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Self-designed
institutions for management of common property resources at the
grassroots exhibit considerable variations. These institutions may
be formal or informal, culturally embedded or other-wise and
episodic or durable. The nature of rules/norms may vary across
sectors, regions and cultures. The source of variability may be
however, more importantly include the nature of stress or
opportunity to which the institution owned its genesis, the context
of the participants, the size of the groups and heterogeneity among
stake holders, the nature of the resource (whether fugitive or
stable), the ownership of the resource (whether private, common,
club or public), the scarcity of resource and the purpose of
management (whether for accumulation of wealth or for sheer survival
of the members). At SRISTI (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions) we have drawn upon a database on CPR institutions developed over the last sixteen years for sustainable natural resource management. A unique feature of this database is that it focuses much more on self-designed or indigenous or indigenous institutions rather the crafted ones. Ms. Riya Sinha at SRISTI in collaboration with Troels Bjerregaard, a Danish student worked on a computerized cataloguing system of this database. Which has now been upgraded to a web based system known as "Common Property Resource Institutions Database & Online Information and Interaction System". This system allows interactivity to users to develop communities for online discussion and self monitored groups allowing receiving updates on each case of there interest. The database is constantly updated with new cases, also new cases could be shared through our online sharing module. Currently the database consists of 87 institutions from more than twenty countries spread over five continents. The institutions have been selected from a number of sectors such as forestry, irrigation, fishery, grazing hunting, gathering etc., thereby making it possible to study the management practices applicable to a variety of natural resources. An example of CPR institutions A Question of Sharing. We would invite contributions of such cases from individuals, organizations to augment this database further. |