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Abstract
This dissertation addresses the question: how are common property institutions of cooperative and restrained resource use created? Economists, ecologists and political theorists have argued that the state, private property and local communities have the capacity to create such institutions. Here, I show that even communities with a history of cooperative and restrained use of resources may lose their capacity to maintain their resource use arrangements. Using the examples of forests and coastal fisheries in Uttarakhand and Kerala in India, I show that as capital accumulation became the primary motivation behind state intervention in forest and fisheries economies, resources, people and the state entered into new relationships. The interests of the state and of commercial resource users ruled them out as innovators of common property institutions. Rural resource users lost their ability to maintain and create new institutions of cooperative and restrained resource use. New institutions were created after Chipko and the Kerala fishworkers' movement renegotiated the relations between resources, forest-dwellers and fishworkers, and the state. The formation of new collective organizations for ecologically sustainable resource use, therefore, followed the construction of new collective identities. The dissertation thus situates sustainable resource use at the intersection between collective action and the political economy of development, and emphasizes the role and interests of the state and social movements in the innovation of common property institutions.
