Abstract
The local turn in good governance theory and practice responded to critiques of the ineffectiveness of state management and the inequity of privatization alternatives in natural resource management. Confounding expectations of greater effectiveness from decentralised governance, including community-based natural resource management, however, critics argue that expanded opportunities for elite capture have become widely associated with program failures. This overview of theoretical controversies on leadership, patronage and elite capture is part of a themed section in this issue that challenges assumptions across a wide range of current policy literature. It introduces a set of Indonesian case studies that examine practices of local leaders and elites and seek to account in structural terms for appropriations both by (‘elite capture’) and of (‘captured elites’) these key figures. These studies explore the structural factors and co-governance practices most likely to promote effective participation of the full spectrum of local interests in pursuit of better local natural resource governance.
Highlights
The local turn in good governance theory and practice responded to critiques of the ineffectiveness of state management and the inequity of privatization alternatives in natural resource management
The turn to the local in good governance theory and practice moved more recently from mainstream debates in development policy circles into conservation literature1. There it met up with a longer standing body of ‘commons’ scholarship reacting against dominant readings of Hardin’s (1968) tragedy of the commons allegory that had placed concerted policy emphasis on the supposed advantages of state and private resource management (Ostrom 1990; Berkes and Folke 1998; Agrawal and Ribot 1999). This earlier shift of focus away from the mainstream predisposition toward centralised resource management to community institutions in common property scholarship and non-government organization circles responded to critiques of the ineffectiveness of state management of resources and the inequity of privatization alternatives (Ostrom et al 2002; Warren and McCarthy 2009; Cleaver 2012)
The Indonesian cases we explore represent a diverse set of cultural and environmental contexts within the framework of a single rapidly developing and democratizing nation-state that has committed to a dramatic decentralization of governance as part of the reform process since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998 (Aspinall and Fealy 2003; Hadiz 2010; Satria et al 2006; Patlis 2008)
Summary
A substantive policy literature has emerged over more than a decade on the role of social capital, community empowerment. The collection of case studies presented in this issue connects with debates in the development and conservation literature on ‘social capital’ and the structural conditions needed to achieve sustainability and equity ends Contributors to these debates tend to diverge along lines we might describe as pragmatic policy-oriented versus critical theory approaches: the one strand follows Putnam et al.’s (1993) interest in the capacities of social groups to use horizontal associations and normative values to achieve institutional bases for collective action and common good outcomes. Bourdieu’s approach to elite domination has become the foundation of a body of literature focusing on the reproduction of power hierarchies and their effects on governance It underpins elite capture assumptions and seeks to explain how ineffective and inequitable policy outcomes persistently result from asymmetrical structural characteristics of communities and social groups (most explicitly evidenced in the Sumatran case). As Bebbington (2007:160) argues, this focus on vertical power relations obscures the existence of other ‘disinterested’ and cooperative forms of local leadership and social action based on horizontal solidarities
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