School of Environment and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
Environ Manage. 2013 Mar;51(3):571-85. doi: 10.1007/s00267-012-0008-2. Epub 2013 Jan 10.
When central governments decentralize natural resource management (NRM), they often retain an interest in the local efforts and provide funding for them. Such outside investments can serve an important role in moving community-based efforts forward. At the same time, they can represent risks to the community if government resources are not stable over time. Our focus in this article is on the effects of withdrawal of government resources from community-based NRM. A critical question is how to build institutional capacity to carry on when the government funding runs out. This study compares institutional survival and coping strategies used by community-based project organizations in two different contexts, India and the United States. Despite higher links to livelihoods, community participation, and private benefits, efforts in the Indian cases exhibited lower survival rates than did those in the U.S. cases. Successful coping strategies in the U.S. context often involved tapping into existing institutions and resources. In the Indian context, successful coping strategies often involved building broad community support for the projects and creatively finding additional funding sources. On the other hand, the lack of local community interest, due to the top-down development approach and sometimes narrow benefit distribution, often challenged organizational survival and project maintenance.
当中央政府将自然资源管理（NRM）权力下放时，他们通常仍对地方的努力感兴趣，并为此提供资金。这种外部投资可以在推动社区为基础的努力方面发挥重要作用。但与此同时，如果政府资源随时间不稳定，它们也可能给社区带来风险。我们在本文中的重点是研究政府资源从社区自然资源管理中撤出的影响。一个关键问题是，当政府资金耗尽时，如何建立继续运作的机构能力。本研究比较了印度和美国两个不同背景下社区项目组织使用的制度生存和应对策略。尽管印度案例与生计、社区参与和私人利益的联系更紧密，但与美国案例相比，其生存比例较低。在美国背景下，成功的应对策略通常涉及利用现有的机构和资源。在印度背景下，成功的应对策略通常涉及为项目争取广泛的社区支持，并创造性地寻找额外的资金来源。另一方面，由于自上而下的发展方式和有时狭窄的利益分配，缺乏当地社区的兴趣，常常对组织的生存和项目的维护构成挑战。
