Community management involves sustainably managing a common pool resource, such as fishing in coastal areas, to prevent depletion and ensure equitable use by all stakeholders. It requires continuous monitoring and may involve a government entity to enforce compliance. Accurate assessment and negotiation with stakeholders are key to effective management. Market forces can also impact community management.
Community management is the task of sustainably managing a common pool resource. A common pool resource is a natural resource shared in common with a group of people who collectively use that resource. An example would be fishing in coastal areas. While this natural resource may be renewable, it can also be depleted if overused. The goal of community management is to prevent depletion and ensure equitable use of the resource by all stakeholders.
The task of managing a community resource can be difficult, because ownership responsibility is shared within a community. Diffusion of responsibility across a population dilutes each individual’s personal responsibility for resource degradation. This makes it difficult to target an offending party in the event of damage to the asset. Overseeing communal pool users to ensure fair and sustainable use generally requires a government entity. This entity may be granted the legal capacity to enforce compliance in case of excessive use by individual users.
Effective community management involves conducting continuous monitoring of the community pool resource. This may be required to determine if resource degradation is occurring and, if so, why it is happening. The community manager can also determine who the resource’s stakeholders are and how best to ensure an equitable allocation among those stakeholders.
An example of a common pool resource would be a small coastal fishery used by multiple villages that depend on the crop for their continued survival. If a large fishing operation comes along and begins using industrial processes that require a much larger share of the crop than the available resource can support without depletion, a community manager might attempt to mitigate that depletion. The community could be managed by a group or an individual. In both cases, the manager would work with each stakeholder to negotiate a sustainable and equitable use of the resource.
Effective community management involves accurate and constant assessment of the community pool resource. A key problem in community management is accurately defining the problem, which is not always apparent on the surface. This requires conducting an ongoing scientific investigation that monitors and compares data about the resource over time.
Community management is a dynamic process, as market forces can change and evolve. New raw materials derived from natural resources can grow in demand beyond what the resource can provide without degrading. Or, that commodity can be exploited using a production method that exceeds the resource’s ability to regenerate. This may be successful from a profit standpoint, but this new business can also deplete a shared water resource in an area.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
