An inquiry into power and participatory natural resource management

Decentralised environmental governance based on community participation is increasingly replacing top-down natural resource management. There is increasing awareness, however, that such mechanisms might fail to ensure effective participation by all stakeholders and be prone to producing and/or perpetuating power inequalities. Against this backdrop, we claim that ‘power’ should be positioned at the centre of analyses of natural resource management. In this paper we provide a taxonomy of positions to analyse participatory decision making in natural resource management. We operationalise this framework to analyse two ‘failures’ of participatory natural resource management in Turkey, focusing on reasons for failure and the role of power asymmetries. Our results are based on case studies comprising in-depth interviews, focus groups and a survey administered to 944 individuals. We conclude that participatory mechanisms are highly unlikely to bring democratic and equitable outcomes unless power relations are addressed at both institutional and local levels. Copyright , Oxford University Press.