Regeneration and sustainable management of CPRs can contribute to increased benefit for the livestock-dependent poor

This documentation is based on the following three Good Practice Notes: 

• Community Ownership and Institutional Mechanisms to Develop CPRs' and Enhance Livelihoods - The Kavalas way;
• Innovations in Common Land Development - Strengthening Institutional and Physical Spaces for Poor Livestock Keepers;
• Securing Community Tenure over Common Lands.

Decentralized, collective management of CPRs results in three major impacts, which are effectively demonstrated in these three Good Practice documents: 

• Increased fodder availability, in both quantity and quality throughout the year. For example, in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, the average standing tree biomass in regenerated commons was 53 ton/ha versus 20 ton/ha in non‐regenerated CPRs.
• Increased water availability, in terms of both spread and time. In the Thoria village, district Ajmer, Rajasthan, water levels in open wells increased by around 10 feet following CPR regeneration; likewise in the Ladwan watershed in district Shajapur, Madhya Pradesh, water levels were found higher in 63 out of the 83 wells surveyed. 
• Increased people’s capacity to manage CPRs, demonstrated by the variety of organisations and institutions which have been formed by both CPR users and non‐users.

Depending on agro‐climatic conditions and socio‐institutional frameworks, improved community management of CPRs can also bring about positive spill‐over effects, such as:

• Environmentally responsible management practices on private land and other common property resources (such as road side plantations; village ponds),
• A diversification of the household livelihood portfolio, including a change in the number and type of farm animals,
• Bio‐diversity conservation and regeneration, such as protecting endangered species and reviving traditional crops and tree species/ flora.

Based on learning from the Good Practice Notes, priority areas of investments for CPR development pertain to three domains:

a) Bio‐physical investments, , i.e. interventions which are necessary to regenerate and sustain the increased productivity of CPRs. Interventions  aiming to improve fodder production and the productivity of CPRs should invest in  biophysical improvements  such as land demarcation, and appropriate soil and water conservation measures. 

b) Social‐institutional investments, i.e. interventions which promote and facilitate community norms and institutions to regenerate and protect CPRs and at the same time ensure sustainable and equitable distribution of benefits from regenerated CPRs. Experiences documented in the Good Practice notes underline the priority need for CPR interventions to be people centred and for community institutions to facilitate collective decision‐making. CPR programs should avoid being prescriptive. It is best left to local communities, local government bodies and facilitating agencies to identify the most appropriate institutions / methods to enable broad‐based participation and collective decision‐making in a given context.

A problem for program design is that whereas the cost of establishing community institutions can be calculated ex‐ante, it is often difficult to budget the time and resources necessary to build the capacity of these institutions and empower them to perform their future expected role effectively.

 c) Facilitation investments,

i.e. actions which allow and enable local people and authorities to appreciate the importance of CPRs for livestock production and start working on their regeneration and management. The major learning is that CPR programs should allocate part of their budget to seemingly peripheral activities, which are however critical for the efficacy of both bio‐physical and socio‐institutional investments. It is in fact fundamental that users are taken on board from the very beginning and that both users and non‐users fully appreciate the potential positive impact of CPR development on fodder production and productivity and, in general, on livestock. Budgeting for such tangential activities is however difficult, as many options are available which have to be further tailored to local circumstances.

Major policy lessons are that programs/schemes focused on CPR regeneration should be built around an appropriate combination of investments across these three domains - bio‐physical, social‐institutional, facilitation- which in turn can ensure the regeneration and sustainable management of CPRs.

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