Abstract
Research on community-based management system has been often
grounded on monolithic institutional, social and ecological perspective with
focus on the commoners as the only local actor, collective territorial rights as
the only local tenure system, and the managed resource unit or ecosystem as
the only contested resource driving collective action. However, CBMSs are
embedded in local social-ecological systems usually characterized by multiple
ruling systems, different local groups, and heterogeneous ecological systems. In
this paper I discuss how the floodplain tenure system is negotiated and rearranged
between two local groups – community residents and large landholders. This
complex and dynamic arrangement comprises three layers of property rights
which are combined according to changing ecological and social context. Based
on longitudinal empirical data spanning 20 years of research, I describe the
history of contemporary human occupation, and the most recent socioeconomic
and institutional changes in the region in order to unpack the dynamics of the
floodplain tenure in the region. I conclude that assumptions that integration of local
management system into a formal legal framework suffices to achieve an efficient
co-management system is rather simplistic. Despite major structural changes in
the formal tenure framework, power relations between different local users may
remain unchanged unless local perceptions and everyday life practices of power
relations are changed. Unpacking the multiple ruling systems and everyday life
practices that mediate interactions between different local actors is fundamental
to understanding how the commons are appropriated at the local level. Therefore,
a local contextualization of the social and ecological structure is crucial to reveal
potential barriers to the development of an inclusive and sustainable production
system.