Customer Reviews

People and Forests: Communities, Institutions, and Governance (Politics, Science, and the Environment)

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Like most edited books, this one shows every sign of editors valiantly trying to get the authors onto the same page, while the authors ignore (or actively resist) their suggestions. Having edited a book myself, I'm all too familiar with the pattern - - and I side with the editors.

The editors present a common framework focusing on the importance of (mostly local) institutions in explaining successful and unsuccessful forest management in developing countries. It's not as strong as a real theory would be, but it's useful enough as a unifier for a collection of hypotheses that Ostrom draws out in her conclusion. About half of the chapters - - those written by one of the editors - - use the framework in a serious way, while the other half don't. The editors' chapters address larger issues about local management of common pool resources, while the other chapters tend to be largely descriptive case studies of local problems.

Both editors and contributors are part of an intellectual community that's interested in successful management of environmental problems (such as common pool resources) at the local level. It's an important topic, but it encourages the worst kind of case study research. All too often, research involves going off to a study site chosen for practical reasons such as language skills, local contacts, or government permission. Analytical questions get pushed off to the side, and I'm afraid that's true of many chapters here too.

In short: read it for the editors, whose chapters provide interesting analyses of local solutions to forest management problems.