Recognizing “reciprocal relations” to restore community access to land and water

Place-based communities are struggling to maintain their connections to land and water, including the social and cultural practices that are rooted in a particular landscape. In this paper, we consider possibilities for recentering environmental governance around reciprocal relations, or the mutual caretaking between people and place. We draw from existing scholarship on relational values and human-nature relations, which emphasize the intrinsic value and agency of non-human beings and the landscape itself. By linking key concepts in the literature to our four case studies, we develop a framework of reciprocal relations as a foundation for local practices and governance policies that facilitate increased community access to land and resources. Our cases investigate the practice of reciprocal relations across different community contexts in Hawaiʻi, British Columbia (Canada), the Appalachian Mountain Region (U.S.), and Madagascar. Through our analysis, we examine a diverse range of community approaches to reciprocal relations, and demonstrate how practicing reciprocal relations can have material effects on community well-being and environmental sustainability. This finding builds on the theory of access (Ribot and Peluso 2003), by suggesting that practicing reciprocal relations can provide a powerful mechanism for shifting community access to resources. In the reciprocal relations context, however, the flow of benefits is not uni-directional. Expanding on existing access concepts, we show how the ability of a place-based community to benefit from resources is contingent upon its ability to maintain multi-directional and mutually beneficial relations with the natural environment—in part through fulfilling caretaking responsibilities for land and water.