What Makes Grassroots Conservation Organizations Resilient? An Empirical Analysis of Diversity, Organizational Memory, a
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What Makes Grassroots Conservation Organizations Resilient? An Empirical Analysis of Diversity, Organizational Memory, and the Number of Leaders Nabin Baral
Received: 4 April 2012 / Accepted: 29 October 2012 / Published online: 8 November 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
Abstract Conservation Area Management Committees (CAMCs)—the functional decision-making units consisting entirely of local villagers—are grassroots organizations legally established to manage the Annapurna Conservation Area (ACA) in Nepal. These committees suffered due to the decade-long Maoist insurgency, but they survived. The paper attempts to test what factors contributed to their resiliency. For this, I surveyed 30 CAMCs during the summer of 2007 and conducted semi-structured interviews of 190 executive members of the CAMCs and 13 park officials who closely monitor the CAMCs. Regression results showed that the number of leaders (b = 0.44, t = 2.38, P = .027) was the most critical variable for building the resilience of CAMCs to the Maoist insurgency, i.e., retaining the same function, structure, and identity of the committees. As there were no reported conflicts among leaders and they were involved in negotiations and devising contingency plans, CAMCs actually benefited from having more leaders. Of the three diversity indices, the quadratic terms of age diversity (b = -5.42, t = 1.95, P = .064) and ethnic diversity (b = -4.05, t = 1.78, P = .075) had a negative impact on the CAMCs’ resilience. Skill diversity and organizational memory had no significant influence on the CAMCs’ resilience (t \ 1.48, P [ .10). These results have important implications for building resilience in community-based conservation.
N. Baral (&) Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Keywords Annapurna Community-based conservation Nepal Protected areas management Resilience Social-ecological system
Introduction Background Community-based conservation (CBC) models serve as an example of a social-ecological system as they build inextricable linkages between ecological and social systems at the local level (Berkes and Folke 1998). Understanding the dynamics of linked ecological and social systems is critical for the sustainable management of natural resources within CBC models. There are several types of CBC models that appear to be at different evolutionary stages and exist in various contexts (see Western and others. 1994; Baral and others. 2007; Shackleton and others. 2010). But, which ones would be sustainable can largely be determined by their capacities to deal with the changing environments. Building resilience may ensure the sustainability of CBC models in the changing world because resilience is a critical property of a system that determines how the system responds to change and uncertainty. In the context of social-ecological systems, resilience can be defined as ‘‘the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoi
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