Justice through the Sea Change: Fairness & Community-Based Natural Resource Management as Climates Change

• In Event: 50620 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14: Food Production Systems and Alternatives

Abstract

Community-based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) is seen as a silver bullet to global problems. CBNRM – Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize winning theory of grassroots environmental management where communities govern local environments – supposedly achieves environmental conservation, justice, & sustainability as local actors have the greatest stake in management reflecting these aims. Little social research indicates whether CBNRM actually achieves this. Two years of ethnography & participation at over 400 marine management meetings in Maine’s CBNRM of lobster & shellfish fisheries revealed significant management variation in towns sharing the same climate precarity. This paper asks: what explains community differences in identifying management challenges & selecting appropriate management actions? This paper argues that different understandings of what fair management looks like drive localized variation in CBNRM activities. Community consensus around principles of management fairness is thus a pre-institutional condition for CBNRM governance. This finding – discordant with existing CBNRM models à la Ostrom – necessitates reevaluating CBNRM management models to elevate culture & identify justice as an interactional achievement in management, not an inherent quality of CBNRM. Bringing sociology into the realm of CBNRM thus has much significance – illuminating communities’ active negotiations over local justice & environmental stewardship as climates change.

Author

• Abby Westberry, New York University