Fay describes two comparable situations in the late 1990s on the Eastern Cape of South Africa where people living next to the Cwebe Nature Reserve joined in solidarity to pursue the sustainable management of their natural resources. These cases demonstrate how a shared reliance on natural resources, a history of dispossession, and the wish to protect resources from outside groups are experiences that can bind people together to assert their right to control their natural resources. The two cases present significant objects of study because community action was not instigated by governmental or external powers, as is the case with most community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) in the literature. Whereas much scholarship treats the problem of the effective identification and formation of community structures in order to implement CBNRM, this article highlights just two of many existent cases where heterogeneous groups of people unite through grassroots efforts to sustainably manage the resources that they have in common. The problem that these cases highlight is a lack of external support for internally initiated CBNRM.

During a virtual vacuum of state resource management in South Africa in the 1990s, people looked for new ways to regulate resource exploitation in the absence of coercive governmental policies. In one of the case studies, independent, dispossessed villages outside the Dwesa-Cwebe Nature Reserve coalesced into a community called Dwesa Cwebe on the basis of their shared struggle for rights to the forest in the Reserve. However, following the success of their coordinated activism and the subsequent regularization of resource access, a new problem relating to livestock grazing rights arose. Two of the villages were not awarded much-needed land access for grazing their livestock, and therefore continued illegally utilizing the Reserve to this end. The larger community called upon the government to help enforce the regulations, but their plea for assistance went unanswered and villagers without alternatives continued illegally grazing their livestock, presenting a situation that has undermined the legitimacy of the community conservation institution.

Shortcomings of the state are also highlighted in the second case study concerning the re-establishment of access rights to a eucalyptus woodlot outside the Dwesa-Cwebe Nature Reserve. The woodlots originated as a compensatory natural resource from the state to locals who suffered eviction from and restricted access to the Nature Reserve. In the subsequent void of government management, the woodlot was succumbing to unsustainable harvest techniques and over-exploitation by outsiders. The four villages that were closest to the woodlot united through their resistance to outsiders and common experience of dispossession in order to protect the trees and promote healthy harvesting practices. Though they formed a community with vested interest in conservation and took many steps to institute management, their efforts eventually failed as the state did not furnish support for financial or enforcement needs.

The author notes that while these newly federated groups of people succeed in their formation of community structures to govern resources, the relevant problem becomes one of financing and enforcing the new regulations and spatial boundaries they stipulated for resource management. Fay suggests that in order to provide critical support for emergent grassroots resource management efforts, research must be expanded to adopt a sharper focus on such cases where communities initiate CBNRM of their own accord.

Prepared by Megan Glore