Since its origins as an academic newsletter, _Agriculture and Human Values_ has evolved to be one of the leading journals publishing critical scholarship of the food and agricultural system. This essay illustrates and comments on the evolution of the scale and scope of research published in the journal over the years.

Common property has been theoretically linked to environmental degradation through the metaphor of “the tragedy of the commons,” which discounts local solutions to commons dilemmas and typically posits the need for strong states or privatization. Though neither solution is theoretically or empirically adequate—because of the nature of states and nature in the real world—local arrangements for averting the tragedy suffer certain lacunaeas well, including stringent boundary conditions and overlapping/overarching commons situations that necessitate larger scale cooperation than is possible in the (...) face-to-face communities that are conducive to cooperation. Second-order or meta-commons issues expand the scope of inquiry necessarily beyond conservationto preservation.The Sundarbans illustrates the contradictory implications of the Leviathan solution to comons dilemmas, as well as the centrality of alternative perceptual framings of natural systems. (shrink)

Of the three strategies available for managing common property resources (CPR)—centralized control, privatization and local management—this essay focuses on the last, which has proven quite effective in various settings throughout the Third World, with the key to success being local ability to control access to the resource. The major factors at issue in the Sundarbans situation are: historically external pressure on the forest; currently dense population in adjacent areas; a land distribution even more unequal than the norm in Bangladesh; and (...) a decentralized local government structure initiated in the mid-1980s. The first three factors have encouraged the local population to view this CRP as a frontier to be exploited,rather than as a resource to be preservedfor sustained yield. Thus to the extent that the new local government structure proves to be democratic and responsive to popular needs, it would most likely accelerate destruction of the Sundarbans, using the area as a cheap and easy way to provide some livelihood to the rural poor and landless. Accordingly, decentralization cannot be a viable strategy for preserving this unique forest resource; only a strong central control can ensure its survival into the next century. (shrink)

The decimation of the Sundarbans has resulted from attempts to satisfy short-term demands by exhausting the chances of satisfying future demands. The forest cannot be preserved by a policy that under-valorizes the urgency of the short-term needs or by a policy that is imposed from above, but it may be by social forestry. Social forestry augments the supply of forest products from non-forest lands, and, most significantly, includes the users in developing appropriate forest policies.