CHALLENGES TO COMMUNITY-BASED SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT - DYNAMICS, ENTITLEMENTS, INSTITUTIONS

Recent approaches to community-based natural resource management frequ ently present 'communities' as consensual units, able to act collectiv ely in restoring population-resource imbalances or reestablishing harm onious relations between local livelihoods and stable environments. Ar guing that these underlying assumptions and policy narratives are flaw ed as guidelines for policy, this article presents an alternative pers pective which starts from the politics of resource access and central among diverse social actors, and sees patterns of environmental change as the outcomes of negotiation or contestation between their conflict ing perspectives. The notion of 'environmental entitlements' encapsula tes this shift in perspective, and provides analytical tools to specif y the benefits that people gain from the environment which contribute to their well-being. The processes by which people gain environmental endowments and entitlements are, in rum, shaped by diverse institution s, both formal and informal.