The Economics of Desertification, Land Degradation, and Drought

Institutions for Land Management: What Matters, Why, and How to Improve?
Based on aforementioned layers of institutions and groups of actors, and building on earlier
discussions of the causes of DLDD (Section 3), this section will discuss (i) which incentive structures
matter for actors, (ii) what policies are most affecting DLDD, and (iii) how to approach institutional
design for better outcomes.
Box 4.2—Customary institutions matter: An example from the Maasai in East Africa and
Buddhists in Burma
The Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania
The Maasai have a unique, environmentally friendly custom that sets them apart from surrounding communities
in East Africa. The Maasai are pastoral communities with strong traditional livelihoods, and they have outlived
the onslaught of modernity. One of the strong features of the Maasai tradition is that they do not eat wild game
meat (Asiema and Situma 1994) or cut a live tree. This shows their strong environmentally friendly tradition,
which other surrounding communities do not have. Before the colonial period, the Maasai lived in what are now
game parks and harmoniously shared the ecosystem services with wildlife. The Maasai regard trees as
landmarks of water sources, cattle routes, and medicinal herbs (Ole-Lengisugi 1998). This is one of the reasons
that the government of Tanzania allows only the Maasai to live in the game parks.
The Green Monks of Burma
One of the Buddhists’ key tenets of environmental friendliness is their compassion toward all living beings. This
tenet, called metta, states that all Buddhists should abstain from destroying any living being (Nardi 2005). Due
to this, Burma (Myanmar) is one of the countries in Asia and Oceania that have largest forested area; the others
are China, Australia, Indonesia, and India (FAO 2011). However, recent economic hardships have led to
deforestation in Burma. From 1990 to 2000, the deforestation rate was 1.2 percent; this rate fell to 0.9 percent
during 2000–2010, which is more than twice the deforestation rate of 4 percent in Southeast Asia (FAO 2011).
How to Improve Institutional Design to Lower DLDD
Having discussed different areas of policy affecting DLDD, which policy and institutional design is
most appropriate for enhancing the role of institutions to address DLDD?
Decentralization, Involvement of Local Communities, and Capacity Building
One of the major reasons behind the failure of centralized governments to effectively manage land
resources is the lack of involvement of local communities in managing and benefiting from natural
resources and the financial resources for managing resources (Gibson, Williams, and Ostrom 2005).
This exclusion creates alienation, which in turn leads to poor cooperation between local communities
and natural resource managers. Therefore, the aim is that local people should participate jointly in
problem identification and in the design of culturally appropriate and sustainable solutions.
Participatory approaches usually imply active engagement of local people and agencies that goes
beyond eliciting the views of individuals, extending to processes of interactive dialogue, collective
learning, and joint action. This type of approach values local knowledge in addition to the usual
scientific and technical knowledge. A participatory approach may help deal with the complexity of
land management decisions through the use of more creative tools and techniques, rather than through
centralized management, which tends to have limited local knowledge and, in developing countries,
limited human and financial resources to enforce natural resource management regulations.
In some instances, decentralization efforts took center stage in efforts to address the poor
management of natural resources by central governments take place (Agrawal and Ribot 1999; Devas
and Grant 2003), which is a recognition of the role of local communities and their institutions. A longterm
study that examined the effectiveness of various forms of institutional settings to manage forest
resource, conducted by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI), generally
observed that locally managed forest resources are better managed than centrally managed forest
resources (Ostrom and Nagendra 2006). It is estimated that about one-quarter of forests in developing
countries are under some form of community-based forest management (FAO 2011; CIFOR 2008).
The share of community-based managed forests is also increasing due to decentralization efforts and
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