From anilg@iimahd.ernet.in Thu Dec 4 12:24:48 1997 Received: from mx4.u.washington.edu (mx4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.5]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.05) with ESMTP id MAA17296 for ; Thu, 4 Dec 1997 12:24:47 -0800 Received: from stdwww.iimahd.ernet.in (root@stdwww.iimahd.ernet.in [202.41.76.247]) by mx4.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.09) with SMTP id MAA01376 for ; Thu, 4 Dec 1997 12:24:27 -0800 Received: from iimahd.iimahd (iimahd [202.41.76.254]) by stdwww.iimahd.ernet.in (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id BAA02157 for ; Fri, 5 Dec 1997 01:17:13 +0500 Received: from anilg.iimahd by iimahd.iimahd (4.1/SMI-4.0) id AA02043; Fri, 5 Dec 97 01:38:16+050 Date: Fri, 5 Dec 97 01:38:16+050 From: anilg@iimahd.ernet.in (Prof Anil K Gupta) To: indknow@u.washington.edu Subject: part two of the draft paper for comments on sacred groves Message-Id: Saint (1995) quotes Illich (1984) on sacred groves as commons but with a difference. Illich observers, ..lm .5" `Commons are a cultural space that lies beyond my threshold and this side of wilderness. Custom defines the different usefulness of commons for each one. The commons are porous. The same spot for different purposes can be used by differ ent people. And, above all, custom protects the commons. The commons are not community resources, the commons become a resource only when the lord or community encloses them. Enclosure transmogrifies commons into a resource for the extraction, production or circulation of commodities. Commons are as vernacular as vernacular speech.' ..lm Nipunage, Kumbhojkar and Vartak (1988) describe Sagdara grove in Pune district which is surrounded by parent land. Joint teak trees preserved through religious sanctions seem to be a unique provenance with considerable potential for breeding in future. The authors refer to almost a 100 year old study by Talbot (1909- 11) to suggest that teak seldom attained a large size in that ecological region. Sacred grove, authors suggest, could be an important source for high quality seedlings. Hughes (1984) traces the origin of the concept of sacred grove in the European and Greeko Roman context. He quotes Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.) that these sacred groves or sanctuaries were the first temples of God. Alsos was a Greek term used for grove con secrated to a deity called Temenos, a `cut-off' or de-marcated place. The Latin equivalent were Nemus (grove) and Templum i.e. a marked out space. The latter was the origin of the word Tem plum. The examples of leasing out private groves for commercial purposes in First Century A.D. and Fourth Century B.C. imply that pressures for weakening moral or religious motivations had start ed emerging in urban fringe areas even at that time. Another interesting dimension of sacred groves recalled from the histori cal documents in Roman era is about their being experimental forest to demonstrate the potential of sustained yield through proper management. The positions of forest guards or forest custodians (hyloroi) are recalled by Aristotle (4th Century BC) signifying the need for protection and, therefore, external regulation. It seemed that priests protected the sacred groves and forest guards protected the secular forests for state use. It is a different matter that the sustainability of the former institution seemed much higher than the latter. Sanjay Deshmukh (1997, Personal Communication) points out that in several of the contemporary sacred groves, the norms of usage have evolved according to the local needs. For instance, the grazing is allowed but no green trees are allowed to be cut. The dry wood, however, can be collected for fuel purposes with the permission of the village and, of course, the god. The ownership is with the revenue department but people have informal control. In another case, the priests of the temple in the sacred grove claimed to have the right to take legal action against anyone who cut down the trees. The forest department and the temple trust have planted about 8000 plants of acacia and eucalyptus in the sacred grove. In the third case, the sacred grove was supposed to have originated more than 2000 years ago and no tree was allowed to be cut. Only those trees which fell down due to storms or some disease could be used. The grazing was practiced round the year. The farmers had planted only bamboo in the sacred grove and rest of the species were naturally grown. US President Clinton's Executive Order on Indian Sacred Sites ( May 27, 1996) states provides new identity to the rights of indigenous people in USA on sacred sites: ..lm .5" Section 1. Accommodation of Sacred Sites. (a) In managing Federal lands, each executive branch agency with statutory or administrative responsibility for the management of Federal lands shall, to the extent practica ble, permitted by law, and not clearly inconsistent with essential agency functions, (1) accommodate access to and ceremonial use of Indian sacred sites by Indian religious practitioners and (2) avoid adversely affecting the physical integrity of such sacred sites. Where appropriate, agencies shall maintain the confidentiality of sacred sites. ------(iii)"Sacred site" means any specific, discrete, narrowly delineated location on Federal land that is identi fied by an Indian tribe, or Indian individual determined to be an appropriately authoritative representative of an Indian religion, as sacred by virtue of its established religious significance to, or ceremonial use by, an Indian religion; provided that the tribe or appropriately authori tative representative of an Indian religion has informed the agency of the existence of such a site. Section 2. Procedures. (a) Each executive branch agency with statutory or adminis trative responsibility for the management of Federal lands shall, as appropriate, promptly implement procedures for the purposes of carrying out the provisions of section 1 of this order, including, where practicable and appropriate, pro cedures to ensure reasonable notice is provided of proposed actions or land management policies that may restrict future access to or ceremonial use of, or adversely affect the physical integrity of, sacred sites. In all actions pursuant to this section, agencies shall comply with the Executive memorandum of April 29, 1994, "Government-to-Government Relations with Native American Tribal Governments." ..lm The executive order does not fulfill all the aspirations of native American communities but at least is a step in the right direction. Sacred Species: There is considerable discussion on higher animals which have been treated as sacred by various religious and cultural communi ties. But the role of insects has been rather neglected. Since sacred groves, lakes and marshy patches provide a very rich sanctuary for different kinds of insects, it may help us to look at the roots of sacredness differently. Hogue ( 1987) explains the evolution of cultural entomology as a discipline and observes, ..lm .5" Humans spend their intellectual energies in three basic areas of activity: surviving, using practical learning (the application of technology); seeking pure knowledge through inductive mental processes (science); and pursuing enlightenment to taste a pleasure by aesthetic exercises that may be referred to as the "humanities." Entomology has long been concerned with survival (economic or applied entomology) and scientific study (academic entomology), but the branch of investigation that addresses the influence of insects (and other terrestrial Arthropoda, including arach nids, myriapods, etc) in literature, language, music, the arts, interpretive history, religion, and recreation has only recently been recognized as a distinct field. This is referred to as "cultural entomology". ..lm He adds, ..lm .5" Insect products have also helped to determine the direction of civilization's march. It could be said that the Chinese Empire was largely founded on the silk trade. Com merce in dyestuffs derived from the bodies of the cochineal insect reached global proportions by the 18th century, and proved so lucrative that the insect and its cactus host were introduced to various parts of the world from their native America. In the adopted countries the plant spread and became a noxious weed that rendered vast tracts of land unusable. Trade in other insect products such as honey and shellac has had similar economic significance. The Israelite band that founded the Jewish nation survived on "manna" during its extended trek through the Sinai Desert. This nutritious substance is thought to have been extruded by scale insects on the tamarisk plant. Several important personages were aided in difficult times and inspired to lofty deeds by insects and spiders. The Chinese inventor of paper, Ts'ai Lun (89-106AD), accord ing to legend, was shown the process by wasps making their nests by chewing tree bark and mixing it with their saliva. Insects have generally influenced human history, principally by forcing shifts in pivotal events. Battles have been lost, expeditions foiled, and populations decimated through the direct involvement of insects, usually as carriers of dis ease. ..lm Many creation myths involve insects: The Hopis explained the origin of the world by the actions of the Spider Grandmother; According to the Yagua Indians of Peru the Amazon River was created by the wood-eating insects; and fire came from a mythical campfire ignited by fireflies, according to the Jicarilla Apaches of New Mexico. Dr. Kellert ( 1980) defines a basic topology of public attitudes towards invertebrates and presents various potential reasons for prevalent societal anxiety, aversion, and antipathy. ..lm .5" AESTHETICS Primary interest in the physical attractiveness and symbolic appeal of invertebrates HUMANISTIC Primary orientation one of strong emotional affection for invertebrate animals MORALISTIC Primary concern for the right and wrong treatment of inver tebrates, with strong ethical opposition to presumed cruelty towards invertebrate animals. NATURALISTIC Primary interest in direct outdoor recreational contact and enjoyment of invertebrates. DOMINIONISTIC Primary interest in the mastery and control of inverte brates. ECOLOGISTIC Primary concern for interrelationships among invertebrates and other species, as well as between invertebrates and natural habitats. NEGATIVISTIC Primary orientation a fear, dislike or indifference towards invertebrates. UTILITARIAN Primary interest in the practical value of invertebrates or the subordination of invertebrates for the material benefit of humans. SCIENTIFIC Primary interest in the physical attributes, taxonomic classification and biological functioning of invertebrates. ..lm All these attitudes have to be assimilated while developing a new strategy for conserving sacred groves and also mobilizing civil society. One will have to do a kind of market segmentation to as to develop strategies which will suit people with different kinds of attitude mix. Part Three: Institutional and management Issues in Conserving Sacred Groves 1) Blending Secular with Sacred: Recognizing moral boundaries of restraint in using natural re sources is an imperative in the current context of increasing alienation of modern mind from some of the traditional cultural consciousness. The paradox is that at the same time when moral order is declining, the fundamentalist forces are becoming a stronger all around the world. Apparently, the ideology of sacred relationship with nature is not able to fill the void created by collapse of other ideologies. 2) Fusing Reductionism with Holistic Thinking: Repairing an ecological system disturbed by various activities ideally may require changing all the parts at the same time. This is a task very difficult to achieve by the NGOs as well as other civil society institutions, public bureaucracies, etc., because of their own fragmented capacity and understanding. In any case, resources being limited, one couldn't perhaps repair all faults at the same time. It is in this context that a prud ent fusion of reductionist approach with holistic perspective may be required. The technological intervention may be reductionist but the context for prioritizing, monitoring and evaluating the impact may be as holistic as possible. The sacred groves would need external inputs in many cases. The sequence, source, and style of these inputs will have to be determined keeping the spirit of conservation into mind. The example of US executive order illustrates why intervention at the highest level become necessary when conflicts among local communities and state bu reaucracies around sacred sites become a rule rather than an exception. 3) Augmenting Sacred Groves by Moulding Markets The pressure for managing livelihoods in marginal environments has been increasing. In the regions of high biodiversity, people are often found to be poor. Obviously, we cannot conserve di versity by keeping people poor. One of the opportunities that may arise for generating incentives for conserving diversity as well as knowledge around it is through value addition in local knowledge of medicinal uses and germ plasm characteristics of diversity. In many cases, the boundaries of the people having rights in a sacred grove may be much larger than the boundaries of the local village in which the grove is located. The assign ment of entitlements will have to contend with the fuzzy bounda ries. 4) Process theory of institutions: participative Evolution of Institutional Arrangements for Enforcing Sanctions Does it matter whether a rule for managing common properties is evolved through different processes? Can a dish have the same flavour, no matter who cooks it and how? This aspect gets ne glected compared to the structure base theory in our anxiety to develop generalized frameworks for analyzing institutions. Traditionally, different cultures did stress the importance of various pathways to reach the same goal. However, despite in creasing appreciation for cultural pluralism in design and imple mentation of institutions, the literature is not as eloquent on the process of rule making as on rules per se. A database of seventy one indigenous institutions on common property resources has been developed at SRISTI in collaboration with IIMA and other members of Honey Bee Network. Drawing upon this database, we can show how institutional pathways for sustainability could vary significantly depending upon the process through which different rules are evolved. The need for building upon local ecological knowledge in the study of institutions has been emphasized by several researchers( Gerlach and Palmer, 1981, Gupta, 1992, 1993, 1995, McKay and Acheson, 1987). Similarly the importance of blending sacred and profane in the design of institutions has been noted though not to the same extent. But what has been left under-explored is the process by which rules for boundary and resource allocation evolve and accordingly the rules for conflict resolution evolve. We contend that this neglect partly also explains the lack of patience among practitioners as well as theory builders with more participative discourse in which local communities and individual assert not just rights of physical participation but also intellectual participation-- an issue persist ently raised by Honey Bee network of grassroots innova tions for last eight years. How else one explains the irony that people are considered good enough for building CPR institutions which work for centuries but not good enough for critiquing theories about their institutions. They could not do so unless discourse taken place in vernacular language. The connection between language and culture is similar to the one between words and grammar and technologies and institutions. The technologies have been considered like words and the institutions like gram mar( Gupta 1992). Let us explain this with the help of three frameworks, ( A ) ex ante and ex poste transaction costs, (b) socio-ecological para digm for adjustment with risks, and (c) playful portfolio of inter-locked, multi market, multi level or multi bureucractic structures( Gupta, 1985, Ostrom, Feeny and Picht, 1988:460) and multi-actor choices for dealing with public, private and CPR institutions( Gupta et al, 1997). ..lm .5" A: Transaction Costs Framework: Three propositions can be made about the way TC theory applies to evolution of rule making process, (a) Some of the ex ante transaction costs may be inversely related to ex poste transaction costs ( Gupta and Prakash, 1992). For instance, if time and resource spent on negotiation are higher, the costs of enforcement may come down because most of the members of the community may have internalized the logic of why rules have been framed in the first place; (b) if arena of negotiation is more open and inclusive, the cost of monitoring may come down. Many times due to penchant for multi tier institution al structures, the arena of negotiation is severely re stricted. The result is that lots of people involved in compliance of rules do not know the whole process that went into evolving the rules. Once the arena is wider and more inclusive, the logic through which rules were evolved is known to larger number of people and thus monitoring costs may go down; (c) if negotiations have been particularly segmented with special emphasis on incorporating naughty boys of girls, the cost of redrawing the contract or rules may come down. The old saying of making the naughty boy( girl) the monitor may have a ring of truth around it. Not every one has the same propensity to violate the rules and create chaos. If the potential violators are allowed respon sibility during the process of negotiation, as and when new rules have to be drawn, the process involves less road blocks because the blockers may become the facilitators. B: Socio-Ecological Paradigm The eco-institutional framework ( Gupta,1985, 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996) suggests that interface between access, as surance, ability and attitudes of members of an institution with ecological endowments, technology, institutions and culture provide a way of looking at the design possibilities more comprehensively. However, the limitation was that one could not incorporate the principle of `sequential synerg isms' ( Gupta, 1981). That is which factor and rule is incorporated in what sequence could make substantial dif ference to the outcome of an institutional dilemma. Those who practice cooking would vouschafe that same spices and ingredients added in different sequences may generate dif ferent flavours. Why then have we neglected this issue so much in the discussion of rule making process? C: Playful Portfolios of Multi-level, multi market and multi-actor choices The households in particularly marginal environments derive their survival need from various resource markets over space and time is well known. What is less well recognized that one can not analyze the validity or otherwise of any choice of various actors in one resource market, or at one level, or in one institutional regime ( private, markets, or pub lic) without reference to similar choices in other resource markets, levels and institutional trade offs. But in day to day life, such an analysis will seem highly complex to an analyst. But ask a person inter-locked in a web of kinship and ethnic relationships with all kind of reciprocities and obligations, there is not another way of looking at the world except through the prism of portfolio of interests, involvements and incentives. Playful aspect of this portfo lio is drawn from an insight ( Richards,1987, Gupta, 1990) that people deal with stress or conflict not just by mani festing, enduring, managing and transforming it ( FAO, FTPP, 1996:51) but also by laughing about it. Much of the earli er work of senior author ( Gupta, 1981, 1983) suffered from this inadequacy i.e. it was full of pathos while describing and thus analyzing the survival options of poor people in high risk environments such as dry regions. But then the light dawned and it was realized that creativity of knowl edge rich and economically poor people lies in not just struggling with stress but also laughing about it, singing about it and some times making it into riddles. The process of rule making thus we submit is consistent with what I call Godel's theorem of institutions. Godel was a famous mathematician who demonstrated that at least one assumption had to be made outside the framework of any set of propositions to be proved. One could not formulate a framework and prove all the assumptions by making reference to that framework only. The Godel theorem of institutions could thus be formulated by suggesting that rule making process and structure of rules make sense only in the living world and context of chaos (natural, spontaneous, or delib erately designed and `institutionalized') and playful manner of oscillation between order and chaos across fuzzy bounda ries. ..lm 5) Rediscovering Roots of Sacredness Inventing new institutions for restoring the place of sacredness in our day-to-day life is important. Far too many concrete monuments have been created in the memory of those who sometimes cared and sometimes not for the non-human sentient beings. Time has come when a large global initiative needs to be taken for encouraging civil society initiatives for creating sacred sites, groves and lakes all around us. The motivations need not be based on fears or heavenly retribution for our carnal mistakes. Instead the respect for perfect strangers i.e. unknown and un knowable may be underlined together with the cultural investment of memory space in physical landscape. We can resurrect the spirit of sustainability which requires faith in future as well as in the past heritage that has made it possible for us to experience the serenity only visible in sacred groves. The challenge is to combine utilitarian logic with spiritual concern for conservation. A new ideology to fill an old gap is what we are talking about. .