Explaining success on the commons: Community forest governance in the Indian Himalaya

SummaryIn the past two decades, scholarship on resource use and management has emphasized the key role of institutions, communities, and socio-economic factors. Although much of this writing acknowledges the importance of a large number of different causal variables and processes, knowledge about the magnitude, relative contribution, and even direction of influence of different causal processes on resource management outcomes is still poor at best. This paper addresses existing gaps in theory and knowledge by conducting a context-sensitive statistical analysis of 95 cases of decentralized, community-based, forest governance in Himachal Pradesh, and showing how a range of causal influences shape forest conditions in diverse ecological and institutional settings in the Indian Himalaya. In focusing attention on a large number of cases, but drawing on findings from case studies to motivate our analysis and choice of causal influences, our study seeks to combine the strengths of single case-oriented approaches and larger-N studies, and thereby contributes to a more thorough understanding of effective resource governance.