 Welcome back. Thank you also for your responses to the questions about environmental laws. We move on. So, today that is this session and one more session that I am going to take on Monday will be focused on issues relating to institutions, governance and common property resources. These relate to some of these topics mentioned in the UGC syllabus for environmental studies that is in the first unit on institutions in environment, people in environment. The idea of the issues related to human wildlife conflict, citizen actions and action groups part of which I have already explained to you in terms of the social movements and conflicts because those are also related to the actions by citizens to both change laws and to force the government to take back certain actions which degrade the environment, waste land reclamation which somebody mentioned earlier as well. Issues related to community, biodiversity and intellectual property rights because these also relate to common property resources and finally the concept of common property resources which is increasingly becoming very important both for environmental management and for development issues. Now, what do we mean by institutional issues in environmental management? Because in some of the units in the UGC syllabus the role of an individual in addressing environmental problems is specifically raised. While individuals do have a role especially in terms of how each one of us as individuals modifies his or her lifestyle, consumption pattern, what position we take with reference to environment does impact in the long run, how we set an example to others in terms of not exploiting the environment or degrading the environment or not polluting the environment and so on. However, the environmental crisis today the problems of environmental degradation and pollution is so vast and huge that we require a very large number of formal and informal institutions from the local to the global level to manage environmental problems effectively. So, we see that those societies, regions, countries, cities, villages are more effective in managing environmental problems if they have good institutions to manage these problems and over hundreds of years all societies have evolved or developed different institutional models for environmental management and to prevent degradation now to promote sustainability. By institutions we refer to laws, rules and regulations as well as bodies that is formal legally sanctioned bodies state bodies such as the national green tribunal or it could be the judiciary, it could be the environment protection authority and so on. So, human beings have always tried to set up various kinds of institutional models to address environmental problems because the problems are vast and human beings need to cooperate and work together and have some kind of a consensus on what to do to prevent environmental problems. So, what I am going to do now is to firstly give you a few examples from history up to the contemporary time about how different societies at different points of time have attempted to address or have failed to address environmental problems with what success and what lessons we can draw from them. There are of course many examples one could give due to lack of time I am only giving you four. One is from the work of the historian Karl Wittfogel who wrote this book called Oriental Despotism where one of the things he was trying to understand was why democracy as a political system emerged first in western societies and not in Asia or Africa and he related political systems to environmental issues. So, he was saying that in Asia particularly in countries like India what a supply for irrigation was a problem, rainfall is not perennial rainfall is very variable in many parts it does not rain at all even if it rains it is very uncertain the rainfall is of a small quantity you cannot depend on rainfall alone for agriculture as for example in parts of Europe where there is plenty of rainfall and there is therefore perennial rivers because of the pattern of rainfall partly we do not always have perennial flow in many of our rivers. So, providing water for irrigation has always been very important for societies like India and other parts of Asia. On the other hand there are also some rivers which flood year after year. So, flood control and water supply for irrigation were both important issues and if you go back to history you know the rains of Akbar and Ashoka and many of our rulers you see all of them were in fact concerned with these kinds of issues. But in the past in the medieval period say 500 years ago or 1000 years ago it was very expensive to provide irrigation to farmers on a very large scale. So, he talks about a hydraulic civilization where there has to be a very strong dictatorial authoritarian ruler who is able to extract a lot of money from the poor and the middle and rich peasants and channelize that money to create irrigation systems on a very large scale in countries like China or India or Mexico, Peru, Egypt and so on or Iraq what was called as Mesopotamia earlier. So, if democracy emerged then the poor may question why so much money should be spent on irrigation when their other needs are being met when they are not benefiting from irrigation. So, this kind of a questioning would emerge and it would be difficult to maintain these kinds of complex irrigation and water management systems. So, his argument is that a lot of forced labor was required a lot of extraction of money was required from the poor and everybody else to maintain these irrigation systems that is one of the reasons why democracy did not emerge. So, what you see here is a connection between the lack of emergence of democracy in societies like India in Asia in general and the need to harness water as a resource for particular sections of the population which is a small section of the population. Now, one can draw lessons from this that the modern imperative the modern thrust on participation in decision making comes from the lessons we have learnt earlier where in the absence of democracy resources could be appropriated for a very small section of the population. If there was participation then probably a different kind of irrigation system may have emerged which was less exploitative, there was less forced labor and maybe not as large scale. So, in India what he mentions is that in the northern parts of India there were these large irrigation systems whereas, in the southern part of India there was small scale irrigation systems and one can also see from history that there were more social reform movements in south of India rather than north of India. So, there was a thrust towards democracy even if it was linked to religion there were lot of anti-cast movements and so on. Second is the Mayan civilization. So, the Mayans were an ancient civilization in central and south America one of the richest civilizations in the world many of the modern inventions in many fields come from them the wheel that is so important to us for transportation and all kinds of machinery was first invented in this civilization. So, this civilization suddenly collapsed a few hundred years ago and was completely conquered by the Europeans especially the Spanish. So, many people ask why is it that such a rich civilization which came up with so many important discoveries in science technology in philosophy in language and so on collapsed. So, Jared Diamond who has studied these kinds of cases his two books are mentioned there on the screen he says that the inability of the Mayan civilization to manage the environmental crisis resulted in their collapse. So, he says the Mayans were too successful. So, they were rich everybody was able to afford all kinds of goods. So, everybody built large houses palaces for themselves there was a lot of consumption all of this happened at a cost. So, lot of trees had to be cut to build houses wooden houses palaces a lot of work trees had to be cut for fuel wood trees had to be cut for their cattle for feeding fodder and so on. So, because of the prosperity there was rapid environmental degradation deforestation happened as a result of deforestation soil erosion took place increased flooding happened crops by getting destroyed there was a scarcity of food when all this happened instead of addressing this environmental problem they began to fight with each other to grab resources income food gold from each tribe from each other. This warfare between the different groups within the Mayans it weakened them and made it much easier for the Europeans to come and conquer them and take over their civilization. Now, let us take a contrary example from Japan. So, Japan also similarly went through a long period of warfare between various groups which also resulted in lot of deforestation because a lot of forests and trees had to be cut to be used by the armies for various purposes. Japan is a cold country for heating for cooking for building forts and all kinds of things. However, in the 18th century after over 150 years of civil war the Tokugowa Shoguns it was a dynasty which came to power and they assured in a period of peace which resulted in economic growth because warfare had stopped temporarily. So, there was an economic growth there was population explosion there was rapid urbanization. So, lot of trees had to be cut for firewood fuel wood for construction of palaces cities for fertilizers and so on. So, lot of burning of trees and other things happened. But the Tokugowa Shoguns unlike the Mayan rulers were more wise they came up with both negative and positive responses to this environmental crisis. They started new kinds of plantations of for which would trees which would grow very fast for constructing their houses. So, even if trees were cut they could regrow them again. They did research even 300 years ago to come up with more fuel-efficient stoves and heaters. They also turned to coal as a source of energy instead of firewood and they did significant afforestation programs by planting thousands and millions of acres of forests. So, the Shogun dynasty and Japanese farmers they took a long term view which is what sustainable development is about. So, today you see Japan is a country which has one of the highest densities of population in the world. So, yesterday we were talking about population growth and how we should be cautious in not blaming it on environmental crisis. So, Japan of all countries in the world though their population is less than that of India it is a small country the density is very high. But yet 70 percent of Japan is still under forest cover whereas in India it is less than 25 percent. So, what we see is that in response to the crisis of deforestation the Japanese were able to address the problem through policy mechanisms through institutions rules regulations appropriate governance responses and so on. Let me take up one other positive example from the current period. This is the case of Cuba. As you all know Cuba is one of the last remaining communist countries in the world. Till the early 1990s Cuba was dependent on a lot of chemical fertilizers for its agriculture. Cuba along with India they are the two top sugar producing countries in the world. But this sugar production which is the mainstay of their economy was based on using very high doses of chemical fertilizers. Now chemical fertilizers as you know are very expensive but they could get them very cheap because Russia which was Soviet Union at that time was giving them petrochemicals at very low prices at very subsidized prices. But once socialism collapsed in Russia it became a democratic capitalist country. They stopped exporting petrochemicals and chemical fertilizers to Cuba at low prices. So then the Cuban agriculture faced a severe crisis that they had no access to fertilizers their production was going down they were not able to feed themselves and farmers were out of employment. So Cuba attempted to reform its agricultural system away from chemical fertilizers which as we know is unsustainable it is polluting to the soil and water they turned to organic farming. So Cuba today even though it is a small country is has the single largest nationwide experiment in organic agriculture which contributes to sustainability issues. So from conventional or chemical based agriculture they transform themselves to organic farming. So it is the first country in the world today to address food production and doing it in a sustainable way producing safe nutritious food. In fact they have been so successful that they are even producing enough food in the cities which are exported to other places. So normally we see that cities import food, cities consume food, cities do not produce food which is why I was arguing on the first day that the concept of sustainable urbanization is an oxymoron. You can have sustainability or urbanization you cannot have both but Cuba has proved this wrong that cities on small kitchen gardens cooperative plots in parks gardens and so on they produce enough food to not only feed the city population but also to export food. So generally we see if you go to a supermarket in India to buy organic vegetables or fruits you find they are more expensive that is because there are a lot of certification issues involved which is very expensive and also because the amount of research done on organic agriculture the amount of money we invest in organic agriculture research is very very small and tiny compared to the amount of money every country spends on chemical agriculture. So the productivity is still not gone to that high but Cuba has shown that if there is a political will you can actually invest in research on organic agriculture and make it pay you can produce cheap good quality nutritious food. So there is this YouTube video called organoponico organoponico means it refers to the organic farming cooperatives which has led to an agricultural revolution. So you can see in response to an agricultural environmental crisis they responded positively and were able to transition to a sustainable form of agriculture. I mean in addition to these kinds of examples one of the issues in India especially has been about what kind of an approach we should follow in respond to in terms of governance of natural resources. Now if we look at large scale natural disasters brought about by climate change we know that localized decentralized kind of governance to this does not really work. You need very strong governments with large armies of disaster management experts. We need a lot of environmental experts scientists technologies to come together to avoid these kinds of disasters. So you do need some kind of a bureaucratic top-down approach in some cases but there are other kinds of environmental issues where decentralization works. So we know that in India in 1993 after the 73rd amendment to the constitution the Panchayats the village Panchayats have been given more powers more administrative powers financial powers powers to take decisions and so on. And the village natural resources including wasteland pasture grassland water bodies they have their control has been given to the Panchayats. So there are two videos here two examples from Maharashtra which are very famous which tell us how decentralized and participatory environmental management can lead us towards sustainable development. The first is relating to Anna Hazare of course today Anna Hazare is famous for his anti-corruption movement but he initially became famous for his work on watershed management in his village Ralehgana Siddhi in Ahmednagar district. So this village is located in the rain shadow area of Maharashtra of the of the not southwest monsoon. It does not get more than 6 inches of rainfall about 15 centimeters of rainfall in a year. So it is a typical drought prone area and farmers were very poor there was a lot of out migration a lot of poverty literacy and so on. So this video made by the CSC Center for Science and Environment in Delhi it shows how using decentralized participatory decision making that is using the village Panchayats to make decisions they were able to use government funds to effectively green the village. So in the interview Anna Hazare mentions how the same schemes of the government work better when there is participation whereas before it was not working well. They did not spend any extra money they did not have any additional scheme the same government schemes with the same money were made to work better when there is participation by the people whereas it did not work before. The two issues that are mentioned in that video include number one the watershed management where they ensure that water is available throughout the year for drinking and irrigation with only 15 centimeters of rainfall in a year and secondly about how they managed to convert a lot of wasteland which is barren and they managed to grow a lot of fodder crops for the cattle and sheep goat while for the domestic animals. The second is a village called Hivre Bazar which is also you know at one point of time it became so famous that there were bus loads and car loads of people going there to see their success okay they got so fed up about with this. So it is this is a again video which is made by the local youth of the village themselves so it is not a very do not expect current Johar kind of video so it is made using simple language and simple techniques. So they talk about how using the 73rd amendment using the Panchayati Raj act the village people were able to take decisions to use government funds more effectively for all kinds of resource management. So this is cited there are many studies which show this as one of the best examples of what is called as CBNRM that is community based natural resource management okay for water for pasture forest agriculture and so on. So in different ways they were able to use the resources more effectively and ensure that resource the ecosystem does not collapse the resources do not get degraded and they are sustainable over a long period of time. So coming to the conceptual issues so these are all examples that I have given you you can use these examples in your class or you can look for similar examples to project a relationship between the form of governance that is what kind of how are resources to be governed what kind of institutions are required top down from below participatory non-participatory and so on and what is the impact on environment and in your own villages and neighborhoods and cities you can also see whether what is the practice with reference to environmental management whether it is successful or not. So we come to some of the conceptual or theoretical issues which we can then begin to teach the students once we give them certain case studies or examples. So the question is how do human beings interact with ecosystems to maintain long term sustainable resources because the fact that humans depend on the environment for their lives is a given it cannot be avoided but how do you do it in a way that you do not over exploit resources or there are the resource yields what we get from the environment from the ecosystem is sustainable in the long term. So with reference to that we come to the question of management or regulation of a resource and ownership is it good if government owns all resources is it best if panchayats have more control is it best if you hand over ownership of resources to private agencies or institutions which one is best for sustainability which one leads to more pollution or degradation. So those kinds of questions issues one can make the students think. So this is where we introduce the students to the issue of the commons or the common property resources or what is also referred to as common pool resources. So the acronym is CPR. CPR may stand for common pool resources or common property resources or we just simply refer to them as commons. So which one is efficient? So common pool resources or CPRs can refer to the resources that are mentioned here that is water irrigation systems pasture or grazing land forest fisheries oil fields minerals and so on. So these are resources that are available they may be owned by private entities but they may also be owned in common by a group of people by a city by a village by a country and so on. Now there has been some debates about the usefulness or efficacy of identifying a resource as commons managing a resources commons as opposed to private or government ownership and then see whether that is better for avoiding environmental crisis or is it worst. So 1968 an American economist called Gareth Hardin wrote this book called the tragedy of the commons in which he mentions that if resources are not owned either by the government or by an individual or by a private agency there is likely to be over exploitation and it will lead to the ruin of all. So here you can see Gareth Hardin is saying freedom in commons brings ruin to all and here he mentions ruin is the destination towards which all men rush each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. So what he is saying is if nobody owns a resource everybody will try to maximize his or her interest. So you take a pond a lake in which many fishing community fishing households do fishing. So each person each fisher will think I should fish as much as possible because this does not belong to anybody there is no rule the more I fish the more profits there are for me and everybody will try to do this in a few years there will be no fish that will lead to the tragedy of the commons where the resources the resource gets degraded completely or you take forest as a common the forest patch everybody will try to cut a tree gather branches or use the forest in other ways because it does not belong to anybody everybody will try to maximize his or benefit her benefit from the resource and over a point of time the resource will get depleted this is what Gareth Hardin said in that book however subsequently there was very extensive criticism of this view because they said Gareth Hardin confused the concept of free rider with the concept of the commons what free rider means is the examples that I gave you where anybody can enter and take something from a resource without giving anything back without planting trees without replenishing fisheries they do not have to manage the resource at all but that is not the commons the commons refers to a system of governance where the people using a resource come together decide on some common rules and regulations so I was telling you this example earlier of how fishing communities in many parts of India have a monsoon ban on fishing because if you continue to do fishing during the monsoon it really leads to the ruin of all so this is not a free rider problem this is an issue where people have come together to say that we will have certain restraints we will have certain limits likewise in forestry there will be a restriction on how many trees a family can cut how much of fallen firewood you can gather and so on and also in terms of duties that if you cut a tree you have to plant one you have to plant two three and so on so in the common pool resource system there are rules and regulations about limits to resource use and also about maintaining it so Gareth Hardin did not distinguish between the two issues free rider and open access free rider leads to overuse and exploitation commons does not lead to this okay now this we will learn using by looking at a short two minute animation video before that there is this cartoon here which shows the tragedy problem where there are these different cattle owners and each of them is saying there is a lot of grass here so I am going to have more cows and buffaloes and then they think they were going to double their profits triple their profits so they buy more cows and buffaloes they let them graze and one or two years there is no grass the grassland or pasture is exhausted and there is a tragedy environmental tragedy there here all of them have to move somewhere else or lose their main source of income but that is a free rider problem what is the difference between this and commons that we will see in this short video in this you can see that they talk about other kinds of commons as well including internet information and is that came out very strongly in the work of Eleanor Ostrom who won the 2009 Nobel prize in economics the first woman to win this prize in economics in fact so in her work she looked at how ecosystems maintain long term sustainable resource yields so she was looking for success stories that when there are there is so much of environmental degradation takes place where people are able to manage the resources what explains that so she found that around the world there is a multiplicity of governance in some cases government works well some cases private ownership works well in some cases that is a very large number of cases communities come together to develop their own rules of regulation to manage the resource without the government or the private sector so people develop rules norms about how to use resources or the limit use of resources institutions principles and so on so this her for her work on common school resources she won the Nobel prize and one of the interesting things about her work which you can also tell through this is that unlike many other economic theory which developed on the basis of research in western society Eleanor Ostrom was among the few who also did research outside of America and you are a team fact team to India many times worked with collaborators in India in other part of the world to study the common pool resource so that makes her ideas much more interesting relevant to us that will appeal to us so at this point I want to show a short interview with her where she explained to us what is her idea of common pool resources so I want to stress on three points that emerge from this interview with professor Eleanor Ostrom one is in a common pool resource it is hard to exclude people from a resource so that is why there needs to be rules and regulations about can access a resource so if it is a fishing village for example whether people from other villages can do fishing there or if this fishing community from one village can go somewhere else and this happens because of the second point that she mentioned about the problem of boundary that in the case of certain kinds of common pool resources like water bodies you cannot draw boundary so the Arabian Sea or the Indian Ocean it is difficult to draw boundary that is why you have Indian fishermen crossing over to Sri Lanka Sri Lankan fishers crossing over to India likewise with India and Pakistan and so on so but then because it is open it is possible technically and theoretically for others to come in therefore there needs to be regulations and rules about who can access a resource otherwise it will lead to the open free rider problem and number three she is not saying that common pool resources are the only solution to sustainably managing resources she says sometimes government intervention is necessary and will work sometimes private sector will be efficient but in many cases common pool resources also work effectively so what she is trying to say is that the world over we only recognize the government and the legal system only recognize government ownership or private ownership whereas there is this other form of ownership and management of resource which is present in thousands and thousands of resources around the world and millions of people depend on common pool resources whereas officially many countries in the world do not recognize it they do not have laws and regulations for it to some extent it is coming now so the forest rights act recognition of people's rights to the forest is a recognition of the forest as a common pool resource to which people have access likewise in some states like Haryana and Rajasthan the village commons that is pasture or grassland for cattle or a village pond has been designated as a commons and is managed by the panchayat does not belong to any particular individual so gradually this is also coming in before I proceed further I just wanted to know if any of you have any questions or clarifications about this idea of the commons because it is not though this concept has been there with us for 40 50 years and is very popular among in environmental studies it is not a concept that is used that is familiar to most people teaching environmental studies so if some of you want to ask me a question or want greater clarity on this idea of the commons please ask me now okay we go to HCTM college where is this in Haryana yes I can hear you good evening sir I am saying that as we have discussed in tragedy of the commons similar is the case in Haryana that is the common resources with the ponds or the pasture lands are continuously degrading sir yes due to over exploitation of these resources by the common people so is there any legislation to protect these resources sir yes yes I got your question good evening sir what could be the what could be the difference between that common pool resources and public resources sir one question is there if we implement 100 percent environmental laws in India then can we stop the degradation of environment if we strictly implement the laws okay is it possible sir thank you for those questions we will go back to the presentation any further questions please send them to me we will take them from a view also one is very good question from Haryana because we see that despite the presence of policies identifying and recognizing commons or common pool resources still they are getting degraded in fact there is a lot of research which shows that the poor people are more dependent on the commons and the degradation of the commons affects the poor more some of the research on farmers suicides also talk about this that earlier if there was a drought or a crop failure farmers could get something at least from the commons but once the commons is privatized or it degrades that kind of a safety mechanism is not present anymore for the poor therefore you know there are all these kinds of distress migration suicides and so on which happens so coming back to this question of why is it that despite the policies the degradation is happening and how to protect it so there are several reasons for this one of course is that despite the presence of policies they are not implemented or not implemented properly especially with reference to maintaining a resource so the when the commons degrades when the commons becomes a free rider that is instead of implementing rules and regulations about how many heads of cattle you can have which you can let out into the pasture or how many days you can let your cattle graze if you do not implement those rules rules and regulations then the commons degrades or if you do not make the local cattle owners participate in making sure that the grass grows again in seeding the grass and so on in growing fodder plants then the commons tend to degrade again somebody has to take the responsibility for the commons not just designate an area legally as commons so actual functioning as a commons is necessary a third reason which has come out of research in Haryana and Rajasthan is that the common pool resources like pasture is attached to a particular village now many of the owners of sheep and goat these are pastoral or nomadic communities so there is work by Anil Agarwal and Rita Brara of Delhi University which shows this so these groups are nomadic they do not belong to one particular village before the coming into existence of these laws they could negotiate with the local village community about letting their sheep graze on these village lands once in a year so they will graze for one week then move on to another village and so on with the coming into existence of these laws what has actually happened is the laws have completely ignored the needs of these nomadic groups so only the needs of the village community is recognized the village has a right to say no to these nomadic groups because of which the nomadic groups are forced to illegally extract let their sheep graze on this land or they pay a certain amount of bribe to the village panchayat to let their sheep graze which means that they are able to get access to a resource without having a complementary responsibility on the part of the group or on the part of the panchayat in the community so there is use of a resource without responsibility okay so these are some of the reasons why despite the presence of laws recognizing common property resources they are still getting degraded and so that is why we are saying the needs of different groups need to be incorporated into the design of a law there needs to be greater participation in making laws so that certain sections of the population are not ignored when making these laws the second question is the difference between public resources and common resources so Eleanor Ostrom in that interview mentions the difference between public goods which is not just resources it can be other things so she mentions security which the police may provide to a locality or a neighborhood so everybody in a locality gets access to that peace and security if the police provides that and you cannot exclude anybody from it okay and if one person is provided security it doesn't mean there is less security available to others because it is provided uniformly to everybody the difference with common pool resources is that in the case of the commons suppose you are talking about a water body if 100 kg of fish is extracted that much less is available to other fishers that is one of the differences but let me also come to the specific term that you used about public resources so take a public resource like a public park which can be maintained by a municipal corporation or a municipality so the municipality owning a park means it is a public resource it belongs to the municipal corporation or the government it can charge for it or it can be free but the entire ownership as well as the management is done by the government agency or the municipal corporation there is no common purpose that is the common purpose is only in terms of using it but in terms of managing it in terms of deciding how much we should charge for entry which kind of plans should be there what kind of playground should be there who should be allowed and so on the people who use it have no say in it whatsoever so in the case of a public resource though it is used in common by many people the management and ownership rests with the management agency or the owning agency or the government usually whereas in the case of the commons people who use a resource collectively have rules and regulations about how to use how much to use what kind of rules to have about use and about maintaining and sustaining the resource that is the main difference about the strict implementation yes I agree with you there but that is an issue it is a larger issue relating to many of these kinds of problems and therefore it is a larger question related to legal enforcement the seriousness with which we take laws the institutions we have to maintain laws and so on so and it is not confined only to commons but to all kinds of resources in general so let us move on so Eleanor Ostrom's view as you can see is radically different from that of Gareth Hardin who believes that the commons will lead to a tragedy whereas she believes that it will lead to more success in managing the environment in a more sustainable manner in doing so however she is saying that there is no one unique solution that is there is no one particular kind of common pool resource or common property resource management that is applicable or relevant or appropriate for the entire world so she is saying that the nature of the interaction between human beings and the ecosystem is different depending on the resource depending on the society so there will be a small village which is based on fisheries there can be a small tribal community depending on forest the entire world population depends on the health of the atmosphere okay so global warming affects everybody there can be many different countries the littoral countries around the Indian Ocean which gets affected by ecosystem environmental problems in the Indian Ocean so it can be from the very small scale to the planetary or global scale and so this nature of the human ecosystem interaction is multifaceted therefore she suggests that our response in terms of sustainable development also has to be multifaceted you cannot have one solution fits all which means there will be different kinds of common pool resource management so the kind of negotiations we are having about global warming and climate change is also about a global atmospheric commons every country in the world is affected by climate change therefore as a planet we need to come together to decide how to manage that have certain rules and regulations managing the global commons or it could be about a river so the river Ganga for example flows through many states in India and we know it is one of the most polluted rivers in the world so managing the Ganga river as a common pool resource requires the cooperation of many different agencies and cooperation so it requires probably a combination of common pool resources at the local level the involvement of the central government the state government and many other agencies also. Ostrom also mentions that the social ecological system problems also are very diverse what she says is that in some cases there will be very large population dependent on a resource the density of population is very high in some cases maybe not much use is made so if you go to the Himalayas for example that is also a resource it may not be used that much though it has ecosystem uses so if there is global warming the glaciers will melt and that will have effects the problem of the forest dependent people is different from the fisheries dependent people so what she is saying is the nature of the problem is very different it also depends on whether you are you are exploiting a resource for commercial use you want to make profits out of it or just to feed your stomach so depending on these again one needs to come up with different solutions there is no single or unique panacea for these problems however because she is most interested in common pool resources she is saying let us not go only with solutions which favor the government or the private sector because she is saying and this is what is written here bureaucrats sometimes do not have the correct information while citizens and users of resources do so in India there may be bureaucrats sitting in Delhi who have no idea about the needs of fisher folk or farmers sitting in Kerala or Kanyakumari or northeast or somewhere else so local people have a better idea so studies on the CRZ the coastal regulations also point this out that there is one national law for the entire coastal region of India which spans across 7 or 8 different states so the the these laws do not recognize the diversity of the context of coastal ecosystems from West Bengal all the way up to Kerala Tamil Nadu and then up towards Gujarat so the focus on the common pool resources enables us to incorporate the wisdom the knowledge the ideas of the local people who have a stake in maintaining a resource because without that they will die but then there are different kinds of resources local people may be effective in managing a small water body a small pasture a small forest patch but what if we are talking about the entire coast of India the Bay of Bengal or the Arabian Sea what we are talking if we are talking about large rivers like Kaveri or Brahmaputra so in such cases you need a combination of institutions to manage these resources effectively that creates certain kinds of complexities how do you interact between local people who are formed in association to manage a resource and the state agencies or the government agencies so for that Ostrom has come up with a set of what she calls as design principles so based on the study of hundreds and hundreds of cases of common pool resource management systems around the world she and her research collaborators have come up with a set of design principles so she is saying if we follow these principles in designing institutions for managing resources then we will prevent resource exhaustion we will prevent depletion degradation and avoid ecosystem collapse so we started out this particular lecture by talking about the role of institutions and governance so we are ending with that by looking at some of these design principles eight of them to be precise which are useful for us in designing alternative ways of governing institution resources of designing rules regulations institutions for managing the resources so let me explain all of these and in turn if you do not understand you can ask me questions you can pass this on to the students because the existing laws that we are discussing the environmental laws many of them do not recognize these design systems so the purpose of teaching these to the students is to tell them there are alternative ways of looking at laws of legislation of rules and regulations for managing resources the existing laws in India do not exhaust the possibilities so there can be these kinds of laws also which can be more effective okay the first one is to define boundaries for commons clearly of course these are not geographic boundaries so in the middle of the Indian Ocean you cannot draw a boundary for example it is difficult these are boundaries in terms of who is entitled to use the resource who is not entitled to use the resource is it okay for Sri Lankan Fisher folk to come into Indian waters is it okay for Gujarati fishers to come to Mumbai waters who can use it who cannot use it it is not simply a question of the availability of resource it is also a question of who will follow the rules so the Gujarati Fisher folk will say Mumbai Fisher folk are not familiar with our rules and regulations therefore they are not welcome the same thing the fishers in Mumbai will say okay same thing will happen across countries also so there may be certain rules and regulations about fisheries what kind of nets to use what kind of boats to use how much fish to catch per day in Pakistan so if Indian fishers cross over to the boundary they may not be aware of those rules so for a common pool system to work you have to decide who can use it who can you are not use it that kind of a boundary has to be maintained similarly with forests or with any other kind of resource the second design principle is about rules so if a group of people utilizing a resource set up a set of rules for extracting or appropriating common resources the second principle says these rules have to be adapted to local conditions that is the kind of rules that may work in one context may not work somewhere else that could be because of the number of users that could be because of the quantity the quantum of resource available the number of trees the number of fish the different species of fish and so on so if you have one rule which is not appropriate to your context most people will violate it because this rule is totally useful useless for us people will follow rules if it is appropriate to them appropriate to their condition so it is very necessary that rules have to be conducive to local conditions number three is collective choice arrangements so when we make these rules and regulations that is this collective choice arrangements this could be about limits to resource use this could be about maintenance of the resource so for example in water bodies the fishers may have a role in maintaining the quality of the water clean up the water body from time to time introducing different kinds of species of fish from time to time so that they can breed so who will do all of these so somebody has to be given the responsibility so the local people have to be given a role in making those rules what happens in India this is also a response to that question from that faculty member from Haryana that sometimes the rules are made in Delhi or Mumbai or Kolkata and there is no participation in decision making and therefore people do not follow those rules because they are not aware of it because it is not appropriate to them and so on so the chances of a law or a set of rules being more relevant for you are more the more you involve local people in decision making about coming up with a set of rules and regulations okay so the more participation there is the better chance that you will come up with a very good set of rules and regulations so in the case of Haryana and Rajasthan for example these nomadic groups were not consulted in making these laws or rules about common pool resources number four now suppose somebody does not follow the rule who will monitor it suppose you are allowed to collect four kilos of fallen wood to be used for firewood in your house you are not allowed to cut trees but you can collect fallen branches but suppose somebody cuts a branch who monitors it so we find that in many cases government is not quite effective so sometimes they can be bribed sometimes there are too few guards in forests to make sure there are no poachers nobody for breaks the rule and in large resources large patches of forest or water bodies or rivers it is not possible to monitor to have surveillance to make sure nobody breaks the rule everywhere so what we what is what we find is that sometimes it is monitoring works better if the local people who are involved in utilizing a resource have a role in that so in the case of forestry there are many studies which show that if you give this role to the local village people living near forest they have the eyes and ears to make sure that poachers do not kill come and kill wildlife or some illegal cutting of trees is not going on by timber merchants whereas if you exclude people and have only the forest guards we find the efficiency of monitoring is much less likewise I will give you an example from Mumbai so you under the coastal regulation zone requires that the coastal ecosystem is maintained what if somebody encroaches on a mangrove who monitors it so as per the CRZ rules the police is supposed to monitor now you go to a police station in Mumbai the first thing a police constable will ask you is what is the CRZ because there have not been nobody has bothered to tell them that they are supposed to implement the CRZ instead what environmental activists are saying is that activists local people living there why cannot they monitor why cannot they be given a role in preventing encroachment and in complaining to the relevant authorities why is it that the police have to come into this okay so people who are appropriating a resource as commoners if they are given a role in monitoring it is likely to be more effective number five suppose somebody violates somebody does not follow the rules of the game somebody extracts more resources so if you are allowed to have only four sheep for grazing you have eight you have ten you have six heads of cattle when you are allowed only two some punishment has to be given if you do not follow the rules so here it is said the sanctions sanctions means punishment penalties these have to be gradually increased depending on the severity of the crime or the violation so what happens is if there is a very severe penalty for a small violation then what happens is that you are likely to commit a more heavier violation because I know whether I take out when I whether I cut one branch or I cut 10 branches the punishment is going to be the same let me try to get away by cutting 10 trees okay so those kinds of punishments will happen and in fact if you read some of the those of you who are fond of literature if you read some of the Russian literature of the 19th century they talk about these kinds of things how a lot of very poor peasants tried to violate the laws because the punishments was so severe but people were starving there was a lot of privatization there was feudalism big landlords used to own large amounts of forest so people were starving they could not get anything from the forest so they would at the risk of death they would go and try to extract as much as possible to feed their families okay so if you have lesser punishment like a fine for a smaller crime and more serious penalties or punishments for more serious violations then people also gradually learn to understand what are the different kinds of rules what happens to me if I get if I violate a rule and gradually they will learn to adapt to these rules and regulations okay so instead of having the same kind of penalty for all kinds of crimes have graduated penalties number six is mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and easy of access what it means is that suppose there is a conflict between different people I say that you have violated the rule and you believe that you have not violated there is a conflict of interpretation or suppose there are two villages which are involved in fishing along the same water body so in Kerala for example there are backwaters which run through several villages so upstream they may do more fishing and the fish stock available to those in the downstream village may be less and the village upstream may say the population of our village has gone up therefore we need to do more fishing how do you resolve this conflict between these two villages now if you have to go to the high court and supreme court for everything then it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of money you have to hire lawyers it may take years before it is resolved and meanwhile people may start fighting there may be violence there has been violence in some cases or people may they may resort to bribing some officials to permit them to do more to extract more from the resources happens in forestry for example so the purpose of having a common set of rules and regulations gets defeated if you do not have an appropriate mechanism so instead of having to the high court or supreme court every time there is a conflict there has to be some local level agency which provides justice which intervenes in disputes and decides on these cases of disputes or conflicts these can be institutions at the local level set up by the government itself or it can be developed by the people so in this example of Kerala that I am I was talking about the local people living along the backwaters have set up something called sea courts sea because this is the sea water that is flowing in so several villages along a particular stretch of the backwater come up and set up their own sea courts so instead of going to the high court or the supreme court they just have to a local court and within a day or two they are the judgment is delivered and it is something that they have set up so they accept it much more than if a high court or a supreme court give this judgment but that brings us to the point number 7 where this kind of a self-determination where the local people themselves have come up with a judiciary mechanism that has to be accepted and recognized by higher level authority if they do not then what is likely to happen is that some people who are not happy with this judgment can say this is not legal they will go to a high court maybe they will bribe some judges they will go to a higher authority bribe somebody and win their case even though they may not be right so it is important that lower level set of rules and institutions be recognized and accepted by higher level bodies the final point is about larger common pool resources like the Indian Ocean so you have countries in Africa the Arab countries in the Middle East you have countries in South Asia India Pakistan Maldives and so on so you have this Indian Ocean as a very large commons in which there are so many different countries who are involved in extracting appropriating something from this resource it becomes very complex and complicated obviously to manage this kind of a commons for these kinds of commons Ostrom is suggesting that we have something called nested enterprises so you can in theory form an organization of all the countries which have Indian Ocean coasts they may come up with a set of rules and regulations but this may not be appropriate to a villager in Konkan or in Kerala or Karnataka or in Kenya or South Africa on the other hand you can allow complete freedom to every village which has a fishing activity along the coast of the Indian Ocean to have its own rules but then what happens if there are larger problems in the Indian Ocean who manages it every village may not be powerful enough to implement rules and regulations they may not have the finances they may not have the technical capacity to address a large scale pollution oil spill for example in the Indian Ocean or if some species suddenly is disappearing is on the verge of extinction a small village may not be able to do enough about it so what she is suggesting Ostrom is that for these kinds of large common pool resources we have multiple agencies from the smallest to the highest so there will be a common pool resource association or organization at the village level there may be one at the district level there may be one at the state level then at the level of the country so India has Gujarat Maharashtra Karnataka Kerala along the Indian Ocean the Arabian Sea and Goa similarly other countries every country will have an apex organization so there will be a scaling up of multiple layers of organizations or enterprises or agencies which is trying to interact with each other find out what is the problem at the lower level at the higher level and which is the kind of best agency to address these problems but also get opinions from lower level if it is a large problem that can be tackled only at the international level they will still get opinions of people at the lower levels not ignore them okay so starting from small local common property resources at the base level to very large organizations at the international level you will have nesting of smaller organizations within subsequent larger organizations that is the kind of solution that she is offering to this particular issue okay so these are the eight design principles that Eleanor Ostrom is offering to ensure that common pool resource management system can be an effective alternative for sustainable use of resources without completely depleting and degrading resources as an alternative to government or public and private management of resources okay now with this I want to stop this lecture but since we have it 10 minutes left I would like to take a few questions on any aspect any issue relating to this particular lecture so based on those who have raised their hands let me come to you this is Truba college of engineering indoor good evening good evening sir yes sir first of all thank you very much for such information given from your side we are just interested to know are there some projects from university grand commission on on environment and society so that we may be interested to work on these kind of projects okay yeah thank you for the question and just come back to you as such we don't have any question to ask you sir okay but whatever environmental aspects we are dealing with are they useful for present community present status whatever solid best management or other things which are going on so people should practice it at their locations I do think in this way okay sir utilization of common food resources who has to govern and monitor as it all the community should be given the community post governing is the best option instead of government controlling it or giving to private but when there is a part of the community sir actually all are asking questions but I would like to put up a comment yes please please go ahead yes actually such a such a nice environment state is going on environmental studies what I think is that we can put foreign culture like conditions to our Indian soil like the environment and all so if everybody really take interest you can make and all are means make available for the contents then it will be very good okay since we have five minutes left let me quickly respond to these issues thank you for those questions the first is about projects I think that's a very good thing that the fact that you people are thinking of taking projects to work on these things so I will just tell you some of the agencies which have sponsored our research in this area and you could probably approach them as well one is the Ministry of Environment and Forest Government of India which has sponsored some of our research on environmental issues including commons common food resources the second is typhag okay typhag is again a government of India agency it stands for technology information forecasting and assessment council so they also sponsor some of this research some of our climate change research has been done with their support and collaboration then the third one is the every state government in India has a science and technology commission so in IIT Bombay we have Rajiv Gandhi Science and Technology Commission of the government of Maharashtra they for example sponsored a project on sustainable rural development so what we did was to assess what kind of resources exist in one particular taluka or block and then develop it come up with a development strategy which is appropriate to those resources because what was happening is in a drought prone area people were growing sugar cane and extracting a lot of ground net so we do not want that to happen so what is appropriate to that area what kind of sustainable technologies can be used to generate employment for example one of the big employers there was a local Desi Zaro company so we wanted to provide a different kind of employment because it was also leading to a lot of soil pollution okay so what are the different kind of employment opportunities we can create keeping in mind the locally available resources okay without having to use lot of extra water or chemicals and those kind of things so that project was supported by the state governments science and technology commission in fact we committed the we completed the first phase they have just given us the second phase as well so these are some of the sources which can give you funds for doing this kind of research coming to the second question again very interesting question that there are we have a lot of environmental systems in place including environmental rules regulations laws institutions but what is the relevance especially when they do not work in practice so I think what has happened in the last 30 to 40 years in India is that in response to a lot of environmentalist treasures institutions and laws have to come into existence have come into existence but for them to be more relevant and work in practice we have to have local communities who participate in the actual implementation and perhaps even modification of some of these rules and institutions and laws and that can have that has started happening only from the 1990s because before that the municipal corporations and the panchas did not have the power to actually start implementing these laws so it is after the 73rd and 74th amendment that people can form associations and start demanding that these laws are implemented and also modified make them relevant to local contexts so it took a few years for those amendments to the constitution to actually begin to be implemented now you see many cities there are associations being formed of citizens at the municipal ward level there are also various associations form being formed in villages who are trying to put pressure and use the these panchayatiraj and municipal corporation amendment laws so to make them more relevant and work in practice what we need is actually more pressure from citizens associations and bodies more citizen action and that is I think one of the things that is mentioned in the UGC syllabus to stress on these kinds of aspects the issue of conflicts between communities so your point is very well taken and well very relevant that while communities may be good at managing a resource what happens when communities fight among themselves so who is the best institution to intervene in such cases so legally speaking very often it is a government agency or a judiciary which intervenes but your point about the involvement of a private is something that can also be tried out with relevant safeguards because sometimes it can become a problem because the private sector can intervene and then take away the resource from the communities that has also happened in some cases but there can be private agencies who are empowered authorized to intervene in such kind of cases so we see in the case of organic agriculture for example a lot of private agencies are given the license to certify and even in cases of conflicts about these certification processes practices to be followed for organic these private entrepreneurs or agencies give advice on what is to be done so with sufficient safeguards that is something that can be done also the last point about foreign conditions I think it can work both ways there are some very good examples from foreign countries which we can imitate there are some bad practices also so we need to know which ones to copy and which ones to avoid so Singapore for example they have implemented some very good sanitation and hygiene mechanisms also in terms of water cycling and so on there are other practices in Singapore that are very highly energy intensive which we in India cannot afford to practice so I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned from other parts of the world India being such a big country we can also learn a lot of lessons from other countries other parts of India also that is something we should not forget so with those words I will stop here we end the session for today