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What Makes Grassroots Conservation Organizations Resilient? An Empirical Analysis of Diversity, Organizational Memory, and the Number of Leaders

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Abstract

Conservation Area Management Committees (CAMCs)—the functional decision-making units consisting entirely of local villagers—are grassroots organizations legally established to manage the Annapurna Conservation Area (ACA) in Nepal. These committees suffered due to the decade-long Maoist insurgency, but they survived. The paper attempts to test what factors contributed to their resiliency. For this, I surveyed 30 CAMCs during the summer of 2007 and conducted semi-structured interviews of 190 executive members of the CAMCs and 13 park officials who closely monitor the CAMCs. Regression results showed that the number of leaders (b = 0.44, t = 2.38, P = .027) was the most critical variable for building the resilience of CAMCs to the Maoist insurgency, i.e., retaining the same function, structure, and identity of the committees. As there were no reported conflicts among leaders and they were involved in negotiations and devising contingency plans, CAMCs actually benefited from having more leaders. Of the three diversity indices, the quadratic terms of age diversity (b = −5.42, t = 1.95, P = .064) and ethnic diversity (b = −4.05, t = 1.78, P = .075) had a negative impact on the CAMCs’ resilience. Skill diversity and organizational memory had no significant influence on the CAMCs’ resilience (t < 1.48, P > .10). These results have important implications for building resilience in community-based conservation.

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Acknowledgments

The Rufford Small Grants Foundation, UK and the Sigma Xi, USA provided the research grant. I would like to thank respondents for their time and alacrity. My special thanks go to the ACAP office for granting permission for this research. I greatly appreciate the generous help of Som Ale, SR Jnawali, Lizan Maskey, NR Chapagain, Bhim Upadhaya, Laxmi Pun, Raj Kumar Gurung, Manish Pandey, Krishna Gurung, Ram Gurung, SK Neupane, Suresh Thapa, Janardan Bastola, Ranju Baral, and Namrata Baral during the various stages of this project. The constructive comments from three anonymous reviewers helped to improve the quality of the paper.

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  1. Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA

    Nabin Baral

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  1. Nabin Baral
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Correspondence to Nabin Baral.

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Baral, N. What Makes Grassroots Conservation Organizations Resilient? An Empirical Analysis of Diversity, Organizational Memory, and the Number of Leaders. Environmental Management 51, 738–749 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-012-9978-3

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