Introduction

This chapter addresses community-level natural resource management and rural poverty, first by re-examining the mainstream view that blames the poor for natural resource degradation. This is followed by a comparison of the traditional and present-day systems of natural resource management in mountain areas. This helps in the identification of factors and processes contributing to resource degradation. Lessons from past systems and successful experiences of new initiatives on community forest management in Nepal and India are synthesized to suggest possible approaches to rebuilding communities' natural assets. The final section of the chapter looks at concerns and uncertainties relating to new forest-centered initiatives, and at possible ways to address these.

The crucial role of natural asset building in reducing poverty — by conserving, regenerating, upgrading and equitably harnessing natural resources, particularly, forests, pastures and crop lands — stems from the contributions of these resources towards enhancing the livelihood options of the poor (Dasgupta 1996). These include direct availability of seasonally and spatially varying supplies of bio-fuel, fodder, fiber, food items, timber and high-value products such as medicinal herbs, honey, mushrooms and vegetable dyes. The indirect services provided by forests and other natural ecosystems include stability of the micro-environment and the flow of moisture and nutrients to sustain productive farming systems.

This facilitative role of forests is all the more important in mountain regions, where due to limited accessibility and relative isolation, people's dependence on local resources is very high.

Prologue

I first learned about global warming in the late 1980s. My colleague Anil Agarwal and I had spent over two years traversing Indian villages, searching for policies and practices to reforest wasted common lands. We quickly learned to look beyond trees, at ways to deepen democracy so that these commons could be regenerated. In India forests are mostly owned by government agencies, but it is poor communities that actually use them. It quickly became clear that without community participation, afforestation was not possible. This is because our forests are not wilderness areas, but habitats of people and their animals. For people to be involved the rules for engagement had to be respected, and to be respected, the rules had to be fair.

At the time, India had a ‘green’ environment minister. Data released by a prestigious US research institution had convinced her that it was the poor who contributed most substantially to global warming — they did ‘unsustainable’ things like growing rice and keeping farm animals. Anil and I were pulled into the global climate debate when a flummoxed state Chief Minister called us. He had received a government circular that asked him to discourage rural people from keeping animals. ‘How do I do this?’ he asked us. ‘Do the animals of the poor really disrupt the world's climate system?’ We were equally puzzled. It seemed absurd. We had been arguing for quite a while that the poor were victims of environmental degradation.

In 1988, DA Miller made an influential diagnosis of ‘a radical entanglement between the nature of the novel and the practice of the police’. His book, The Novel and the Police, was designed to challenge what he saw as a politically conservative ‘consensus’ in departments of English that ‘literature exercises a destabilising function in our culture’. In opposition to that ‘consensus’ a new school of critics, authors of books with valiant titles like Resisting Novels, set themselves to argue that the function of literature was to act as vehicle for ideological control. The irresistible conclusion was that this was particularly true of literary forms distinctive of the bourgeois era, and thus of the Victorian novel above all.

Dombey and Son takes the chaos of history as its structuring theme. However, the very use of ‘theme’, or the combination of realism (fiction presenting what seems like a picture of the familiar world of experience) with the organised, overarching significance and unity of plot, has been interpreted as in some way already a concession to an imperio-historical conception of history as a unified, significant and teleological progress. Lennard Davis, for instance, suggests that ‘plot in narratives, and most particularly novels, helps readers to believe that there is an order in the world’, so that ‘we might say that the idea of plot is part of an idea of history – that history and novels share a certain faith in plot’. Needless to say, for the reasons suggested at the start of the last chapter, this is a very bad thing as far as Davis and like-minded critics are concerned.

I have suggested that there are elements in Dombey that resist being subsumed by the progression of plot and its structured import.

Introduction

Participatory forest management in West Africa became institutionalized during the 1980s as part of the movement towards decentralization under structural adjustment programmes. Most nation states in the region have implemented forest-sector administrative reforms that give greater roles to communities in forest management, and that recognize the importance of building partnerships between communities and forest departments (Brown 1999).

The idea that community participation is central to effective natural resource management has been endorsed in a number of international environmental conventions. It was given a prominent place in both the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 1994 UN Convention to Combat Desertification. It was embraced again in 1997, in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Forests' Proposals for Action, which called for the establishment of participatory mechanisms to involve all interested parties, including local communities and indigenous people, in policy development as well as implementation.

Although most West African forestry services now have moved beyond previous exclusionary approaches, participatory forest management still generally is situated within a technocentric, top-down framework. The goal is to get rural communities to participate in the programmes designed by global and national agencies, rather than to enable rural people to make their own inputs into natural resource policy. The main concerns, rooted in neo-liberal economic philosophy, are the need to make forestry management more efficient and to lower transaction costs by involving communities.

Introduction

In many parts of the developing world, poverty is not so much about a lack of money as a lack of natural resources. For rural people who live off the land, prosperity means plenty of water, crops, animals and timber. Improving the ‘gross natural product’ is far more important than increasing the gross national product (Agarwal 1985). Building and sustaining a base of natural capital is the key to a robust local economy.

This chapter presents case studies of four rural communities in India that have succeeded in mobilizing natural and human capital to generate economic wealth and well-being through improved management of natural resources. All four studies come from hilly and plateau regions of India, with semi-arid to sub-humid climates (500–1,250 millimetres of rainfall per year). In all cases, important natural resources are held as common property. From the colonial era until recently, these resources were managed, or mismanaged, by government agencies. The key to ecological restoration has been the restoration of community control.

In these regions, watershed management requires cooperative solutions above the level of the individual farm. The ancient art of water harvesting needs to be revived and modernized to provide adequate water for irrigation and household needs. Water harvesting means capturing the rain where it falls by collecting runoff from rooftops, constructing check dams and small reservoirs to capture runoff from local catchments, and replanting degraded watersheds, so as to reduce runoff losses.

Introduction

In agricultural economies, land is the single most important asset. With access to arable land, rural people at a minimum can feed themselves and their families. Yet ironically, world hunger is concentrated in the countryside. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO 2004, 25) reports that land-poor and landless households in rural areas account for 80 per cent of the people who are chronically hungry in the world today.

Land reform — here defined as the reallocation of rights to establish a more equitable distribution of farmland — can be a powerful strategy for promoting both economic development and environmental quality. Across the globe, small-scale farmers consistently tend to grow more output per acre than large farms. At the same time, when small family farmers hold secure land rights, they tend to be better environmental stewards, protecting and enhancing soil fertility, water quality and biodiversity. For both reasons, democratizing access to land can be the cornerstone for sustainable rural development.

This chapter provides an overview of land reform as a natural assetbuilding strategy. First, we sketch the wide variety of changes in agrarian structure that fall under the rubric of ‘land reform’. To illustrate, we review the experiences of China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan after World War II, where land reforms helped to set the stage for rapid economic growth. We then describe of one of the most vibrant land reform movements of the present day: the Landless Workers' Movement of Brazil.

The mid-Victorian realist novel is the medium par excellence for an exposition of a sympathetic politics of care, and an effective vehicle for the perpetuation of the conditions for its realization. Its realism is orientated towards the caring conviction, which Gilligan observed in her female subjects, ‘that the solution to the dilemma will follow from its compelling representation’. Its personal focus, its realist enumeration of particularities and its emotional function make it a form that emphasizes connection and that cultivates the virtue of human sympathy, that weighs the subjective and emotional value of quotidian experience in dense and human terms, and that makes visible the delicate, fragile and underground lacework of social mycelia connecting the autonomous man-mushrooms of civil space. Even when its overt ‘message’ is individualistic it is led, by the very skill with which it mobilizes its fictional conventions, into an emotive revelation of human connection.

This same revelation is embodied, in different ways, in every novel to which I have turned my attention. It bursts the channels cut for it by any rational scheme of rights, and any rationalistic legitimation of or resignation to the status quo, and it bears the reader inexorably on to a hopeful and active desire for the social realization of human sympathy.

In 1907, aged nineteen, the writer Katherine Mansfield set out on a camping trip that was for her arguably the New Zealand equivalent of the European Grand Tour in that it functioned as a rite of passage into the independence of adulthood and as a way of educating herself about her country's indigenous peoples. The route taken by the small group of friends she travelled with was through an extremely remote and hilly part of the North Island known as the Ureweras, a region inhabited by the Tuhoe people who had retreated there after the Land Wars of the 1860s. Undertaken in two horse-pulled roofed coaches, the trip also took in the Rotorua Lake district where Maori commandeered a booming tourist industry, the Huka Falls and Taupo. Throughout the voyage Mansfield kept a notebook which she filled with evocative descriptions of the landscape and of Maori but it was clearly not intended for publication, being more of a space to experiment with different writing styles and even forge a distinctive writing style of her own.

In this chapter, I examine Mansfield's Urewera Notebook, as it is commonly known, as an example of a particular form of travel writing from the early modernist period — one that is associated with the cultivation of aesthetic taste and with the preservation of high culture.

Introduction: Where exactly are the Balkans?

The name of the Balkan peninsula was coined by the German geographer August Zeune in 1809, in his book Gea: Versuch Einer Wissenschaftlischen Erdbeschreibung. Zeune called the peninsula Balkanhalbeiland, using the name of the Balkan mountain range, known in classical times as Haemus, in present-day Bulgaria. The term soon gained wide currency because of the need for a convenient way of referring to a region and a diverse collection of peoples — and, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, new countries — which had previously lurked little noticed under the cloaks of the Austro- Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires. The Balkan territories of the Ottomans, which comprised some two-thirds of the peninsula, were commonly referred to as ‘Turkey-in-Europe’ or the ‘Near East’, a term whose ghostly presence is felt — like the twitching of a severed limb — in the way we continue to refer to the Middle and the Far East even today. As an increasing number of Western travellers visited the Balkans and wrote about the peninsula, and as the independence movements gradually achieved their objectives in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the region's collection of borderlands and peripheries slowly crystallized into a new Balkan identity in what resembled a version of a geo-political Rorschach test.

Chewing on slavery

American Notes, Charles Dickens's account of his trip to the United States between January and June 1842, still provokes strongly negative feelings more than a century and a half later. In a dismissal involving a familiar dig at travel writing, Laura C Berry pronounces that: ‘The “plot” of American Notes, and perhaps this must be accepted as simply endemic to travel accounts, is as rigid as a set of railroad tracks, and just about as tiring’ (Berry 1996, 213). Noting that Dickens's ‘monotonous’ text (212) has rarely been ‘treated at length’, Berry opines that: ‘The superficiality of Dickens's reading of America has defied any truly good reading of American Notes’ (213). Berry's argument, immersed in theories of the body, is that Dickens encounters in the United States a commingling of classes that discomforts him since the British context that generates and consumes the narrative is one of social tensions. Dickens's concern that ‘increased social circulation might be a necessary result of industrialism and its effects’ is focused — or projected — on the spitting he finds everywhere in the United States (Berry 1996, 212).

Introduction

When — in the famous Disruption of the Church of Scotland, in 1843 — Thomas Chalmers and his evangelical supporters walked out of the General Assembly to form their own breakaway organization, their most pressing task was to raise money. Over a third of its ministers and up to half of its lay members declared allegiance to the new body, which, although not an established church, had high hopes of fulfilling the same role: a national church that would care for the spiritual and educational needs of the whole population. While the voluntary and dissenting churches could support themselves from the contributions of their congregations, they were only viable in the wealthier areas of the towns. In working-class districts and in the country, a church required additional sources of income. For the Free Church of Scotland, with no church or school buildings to call its own, the financial problem was acute.

A huge fund-raising programme was set in motion, at home and abroad. Representatives were dispatched to England and Ireland the same summer, and, later in the year, a deputation set sail for North America, where they reaped the benefit of long-standing links with the Presbyterians there. Reporting back on the visit to the Assembly of 1844, Dr Cunningham estimated that £3,000 had been raised in the United States before the deputation left and £6,000 since, with a few thousand perhaps still to come.

We began this book with a question: how do you make a man? Our first answer came by way of assertions from an elite community that their esoteric and exclusivist rituals effect radical transformations by turning low-status boys into hegemonic twice-born elite men. Yet this assertion was immediately undermined: both by the men themselves, who ruefully admit that to be initiated is not enough, that successful and repeated performances of dominant masculinity are needed; and by males from other communities, who manage to claim ‘manhood’ without the practice of initiation and who are moreover oriented towards styles of masculinity quite different from the Brahmin, suggesting that perhaps we should not speak of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ in such a richly plural society.

Yet against this fragmenting tendency, Chapters 3 and 4 highlighted over and over the existence of consensus around the set of characteristics needed if one is to make accomplished performances and stake claims to consistent and successful masculine status. We found that earning and bringing money home, providing dependents and making wise use of the money—as in house-building—have become core preoccupations for men across all communities over the 20th century. Brahminical values of renunciation, austerity and purity are sidelined even among Brahmins in favour of decidedly this—worldly demonstrations of masculine competence. This competence is expected to anticipate or realize one's role as heterosexual householder, with sexuality and providing as its twin poles.