India's experience

In India as also in other developing countries of the world, the government today is the single biggest actor in the field of development and management of CPNR. That is why we talk of people's participation in (government-sponsored) resource development and management programmes. According to one of the schools of development, scholars and practitioners which is now gaining currency all over the world, the traditional roles of government and people in development should be reversed. That is, people should prepare their own development programmes and the government should participate in these programmes by way of financial, legal, and technical assistance. This seems to be a difficult but desirable goal worthy of serious pursuit. Until that goal is achieved, we should content ourselves by enlisting increasingly higher participation of people in government-sponsored resource development programmes and by empowering them to initiate their own development programmes. In India, in recent years, we have made some progress in both the directions, i.e., local people taking initiative and preparing their own programmes for development and management of CPNR and the government departments/agencies trying to enlist local people's participation in resource development programmes. A brief review of five of the successful efforts made in both the directions is presented below. A profile of the selected cases is presented in Table 1 and a summary of the key determinants of people's participation identified from the analysis of the cases in Table 2.