ISS Membership No: Applied Number and Name of RC: 23; Sociology of Law Title of the Abstract: CUSTOMARY

PRACTICES AND MANAGEMENT OF THE LOCAL COMMONS Name and address: Pratap Chandra Behera; Assistant Professor, Dept of Social Work, Jain Vishva Bharati Institute, Ladnun, Rajasthan - 341306 Abstract: In an established social practice, the normative aspect is called custom - a culturally transmitted behavioural pattern. This reflects the shared interest and collective will of society, which Tonnies termed as social will. Like norms, it plays the function of social control. A custom, in the context of a nation-state, may be different from, competing and contested with state polices. Policies of the state and law of the locality may co-exist to form legal pluralism reflecting the power relations of a society. Customary practices emerge depending on the existential needs of the people in a locality, and change over time as the circumstances change. They vary depending upon the production and consumption system in an area, the cultural and the ecological parameters. Understanding these complexities would help in sustainable and equitable use of natural resources. Human beings depend on the nature and its resources for survival and possess material goods for security. Common pool resources, a category of public goods, demonstrate a dialectic relationship between nature and society. Members of an identifiable community have certain conventional access to and inalienable use rights over these resources. The concept of commons configured at a micro level is called as local commons. The broad institutional framework of commons would equally apply to the local commons. Assets such as tanks, forests, and pasture lands owned and managed by reasonably small communities like villages can be categorised under local commons. Customary practices, in many respects, have benign qualities in promotion of natural resource management. It is being argued, in this paper, that local ideas and actions, that is, the rich indigenous knowledge and customary practices, are more likely to succeed in saving and sustaining the commons. These practices relating to management of natural resources have a high focus on regulated harvest use of the resources. Being pluralistic, these address the issues related to access and uses of the resources when located within a larger enabling framework.