This research explores the mechanisms, and associated factors, by which local institutions for the management of natural resources successfully adapt to changes in important features of the external environment, namely, demographic change, market integration, technological progress, shifts in state policies, and political competition. Existing theoretical understanding of common property institutions, particularly at the local level, has been preoccupied with internal features of the institutions that are associated with cooperative behavior, largely ignoring the larger context or holding it constant. This project contributes to theory development by expanding the scope of the theory of institutions to include changes in the external environment over time. Intellectual merit: The interaction between local institutions and the external environment over a long period of time has never been studied systematically before. The impact of population and markets have been explored to some extent, but analysis of the role of technology and state policies has been restricted to their influence on the resources, without explicit reference to local institutional arrangements. Political competition has not been considered to be an important factor in the performance of local institutions for natural resource management till now. This project is the first attempt to explore changes in all the relevant features of the external environment simultaneously, within a unified analytical framework. In another theoretical contribution, it seeks to empirically clarify and theoretically engage the concept of institutional resilience . the ability of institutions to adapt to changes in the external environment. The research design combines qualitative and inductive analysis of contextual factors with quantitative and time-series analysis of institutions, providing greater theoretical leverage over causal inference. The project will create a framework for the comparative analysis of institutions for the management of different resource types . forests and irrigation . that would be exportable to other locations and contexts, and create a dataset for over 100 institutions for future reference. Broader impacts: More than sixty developing countries have initiated decentralization policies in the 1990s that devolve management authority to local/village institutions over multiple domains, including drinking water, primary education, public health, and small infrastructure development, besides forests, fisheries, and irrigation. Inevitably, the external environment in which these institutions are expected to perform is changing steadily, whereas social scientists and policymakers do not have the theoretical tools and operational instruments to equip institutions to adapt to these changes. Better appreciation of the factors that contribute to institutional resilience has the potential to enhance the quality of policy- making and implementation. Much of the literature on democratization in developing countries has ignored environmental issues, just as the literature on environmental politics has almost totally neglected democratic politics. By incorporating the influence of democratic competition on the functioning of local institutions for natural resource management, this research project initiates the building of a bridge between the two literatures, leading to a better appreciation of the challenges in environmental management in new and broadening democracies. The theoretical lessons from this research would also be applicable to similar questions in other domains, such as public goods provision, political decentralization, and fiscal federalism.
