In a paper published in PNAS in 2006, Elinor Ostrom and Harini Nagendra synthesized the findings of a long-term research program aimed at understanding how institutional factors affect forests managed under different kinds of tenure. Bringing together satellite images, socio-ecological studies in the field, and laboratory experiments of human behaviour, Ostrom and Nagendra showed that users are more likely to follow rules regarding resource use and monitor other users when they are are involved in decision-making than when the rules are imposed by an outside authority. Fourteen years after the paper was published, I spoke to Harini Nagendra about how the idea for this paper came about, her memories of carrying out this study, and what we have learnt since about the effectiveness of different institutional factors and tenure arrangements in governing forest use.
Citation: Ostrom, E., & Nagendra, H. (2006). Insights on linking forests, trees, and people from the air, on the ground, and in the laboratory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103(51), 19224-19231.
Date of interview: 27 March 2020 (via Skype)
Hari Sridhar: I’d like to start by asking you how this paper came about. I know that Elinor Ostrom was asked to contribute this Inaugural Article when she was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences. From reading the paper, it seems like it is bringing together different independent pieces of work that were already done. Tell us a little more about the idea behind this paper?
Harini Nagendra: This is indeed an inaugural paper. Lin (Prof. Elinor Ostrom) was approached by PNAS, when she was invited as a member of the National Academy, to do this inaugural paper. She was thinking about what to do for a while in the paper, and she approached me when she was, I believe, a few weeks into the thinking. The inaugural paper is supposed to be a summation of the member’s lifetime contributions. That’s the idea. It’s like a perspective piece – it tells you about their most important findings, discoveries and what they feel the implications are. Lin’s original idea was to write on her work on experimental games, which was something that she’d worked on for a long time. And then she started thinking that that was maybe too focused – that would not serve the purpose of summarising the very broad scope of the diverse issues she had been working on, and the diversity of methods and collaborative work that research on the commons demanded.
The core of Lin’s work was to show that communities had significant capacity to collectively manage their natural resources. And while this was not a panacea, there was definitely sufficient evidence from across the world in diverse contexts to show that “Hardin-like” thinking, or many other people who use similar thinking approaches that either focus on the privatization of natural resources, or their conversion to state property, were not the only ways – that there’s a third alternative, of community management, which is also very effective.
The paper was focused on – what are the lines of evidence that we can put together? Some of the evidence came from the experimental games that she had worked on. There was also a lot of additional evidence from a long term program – the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) – which she was instrumental in setting up at Indiana University. This is a long term field-based program, the longest running in the world that examines the relationship between forests and institutions, established across multiple countries in North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia. I had worked on several of the IFRI datasets, especially in South Asia, examining them from an ecological standpoint. Finally, I’d been working on remote sensing for several years, of course. Lin suggested, why don’t we do something together for this inaugural on integrating these three different aspects – games, ground data, and remote-sensing images – and putting that together? So that’s really how the idea for the paper came about.
HS: At this time, were you already working with her?
HN: Yes, I’d been working with her for a long while. I moved to Indiana University in September 2000. Lin had set up an interdisciplinary centre along with another anthropologist called Emilio Moran. They had been awarded a large NSF grant, to create an interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change – CIPEC. They had hired post-docs from various places with diverse disciplinary backgrounds to create an interdisciplinary research team. I joined them in September 2000 because they were setting up a South Asia focus. They were already working in Africa, in Latin America, in North America obviously – because that’s where the center was based –and in Brazil, where they had a large -scale program. They had field sites in Nepal, under the IFRI program, but no systematic work on biodiversity, remote sensing and the like. Since I had the experience of working in India, it was a good fit, essentially, because they wanted someone to set up the South Asia program. I was seeking postdoctoral experience where I could engage more with societal, institutional and governance issues, to complement my remote-sensing and ecology background. And I was quite clear that I wanted to work in something that was relevant to the Indian context. I didn’t want to go off and work in the North American forests, for instance. So I joined them in September 2000. And I worked with Lin Ostrom very closely since I joined CIPEC in 2000, until she passed away in 2012.
HS: Before I ask you more about this paper, I wanted to step back a bit and ask you how you got interested in remote-sensing. Was this something that was planned right from the beginning when you joined the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) for an Integrated PhD?
HN: Not at all. I joined IISc for an Integrated PhD in Biological Science. I was part of the first batch, which was their initial experiment with a new approach. They admitted six people, but only three of us stayed the course. At that time, there were seven bio departments in IISc, of which six did some kind of molecular biology, molecular biophysics, developmental biology, cell biology – and then there was the Centre for Ecological Sciences, which was a real anomaly. In the first year we did a lot of lab rotation, and in the second year, we had to select two research projects, and pick one of them, ideally, to continue our PhDs on. My move to ecology itself was pretty serendipitous, because I had done an undergraduate degree in microbiology, chemistry and zoology from Bangalore University. And I sort of assumed I would be doing something molecular biology related. I did indeed complete my first Masters project on molecular biology, trying to clone a gene and extract a protein. But I discovered I hated lab work; purely hated it. I was thinking of dropping out from the program, at which point the Centre for Ecological Sciences had its 10th year anniversary. WD Hamilton was invited to give a talk on evolutionary biology at this event. I went to hear Hamilton give this talk, because we had read his papers in our evolutionary biology classes. But they were off schedule, and when I went Madhav Gadgil was talking. And he was talking about issues that resonated with me – doing science that was relevant to the country’s context, doing something that was interdisciplinary, thinking out of the box, working in collaboration with local communities, about his life’s trajectory. So I went up to him and said, Can I do my second project with you? And he said, Fine, and gave me three options, from which I selected one – this was not related to remote-sensing.
In the process of working on this project, I realized that here is somebody who I really wanted to do a PhD with; because many of the other PhDs that I saw around me were very directed. And that I think is often the nature of working in the lab – you write a grant, you have a certain problem that you want to do, and then a student joins and works on this problem. But Madhav was far more open to new ideas, and interdisciplinary applied work He gave me a set of books, and asked me to see what interested me. One of the books he gave me was the classic Landscape Ecology textbook by Forman and Godron, which fascinated me. So that’s how I got into remote-sensing. Landscape ecology still constitutes the core of what fascinates me about ecology – the way in which spatial patterns configure, and are configured by ecological and human-driven processes.
We decided that I would begin research in Siddapura in Uttar Kannada district – a patchwork landscape with some plantations, some agroforestry, some agriculture and the Western Ghats forests–to explore how this mosaic landscape contributed to biodiversity. The original plan was go stand on a high hill top or places of elevation, walk through the place, try and make a grid with a compass – this was pre-GPS – and essentially sketch out a map by walking on the ground. But I came back after some time realizing that’s completely impossible.
We then said, Okay, what is the workaround for this? Satellite images were a possible workaround because they had just come into existence and Madhav had a grant that allowed him to buy a lot of satellite imagery. The Indian Institute of Remote Sensing had offices in different parts of the country, including one in Bangalore. I spent some time there and learn the essentials of remote sensing. We bought the images but the commercially available state-of-the-art software for remote sensing, statistical analysis etc. required a lot of money, and we could not purchase these. Landscape ecology analysis, luckily, could be done using open source software, but image analysis required software. After a while, I realised it was impossible to work out of Indian Institute of Remote Sensing because it’s a government institution which is fully occupied with work on their own projects. I would only get short periods of time to use their systems – half an hour in the lunch break and 15 minutes in the tea break, and if somebody was generous enough to stay back in the evening and open it for me, maybe an hour in the evening.
At that time, the US Geological Service had open-source software for remote-sensing called GRASS. I found a complicated work around to make it run on my computer at IISc. That’s too much detail for you right now, but we figured out a way to run it on Linux, partition the computer to load the data on the computers in the supercomputing center, which was just behind our department in IISc, and use my computer to process the data, one image at a time (we had 53 images in total to process in this manner, which was incredibly time consuming). Remote sensing is something I got a bit of training on from the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, but really had to pick up on my own. These were early days in India. There were remote sensing images available, but most users were using visual approaches for classification. In this approach, you’d print this out in a large mapping table and delineate patches of various kinds, and then digitize them using a digital pen. What I was using though was digital remote sensing- using a pixel-based approach, training computer with classifiers, etc. That’s how the Siddapura classification started.
Again serendipitously, Madhav at that time had set up the Western Ghats biodiversity through a Pew Foundation award he got, where a number of college lecturers and other field-based people working across the Western Ghats were doing biodiversity sampling, according to a common protocol designed in CES.
At that point, it seemed like a good way, if I was interested in landscape ecology principles, to work with this broader network of researchers across the Western Ghats. I completed my field research in Siddapura, with landscape ecology using the remote-sensing data, but we also bought images for the entire Western Ghats. I developed a three-level hierarchical study for my PhD. The first level was based on my work on Siddapura. The second level was a collaboration with the PEW network of researchers based in different landscapes across the Western Ghats, where we conducted landscape classification and studied the landscape ecology and biodiversity. At the third level, I analysed 53 images of the entire Western Ghats and west coast of India. We put these together, to conduct hierarchical analysis to examine biodiversity and landscape ecology patterns at the scale of the entire Western Ghats. Anyway, that’s how my interest in remote sensing began. I was fortunate to be one of the early starters in the use of remote sensing for ecological research application in India.
HS: The 10th anniversary celebration would have been in ’94?
HN: No,‘93 was the 10th anniversary, at least the tenth anniversary celebrations. I joined IISc in mid ’92,and my first project was the end of ‘93. The lab based project somewhere towards the end of ’93. I think it was September-October that CES had that meeting – the 10th anniversary meeting. I’m not sure but sometime around then. In early ’94 – January – I started working on a field based project in IISc with Madhav – and by mid ’94, I was reading landscape ecology. And I think by about – I can’t remember the dates – probably July-August was my first trip to Siddapura, after which I started working on remote sensing.
HS: When you joined the Ph. D program in IISc, did you have an idea of which area of biology you wanted to work in?
HN: When I joined the Integrated PhD? Yes, I did. I mean, I thought I would be working on something related to microbiology and molecular biology. It’s an area that I was very fascinated by, but the long hours it requires in the lab and the fact that you can spend six months to eight months doing something like cloning a gene and then you can have failure at the end of it doesn’t fit me. I mean, the doing of it, I hated that. I still like reading about it.
HS: What about your interest in nature and ecology? You say that it came about in the PhD because of listening to Madhav Gadgil speak. Growing up what were your experiences? Was it something you were interested in? Did you have the chance to be out and with access to nature?
HN: I’d say no to that question, Hari. I came to this in a very different way from many of my other friends who work in ecology. Many of them are expert bird watchers or people who grew up with naturalist parents or went on their own and had early exposure in the Wildlife Institute of India with teachers etc. My interest did not come with an early background in ecology. It came with a love for, or even an obsession for, spatial patterns and landscape ecology. Though the urban part of my ecological research -the work I do now, for instance, cities and canopies – I can trace that back to some early stuff, not at all bird or wildlife related, but tree related, with both parents, going for long walks in Delhi and Bangalore. My father was a Govt. bureaucrat who took me on long brisk walks on Sunday in Deer Park in Delhi, and Lal Bagh and Cubbon Park in Bangalore. With my mother, who is trained in botany, we went on long strolls, taking apart flowers and looking at the insides of them and those kinds of things. My exposure to nature was slow and static – looking at a tree or a plant. But looking at birds, listening to wildlife…those aspects of natural history came later, as I opened my eyes to later, as I started reading about them.
HS: During your PhD, the focus was on remote sensing and mapping and using that to map biodiversity and so on. Could you trace how your research trajectory progressed beyond your PhD? How did you become interested in community management, and this debate about strict protection versus community management?
HN: Once you get to the field, it’s very clear that there many things going on beyond the biological structuring of landscapes. I think that’s true in any field context, but particularly obvious in a peopled context like the Western Ghats. This was my earliest rural field exposure to ecology. Obviously, going to grandparents’ homes or relatives’ homes is a very different thing from going out in the field and actually doing your own research. And whether it was Siddapura or anywhere else, it was very clear the Western Ghats was changing because of people and because of its geographic and geologic structure. There are two things going on – biodiversity is structured by latitude, longitude, elevation, all of those other things. And biodiversity is structured by people. During this time, I had no coursework in Ecology. The only coursework I’d had was on Evolutionary Biology. I had to teach myself Ecology, statistics, coding… because for lot of this remote sensing and statistics, we didn’t have software in the lab. While I was doing that I dabbled in wide ranging reading, because it was a completely new field. I think that eventually turned out to be a strength, actually, because I came with zero preconceptions. I had no knowledge of the field. And so I had to teach myself everything. CES had a lovely library. And I would go talk to people. In those days, in IISc if you wanted new journals, there was this little magazine, Current Contents, which came out with an abstract of journal content in different areas every week. You’d get it on Wednesdays into the IISc library. I would go there and write down the addresses of authors whose papers I was interested in, and come back to CES. Madhav had a stock of postcards. We would fill out postcards with little reprint requests for authors, and mail it off into the deep blue sea. Three months, sometimes six months, sometimes a year and a half later, you’d get a response. I’d say about 40% of the people would be kind enough to send us reprints; 60%just disappeared. I mean, I don’t know where they went. So there was a lot of serendipity that shaped my reading as well. I started reading a lot of published literature on landscape ecology from North America and seeing how people were trying to relate human impact to landscape pattern and process. The study of urbanization gradients was popular in those days. How does the urbanization gradient impact biodiversity?
My PhD, as you say, was focused on how to use remote sensing to monitor biodiversity. But the obvious next question is, Okay, now that you’ve monitored biodiversity, you say it’s decreasing, how are you going to stop it? And you can’t stop it by putting out papers that say that biodiversity is changing in XYZ ways. It’s changing because of people – and I could see very clearly that it was changing because of people not just in negative ways, but also in positive ways. There needed to be some way of understanding how to engage with people to appreciate the social dimensions of why they do what they do.
At that time, I decided that I had two possibilities career-wise – one possibility was to go deep into landscape ecology. There was a lot of modelling work that you can do to address the theoretical drivers of landscape ecology, for e.g. by modelling how people move around using cell-based models. That was definitely something I was getting very interested in. The other one was to move into a different area of collaborating with social science, working with and interviewing people, understanding how they did what they did. I decided to look for what post-docs were available in these two areas.
Remember there were two reasons I came to ecology. I think I didn’t talk about the second reason – one was the fact that I hated the lab. But the second reason was also a normative idea – I felt bad that we were wasting so much money on reagents, etc. when my work failed. We’d buy these little pipettes of extremely expensive enzymes that came after six months in various ships etc. and the experiment wouldn’t work. And then I would borrow enzymes from someone else in other labs – but that was also expensive. It was government money – taxpayers’ money – essentially. And I wasn’t sure we should be doing this kind of work. One of the things that really sort of resonated with me in Madhav’s talk was when he was talking about doing locally relevant work and useful work; directly useful. I must clarify – I don’t mean that everybody needs to do that work. For instance, I have a number of friends who do excellent theory-based work, which may have no practical relevance today. It’s not that I feel like people should only do applied work, but I wanted to do applied work. So, with that clarification – because I know that often this gets into a debate about whether India should be doing theoretical work? I think we should be funding all types of research. But I feel that, personally, for me, this is not something that gives me satisfaction – I want to do something that has an application.
And here’s part of the application – you can monitor biodiversity and, yes, you need information on what’s changing to prevent it. But where’s Step 2? How do you make that change?
I submitted a PhD in the end of December ’97,and ‘98 I took a year off. Suri [Suri Venkatachalam, my husband] was in San Diego completing his post-doc, and I moved to the US to join him. At that time I was working with Michael Gilpin, who worked on meta-population ecology. I volunteered in his lab for a year. I learned JavaScript and furthered my interest in landscape modelling. They were working in California on how to do multi species modelling of reserve design. We put together a model for a kit fox looking at what kinds of reserve design would be ideal for the landscape. It was a Java cellular automata-based model. It was great fun, I learned a lot, and Suri and I returned to India in the end of ‘98. I rejoined Madhav’s lab, this time as a post-doc, essentially writing up my work, writing up the interesting bits and pieces that always get left out of a PhD.
By mid-2000, it became increasingly clear to me that while this was one end of one part of the journey, I wanted to do something more. I then started looking out for postdoctoral positions. And I think it was really fortunate timing because at that time, I saw the CIPEC ad. I wanted to move somewhere where I could learn more from the social science disciplines, but all the opportunities I was finding were largely in places where they were working on North American forests and North American landscapes, because a lot of the core landscape ecology work is done in those contexts. And I really didn’t want to do that, because eventually I wanted to come back to India. The CIPEC ad seemed perfect. Nepal forests are so similar to the Indian context – it was the same biogeographical area. And CIPEC was especially pleased because they were looking for someone with a South Asian background who knew remote sensing. So that’s how that happened. I applied sometime in March or April of 2000, I think, and I went to CIPEC in September 2000 and spent about two years in the US full time.
I moved back in mid-2002, to India, but I was still working with CIPEC. First, for a year on their rolls, working from India – my father was sick so I moved back home for personal reasons. And then by the end of 2003, I got a five year Swiss fellowship from ETH, the Branco Weiss fellowship, which was for early career researchers in the life sciences who are working on Science-Society interface issues. So yeah, by the time we wrote this paper, I’d been working with Lin Ostrom for a long time.
HS: Where did you see the ad for the post-doc?
HN: I can’t remember. Somewhere online, I guess.
HS: And was this for a specific project, i.e. doing remote sensing in Nepal?
HN: No. CIPEC had an NSF grant, which was an eight year grant to look at the broad idea of what shapes people’s action in terms of positive and negative impacts on forests around the world. Emilio Moran, one of the CIPEC co-directors, was an anthropologist who had also deployed remote sensing extensively in Brazil. Ostrom had been working in different parts of the world, also using the IFRI protocols. They were also working on North American forests, and in forests in Africa and other parts of Latin America. The idea was to put all of these together and see what patterns could be discerned in different parts of the world.
Nepal was one long standing focus area for Lin Ostrom. She was looking for someone who could set up the remote sensing components, and link it to the field data. There were colleagues doing excellent field research using IFRI, who knew the social context and institutional context. They had collected biodiversity data, and they really wanted the remote sensing part set up, and connected to biodiversity and to institutions. It was great for me because I got to learn about institutions and use the biodiversity data that had been collected so far.
HS: The paper draws upon work that you did in Nepal, West Bengal and in Maharashtra. How did you choose to work in these places?
HN: Nepal was a natural choice because of the CIPEC work and IFRI data that already existed. At the same time, CIPEC had an IFRI network across the world. IFRI is the longest running program – even in 2002 it was the longest running program – which was set up with the idea of looking at over-time monitoring of forests and institutions simultaneously. The protocols and survey designs were set up at Indiana University. Researchers could select the forest as your node of interest in relation to the communities around that forest, or the community as your node in relation to the forests it accessed. The researcher then completed a series of survey instruments. So for instance, what products do you collect from forest, what rules do you have to manage them? There’s also a biodiversity survey, a household survey, a village-level survey, a survey of the other institutions – economic institutions for instance -How far is the market? What do you sell on it? How often do you meet for your discussions? What kind of sanctioning do you put on an offender who comes in and grazes his cow or cuts the wood that she’s not supposed to take or whatever it? IFRI covers a whole set of aspects – biological as well as social and institutional. Repeat surveys are conducted , not in all forests but in many forests, every four to five years. The idea is to build up a long database – it is not just a one-time sampling point, but it’s also a long term database of change.
By the time I joined CIPEC, repeat data was beginning to build up from many of these places. And it had not really been sufficiently looked at in terms of the ecology, because CIPEC didn’t have too many ecologists on board. They were very strong in the social and the institutional content, but changes in biodiversity, forest volume, biomass or sapling regeneration rate, had only been studied in a few places where there were biologists as part of the core team. What they used in other places were other measures. The forester, for instance, comes with the team and provides you their assessment of what’s this forest like compared to other forests in this region, along a five point scale – very good to very bad. Most analyses relied on this assessment. But there was a lot of biodiversity data, because most forests sampled at least 30 plots in each forest. And these are nested plots: providing data all the way from herbs to seedling and sapling regeneration rate to tree size and canopy cover. The remote sensing that we did in CIPEC explicitly built on these sites. There’s one way to do remote sensing, which is the more accepted method -that you randomize your sampling, select areas at random, and then survey them in the field to understand the landscape. Here we moved away from approach, explicitly acknowledging that we valued the social and institutional and cultural connections that our collaborators developed in different locations. And because that knowledge was so location specific and not randomizable, we built our remote sensing on this.
In Nepal they had a very long standing program in IFRI. That was one of the oldest IFRI centers. So there was a huge database that we had from Nepal. Similarly, in Maharashtra, there was my colleague Rucha Ghate who at that time ran an NGO: SHODH. They had collected a lot of repeat data on forests in parts of Maharashtra. Remote sensing also provides you with repeated landscape maps. When you match up over-time analyses using remote sensing with over-time field assessments, we are able to ground truth and verify that what we’re looking at through remote sensing is also true on the field. Otherwise, the problem with remote sensing is, unless you have really good ground-truthing you can end up with misleading conclusions. In Maharashtra, Rucha had already done some studies at the fringes of in Tadoba-Andhari, Park. We had been collaborating for a while. There’s a meeting that many of us go to every two years, the International Association for the Study of Commons. I met Rucha at the Kenya meeting, and we are still good friends and collaborators even today. We decided we would look at the areas around the park, because that was related to my old interest from my PhD research – how do protected areas and community forests compare? We expanded on IFRI work that she had done in the past. That’s the reason we settled on Tadoba-Andhari National Park as the second site to write on, in the PNAS paper.
Research on the third location, Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary in West Bengal, came from a different route. One of the students at CIPEC while I was there was Sugato Dutt. Sugato Dutt is a Bengali forester working in Tamil Nadu cadre. Sugato had come to the US and did a Master’s at Indiana University. He later moved to complete a PhD elsewhere in the US, but was working in West Bengal. When I returned to Bangalore, I was on a Branco Weiss fellowship and was an adjunct Fellow at ATREE. I wrote up a grant proposal from National Geographic Society, which also raised funds for some field work in West Bengal, in collaboration with Sugato. Our original plan was to study Buxa tiger reserve, which he did eventually work on for his PhD. I didn’t get permits to do fieldwork there, so I focused on Mahananda. Here’s the issue of serendipity again!
Mahananda became very interesting because right next to it was the Baikunthapore reserve forest, which was far more degraded than Mahananda. This turned out to be a much more illuminating study site than Buxa. Buxa is far more tightly patrolled–with guards and guns-whereas in Mahananda people could move around a lot more. The comparison between Baikunthapore and Mahananda forests, right next to each other but very different geographically and institutionally, turned out to be very interesting. Each of these research studies taught me that if you want to understand the social context of a landscape, and the culture and the institutions and the history, it’s very important to have local collaborators that know the place very well. You cannot parachute in and out of these places. Each piece of research was only made possible by people who had deep field knowledge of these areas. And that can’t be done at random, because people don’t meet people at random and strike up relationships at random. The field insight and depth of knowledge contributed by these collaborations made the research possible in the first place. The limitations of ‘random sampling’ to me, in this context, far outweigh the strengths.
HS: Did you spend time in each of these places? You mention a field visit in 2005. Can you give us a sense of what the fieldwork itself involved?
HN: Hmm, I wouldn’t say I spent considerable amounts of time myself. I have certainly made multiple visits to each of these sites -Mahananda only once, but to Nepal multiple times, to Tadoba multiple times. But more importantly, I think a lot of the insights that we bring out here, are based on data that is generated by local collaborators who spent significant time in these landscapes. In Nepal, two colleagues that I’m still in touch with (one has retired)- Birendra Karna and Mukunda Karmacharya, have been working there for decades. Their knowledge of this area is tremendous, and they have a real depth of insight into human-nature relationships in these locations. The same is true of Rucha Ghate and her work in the landscape around Tadoba-Andhari. In Mahananda, I worked with Sajid Pareeth, who took the elephant photograph we used in the PNAS paper. Sajid is not from Mahananda but from Kerala – he nevertheless spent several weeks there, doing field research. Overall, our body of field data and insights was extensive.
HS: Can you also give us a sense of how this paper actually got done? Did you spend time in Indiana working on this or it was all done remotely?
HN: It was mostly done remotely. After I moved back to India in 2002, I used to go back to the US, sometimes three, four times a year, sometimes once a year, and spend several weeks there. It decreased over time, and after Lin passed away, I haven’t gone back that much. But even when I was in India, we continued a long working relationship. We had weekly Tuesday phone calls on our schedule – at 5: 30 pm for me, 8am in the morning for her. I still think of and miss my weekly Tuesday conversations with Lin very much. We always worked on something together, something that was engaging and struck off into many different exploratory directions. In fact my now-extensive research work on water in Bangalore began from these Tuesday conversations. I was working on lake restoration, and Lin began to tell me of her path breaking PhD work, on multi-level irrigation systems and the role of community action in California. Over multiple conversations, we decided to convert this work into a research project from an action project.
We worked the PNAS paper into our weekly Tuesday conversations. Lin was – and I think any collaborator of hers will attest to – a very intensely engaged co-worker. She always worked on multiple manuscripts at the same time, with multiple collaborators. I’ve never seen anyone as collaborative as her. She would work on diverse topics like evolutionary modelling of communities to remote sensing to language and the grammar of institutions to games. She was always open to new ideas and explorations, and a great pleasure to work with. We covered a great deal of ground in our open-ended weekly conversations, and it was always an incredibly interesting collaborative experience. She was also one of the most detail-oriented researchers I knew. Any paper that you worked with her would end up in draft 23, draft 40, draft 50!We just went back and forth and back and forth, and plugged away at big and little things, adding bits and pieces.
HS: Did the paper develop organically or did you have an idea right at the beginning of the different things that you were going to include in it?
HN: We knew the core of the paper, which was to summarize her contributions to the field, focusing on the idea that communities can play a very important role in managing natural resources, specifically forests. We thought about working on irrigation and forests and perhaps another natural resource regime, initially, but decided to pick forests to illustrate the core idea. Then we started thinking about what types of methods we could use, to stress the importance of interdisciplinarity and the use of multiple methods(a) to triangulate the outcome, but (b) also to get different but complementary insights. That’s something we thought the readers of a journal like PNAS would be interested in – how have we actually used these multiple methods to give us insights into one core problem. The choice of methods became clear fairly soon – there were IFRI field studies that was a real core component, there were the experimental games that Lin had extensive experience with, and then there was the remote sensing component which I had worked on, which she also knew well – in fact, she had collected some ground truthing data which we could use for satellite image analysis during one of her field trips to Nepal, something which she found very exciting. Those three core method components were settled upon quite soon. What we would actually illustrate using these methods was something we went back and forth on a bit.
Lin was the primary author of the experimental games section, while the remote sensing component was largely my section. We developed both these sections in discussion with each other, obviously, but in terms of deciding the overall structure – what was the main goal, how to express it, what evidence to show. And then the IFRI section was built collaboratively. A then-graduate student of Lin’s, Eric Coleman, now a political scientist at Florida State University, helped us run the analysis for this section. The paper was mostly written remotely, but we worked on it face-to-face a couple of times – once when I visited the US, and once when we were together at am IFRI meeting in Bogor.
HS: This paper is synthetic in the sense that you’re putting together stuff from different studies you had done earlier, but how novel was this kind of an approach at that point in time? Do you have a sense of whether there was other work that was doing similar things like bringing together methods as different as remote-sensing and you games in classrooms to tackle a single problem?
HN: CIPEC was definitely a unique center in terms of the extent of collaboration and the interdisciplinarity that flourished within. So many of the younger people that worked in CIPEC, the PhD. students and postdocs, have gone on to do very diverse and interesting work in different places. CIPEC was a place where anthropology, remote sensing and GIS, experimental behavioural games, very sophisticated modelling with supercomputers, geography, landscape ecology and conservation would come together. You don’t normally see that mix. There were other interdisciplinary centres working on issues of land use and land cover change, though – for instance a group mentored by Steve Walsh, at the University of North Carolina, another group mentored by Billie Lee Turner at Clark University, and a research group mentored by Jeff Fox in Hawaii. This kind of work could be broadly categorized as linking people and remote sensing. There was in fact an interesting book in the late ‘90s called People and Pixels. That was an iconic book for people working on remote sensing, because it laid out a number of approaches to use pixels to study people, and their impacts on the landscape, building on case studies from across the world.
Emilio Moran, who was the co-director of CIPEC, produced some extremely influential work on Brazil with another faculty member at Indiana University, Eduardo Brondizio – with whom I collaborate even today. They’re both anthropologists who’ve used remote sensing extensively, along with very careful, detailed, over-time fieldwork in Brazil. There were some very interesting interdisciplinary collaborations to learn from. But, that said, for the breadth of scope that our paper laid out- from experimental games to field monitoring of people and biodiversity, to remote sensing, I’d agree that this paper laid out a vast scope for methodological investigation that was unique.
HS: Since then, have you seen more work like this, bringing together such different lines of evidence to bear on the same problem?
HN: To sustain interdisciplinary work at this scope and scale, across multiple parts of the globe, you need sustained funding – a large center that is massively funded, that has the same people together, that work together for a long period of time. I think that time for large umbrella funding of such work on land use/land cover change has passed in the US. In Europe, you possibly still have scope for such work, with funding from grants like the Horizon 2020 grant. However I think many of these groups tend to have a greater focus on the natural sciences with less scope for integration with the social sciences. Of course, I might well be missing some groups: there might be collaborations I am not aware of. I don’t see the level of collaboration between natural and social sciences to the degree that I saw at CIPEC however. Perhaps this is not as possible in today’s world where funding is a crunch, and it is difficult to find sustained long term funding for large centers, which could have the flexibility to evolve direction from time to time and experiment with an alteration in direction based on learnings. I think you such vision, support and flexibility for this kind of work. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be the environment to support this today.
HS: Is this something you’re trying to do here, with your own work in the Azim Premji University?
HN: Definitely. We are in a very fortunate place, because we have an endowment that gives us the capacity to do very innovative thinking, keeping the sort of normative approach that is at our core – to do research that is relevant to action to help create a more just, equitable and sustainable world. Our goal is not, for instance, to publish citation classics, or Nature and Science papers; of course, if they come along the way, that’s great, but that is definitely not our focus. We’d be far happier, I think, with a series of reports that actually help or work with policymakers or communities to change track in useful ways. At the University’s , we would like to nucleate research on issues relevant to big picture questions: how should India tackle climate change, and address urbanization, for instance. Once we engage a wide range of actors in conversation, we believe that interesting and important ideas for action will emerge.
HS: Hardin’s paper sort of forms the motivation of the work presented in this paper. Do you remember when you first encountered Hardin’s paper?
HN: I don’t actually. I have no idea if I already knew of Hardin and believed, as many conservationists do, that he was right, before I went to the US, or if I first encountered him in the US. I’ve been thinking about this, but I really have no idea.
HS: I would like to go over your Acknowledgments to find out more about who these people were and how they helped. Can we do that?
HN: Sure.
HS: Eric Coleman.
HN: Eric Coleman was at the time a graduate student of Lin’s. He is now a well- regarded political scientist at Florida State University. Eric helped us run the analysis for this section. Lin asked Eric to help with the IFRI analysis we designed for the paper. Eric later expanded on the idea of understanding how institutional variables like monitoring and sanctioning play a role in forest conservation, by controlling for other potentially confounding biophysical and socioeconomic variables, in his 2009 paper.
HS: So this was analysis done specifically for this paper.
HN: For this paper. That’s the analysis where we talk about the impact of forest management (private, community or government), and the involvement of users in monitoring, in influencing positive changes in forests, as assessed by measures such as a significant increase in the density and size of trees.
HS: Roy Gardner and James Walker.
HN: Both were long term colleagues of Lin’s. She worked with them for several years on research on the commons, and collaborated with them on some of the experimental games research we discuss in this paper.
HS: David Bray.
HN: We sent David Bray the paper for his comments, before submission to PNAS. David Bray sent us useful feedback on the paper, as did Burnell Fisher, Tanya Hayes, and Rob Holohan – all colleagues at Indiana University. Mahesh Rangarajan, of course, you know; I sent him the paper. Charlie Schweick was a former PhD student of Lin’s, Sean Sweeney was a colleague of ours at CIPEC who did remote sensing and James Walker was a colleague of Lin’s. This was a PNAS inaugural paper, that is reviewed, but more as an invited paper. We wanted to make sure that, from our end, we got as much reviewing and feedback as we could. So we sent it out widely to people. Some gave us very extensive suggestions, and others gave us specific useful comments of one kind or the other. This list acknowledges all these inputs.
HS: You also thank someone called Joanna Broderick.
HN: Joanna was our right hand person at CIPEC, and provided technical editing on the manuscript, as she did with many other manuscripts that went out from CIPEC. She helped us fix a range of issues. For instance – okay, you said this in this paragraph, and you say that in the next paragraph, but where’s the link? Or, these two sentences seem to contradict each other. Or, this is a very long sentence; can you make it shorter? Or, I don’t get the chain of reasoning. All the way down to – this is bad grammar, I’ll fix it.
HS: You say, We presented earlier versions of this article and received valuable feedback at the International Center for Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia, the World Congress of Environmental Economists in Kyoto, Japan, and the University of Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, during summer 2006.Were both you and Elinor Ostrom involved in all these presentations?
HN: We were together in Bogor, and co-presented it, though Lin gave the main presentation. Lin presented solo at Kyoto and Bogota.
HS: And all of that happened in 2006.
HN: Yes, because that’s when we were in the most intense period of manuscript analysis and writing.
HS: You said that because this was an invited article, it didn’t go through the regular peer review. But do you remember if you also got any reviewers from the journal itself?
HN: The process then for such papers was that you send it to a reviewer directly with a form that the journal gave you. The reviewer returns the form with comments, you revise it, and then send the paper back to PNAS along with this exchange and the form. David Bray was the ‘official’ reviewer, who provided very useful comments. As I mentioned, we solicited and received additional feedback from many other experts acknowledged in the manuscript.
HS: Do you remember the kind of attention this paper received when it was published?
HN:I was in India, and I did hear from many colleagues who found the linking of methods and disciplinary perspectives very illuminating. Lin also mentioned several times that she received very positive responses from a lot of people who contacted her on email and in person. We did of course very memorably receive the Cozzarelli prize, which is a prize that PNAS gives every year for the best paper – we received it for the best paper in the Sustainability section. Lin was traveling that year, and I planned to make it to the US to collect the award – that’s the time I was pregnant, with my daughter Dhwani. I didn’t end up making it eventually – I wasn’t feeling well enough to go.
Lin gave a number of talks on the paper. There are the talks that we cite in the paper, which were the ones that we got feedback on before we sent in the paper. But through the year after the paper was published, she gave a number of talks in different venues on the findings of the paper. She heard from a number of other scholars and practitioners about the importance of collaboration and local involvement in the forests they were working on indifferent parts of the world, with invitations for conversations and potential collaboration.
HS: In the abstract of the paper you say “Evidence from all three research methods challenges the presumption that a single governance arrangement will control overharvesting in all settings. When users are genuinely engaged in decisions regarding rules affecting their use, the likelihood of them following the rules and monitoring others is much greater than when an authority simply imposes rules. Our results support a frontier of research on the most effective institutional and tenure arrangements for protecting forests. They move the debate beyond the boundaries of protected areas into larger landscapes where government, community, and comanaged protected areas are embedded and help us understand when and why deforestation and regrowth occur in specific regions within these larger landscapes.”
Today, 14 years later, what resonance does the main takeaway have with what you have found since in your own research and research in this area in general?
HN: The IASC – the International Association for the study of Commons conference -is the iconic Commons conference, held once in two years, where Commons researchers and practitioners come together. I haven’t been to the conference in the past few years, but I continue to review papers for the conference. The kinds of submissions we see, in terms of the diversity of methods, not just the diversity of focus areas, but the methods and types of commons people look at -from the internet as commons, to intellectual property as commons, to roads and streets as commons, to global commons and climate change issues- the diversity of commons being studied has exploded and the kinds of methods people use is incredible. You even have entire panels that are devoted to remote sensing, e.g. GIS and remote sensing for commons research. When we wrote the paper, relatively few people really were working on connecting remote sensing to institutions and to commons management. In terms of the research, this area has grown phenomenally.
However, in terms of the action on the policy, I think we’re very much still at square one. Take international conservation organizations. IPBES is a notable exception, but if you sit in COP meetings, etc, or you listen to anyone talking from IUCN, etc. the discussion is all about – have we progressed towards our targets through measuring how many PAs have expanded across the world. In reality, you see a large expansion of the privatization of conservation. For instance, South Africa’s private parks or all of these other places where the private contributions to conservation have increased – some of this may not be the privatization of forests, per se, but it certainly indicates the increasing influence of corporates and certain private, wealthy individuals on conservation decisions. On the one hand, I’d say in the past 14 years, we have a very robust set of data and evidence from countries and contexts across the world of various kinds of natural resources that tell us that communities can successfully control and manage or protect their forests. And we also know, much more than we did 14 years ago, the kinds of conditions under which this is possible. It’s not a panacea; you can’t say just handover forests to communities. But we have a much deeper understanding of the kinds of conditions under which communities do a better job of conserving forests and the conditions where they don’t do such a good job.
In terms of what’s actually happening, as I said, I think it’s a regression of status quo, because as forests become increasingly endangered, the approach across the world, not just in India, has been more guards, more guns, more patrols, and therefore more conflict with Commons. The state-managed protected areas and private funded protected areas – are encroaching on the commons, and that encroachment has only expanded and intensified globally.
HS: What influence has this paper had on your own career and research trajectory?
HN: If I was in the US it may have had a larger influence in my career. In India, I don’t think in India it’s played that big a role. In terms of shaping the work I did–I won’t say the paper shaped a future trajectory of work. Rather, the paper was a reflection of work that was already ongoing. The idea of mixed methods was based on aspects we were working on. This paper is important because it marks a stage along a journey that we were already taking. It’s not something that signifies a new fork in the road for us. This is the road we were already on. But it does signify an important milestone that brings back some wonderful memories of intense conversations and a time of very creative cross-disciplinary ideation.
HS: Have you ever read the paper after it was published? Do you use it in your teaching?
HN: I do use elements of it in my teaching, much more than in my research presentations. I find the ideas of baseline experiments, one shot versus repeated communication, the idea of imposed sanctioning versus coming up with your own rules are very interesting for students. The remote sensing and biodiversity/IFRI analyses are of course a core component of the work that I present and talk about to students.
HS: Would you count this paper as a favourite among all the papers you have published?
HN: I would certainly count this paper as one of my favourites – especially because of the very special memories of working with Lin Ostrom, one of my very favorite people – there very few like her in the world, who combined a world of scholarship with a worldview of collaboration and connection. Well over a decade later, it is very interesting to go to conferences in distant parts of the world and bump into someone who has read the paper, and wants to talk to me about it. I don’t think we anticipated the influence it would have across so many years and in so many parts of the world. It is certainly a privilege to have produced something of this kind, with its long reaching scope and influence especially on early career researchers interested in interdisciplinary research.
HS: What would you say to a student who is about to read this paper today? Would you guide his or her reading in some way? Would you suggest other papers that should be read along with this? Would you add any caveats to keep in mind, when reading this paper?
HN: I would definitely suggest that they read Governing the Commons, because, to me, that’s really the conceptual underpinnings of many of the fundamental ideas we explore in this paper. What are the commons, what does it mean to govern the commons, and why should we care about the commons? That’s a far older discussion than this book, of course, but I think the simple and fundamental language in which it is put together, makes it a great read. It’s a classic book. So I will say start with Governing the Commons. In terms of updates, I actually would look at the experiences of a lot of countries across the world. Nepal was a real leader in community forestry at the time that we were writing the paper. Then they had the whole civil war, were closed down for a long time, the monarchy collapsed, the death of the king and various other crises hit them hard,. Despite this you can still see, even now in Nepal, that the areas that are resilient, that have resilient communities with good lives as well as good forests, are the ones which are community owned; where community forestry is ongoing. Look at Mexico and Guatemala and Brazil, where indigenous forests are resilient, despite all the challenges induced by drug smuggling, political interference and violence, as well as pressures for the economic use of the forest. Drug running within the forest brings up completely different dimensions of what is safe and not safe. But even in those conditions, you find that indigenous management of forests is incredibly resilient. I think there’s a lot to learn from contexts like Latin America.
And I think, more and more, what we need to look at is how do we imagine the commons? Why are these commons so resilient? People have certain mental imaginations of the world that I think we can learn from. Looking at all the global crises that we have around us today, I think one way forward would be to see how much can we shift back into commons thinking, because this provides a normative and a practical way to combine social objectives and conservation/environmental objectives together. In conclusion, I would say read this paper with the thought of bringing new commons imaginations into mind. And then go off and engage the literature about the commons, both on practice and theory, in greater depth – not just academically, but possibly as a way of life.
0 Comments