- Practice · 6 marks
Natural resource management approaches and sustainability
Short answer
Environment supplies resources for development; society manages their use and distribution. Sustainable development meets present needs without compromising future generations. Resource management approaches: state (e.g., national parks), private (mines, plantations), and community-based (community forestry). Co-management combining these is often most effective, ensuring local rights and clear rules.
Explain the relation between environment, development and society. Compare the state, private and community-based (common property) approaches to natural resource management with examples, and state what sustainable development means.
Environment, development and society
The environment provides resources (energy, water, soil, forest) and absorbs wastes. Development uses these to raise income, health and living standards. Society decides how they are shared and who bears the costs. Rapid development without care for the environment causes depletion and pollution, and poor management without development leaves people in poverty, which also damages the environment (e.g. over-cutting forest for fuelwood).
Sustainable development (Brundtland Commission, 1987) is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". It balances three pillars: economy, society and environment.
Approaches to natural resource management
| Point | State (centralised) | Private | Community-based (common property) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owner and manager | Government agency | Individual or company | Local user group |
| Aim | National revenue, protection | Profit | Livelihood and sustainable use |
| Strengths | Large-scale planning, national parks, law | Efficiency, investment | Local knowledge, low monitoring cost, fair local sharing |
| Weaknesses | Poor local participation, costly policing | Neglects poor and long term, can over-exploit | Needs clear rules and legal rights, may exclude weak members |
| Example | National parks, state-owned hydropower | Private mines and plantations | Community forestry user groups, village irrigation, micro hydro committees |
Open-access resources suffer "tragedy of the commons" (overuse because no one owns them). Experience, such as community forestry in Nepal, shows that giving local users clear rights and duties can restore forests. Most countries now prefer co-management, where government, local communities and the private sector share roles.
Comparison summary
No single approach suits all cases; the best results come from clear property rights, local participation, transparent rules and monitoring, together with legal and technical support from the state.
✓ Answer checked by Claude Opus 5.5 (high effort)
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