Community management involves sustainably managing a shared natural resource to prevent depletion and ensure fair use by all stakeholders. It requires continuous monitoring and may involve government enforcement. Defining the problem and negotiating a sustainable solution is key. 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 that is shared in common with a group of people who collectively use that resource. An example would be fishing in the coastal area. While this natural resource can be renewable, it can also become depleted if overused. The goal of community management is to prevent depletion and ensure fair 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. Spreading responsibility across a population dilutes each individual’s personal responsibility for resource degradation. This makes it difficult to target an infringing party in case of resource damage. Policing common pool users to ensure fair and sustainable use often requires a government entity. That entity may have the legal capacity to enforce compliance in cases of excessive use by individual users.
Effective community management involves performing continuous monitoring of the common pool resource. This may be necessary 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 a fair allocation among these stakeholders.
An example of a common pool resource might be a small coastal fishery used by several villages that depend on the harvest for their continued survival. If a large fishing operation comes in and starts using industrial processes that take up a much larger share of the harvest than the available resource can sustain without depletion, a community manager can try to mitigate that depletion. The community can be managed by a group or an individual. In both cases, the manager would work with each stakeholder to negotiate a sustainable and fair use of the resource.
Successful community management involves an accurate and ongoing assessment of the common pool resource. A key issue in community management is precisely defining the problem, which is not always apparent on the surface. This requires conducting an ongoing scientific investigation that monitors and compares data on the resource over time.
Community management is a dynamic process as market forces can change and evolve. New commodities derived from natural resources can grow in demand beyond what the resource can supply without suffering degradation. Or, that commodity can be mined using a crafting method that surpasses the resource’s ability to regenerate. This can be successful from a profit perspective, but this new activity can also deplete a shared water resource in an area.
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