This part is presenting articles written by Mary Rodeghier and Clara Jamart, based on "Sharing Power: Learning by Doing in Comanagement of Natural Resources throughout the World".

This collective work was published in 2004 by Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend, Michel Pimbert, M.Taghi Farvar, Ashish Kothari, Yves Renard et al. It gives a whole enlightening reflection about the shared management of natural ressources and tools needed.

Considering aGter’s mind, we wish to make syntesis that report main elements of this publication available and understandable for all.

The authors of Sharing Power employ “the term co-management (CM) to describe a partnership by which two or more relevant social actors collectively negotiate, agree upon, and implement a fair share of management functions, benefits and responsibilities for a particular territory, area, or set of natural resources.” In other words, co-management describes a kind of arrangement for governing natural resources that involves negotiation and a degree of power sharing. Many such partnerships (...)

In a broad sense, everyone on Earth partakes in the management of natural resources. “Via the physical cycles of water, air, and energy, the movements of living organisms and people and the expanding global exchanges of goods and information, powerful linkages are established among distant ecosystems and the human and animal populations living therein. The most impressive example may be the enormous consumption of fossil fuels in the industrialized North, which is altering the chemical (...)

« Social organization for the management of natural resources is a fundamental attribute of human communities. Not all social responses to resource management challenges, however, achieve appropriate or effective results. Violent conflicts, extreme inequities in access to natural resources, instances of people scrambling for resources in open access situations or major development schemes delivering environmental and human tragedies too often do occur. » The all too common tragedies of (...)

The distribution of power in society profoundly affects the conditions for sustainable natural resource management. When the interests of the local level are not represented in policy-making processes that take place in other spheres of power, the co-management of natural resources is not feasible in the long term. Sustainable natural resource management therefore requires the alignment of different scales of decision-making, from the local to the international level and in between. More (...)