reflect conditions on the ground. It also
demands enforcement of the community’s harvest or use
rules and the prevention of illegal logging, fishing, or other
encroachment on the resource. Communities can often
develop monitoring and enforcement capabilities, and, in
fact, this is one area of group participation that can become
a source of empowerment, as community members develop
scientific skills or volunteer as forest guards or game
wardens. But for transboundary monitoring or enforcement
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