Nesting, subsidiarity, and community-based environmental governance beyond the local level

By Graham R. Marshall, Institute for Rural Futures, University of New England,
Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia. gmarshal@une.edu.au

Abstract: Community-based approaches to environmental management have become widely adopted over the last two decades. From their origins in grassroots frustrations with governmental inabilities to solve local environmental problems, these approaches are now sponsored frequently by governments as a way of dealing with such problems at much higher spatial levels. However, this ‘up-scaling’ of community-based approaches has run well ahead of knowledge about how they might work. This article explores how Elinor Ostrom’s ‘nesting principle’ for robust common property governance of large-scale common-pool resources might inform future upscaling efforts. In particular, I consider how the design of nested governance systems for large-scale environmental problems might be guided by the principle of subsidiarity. The challenges of applying this principle are illustrated by Australia’s experience in up-scaling community-based natural resource management from local groups comprising 20-30 members to regional bodies representing hundreds of thousands of people. Seven lessons are distilled for fostering community-based environmental governance as a multi-level system of nested enterprises.

International Journal of the Commons
Vol 2, no 1 January 2008, pp. 75-97
Publisher: Igitur, Utrecht Publishing & Archiving Services for IASC
URL: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org
URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-IJC/08005
Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
ISSN: 1875-0281

» http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/viewFile/50/19