Institutional supply public demand and citizen capabilities to participate in environmental programs in Mexico and India

1.1. Defining the outcome: participation and successful participatory programs

We define public participation or citizen engagement to include activities by individuals or groups that aim to influence public actions and outcomes (Verba et al. 1995; Schlozman et al. 2012). A participatory program or reform is a program which aims to increase public participation in decision-making. In addition to those programs formally advertised as participatory, this includes many reforms categorized as social accountability (Fox 2015; Brinkerhoff and Wetterberg 2016), decentralization (Coleman and Fleischman 2012; Smoke 2015; Lund et al. 2018), community-based (Mansuri and Rao 2004; Dressler et al. 2010), rights-based (Kashwan 2013), or deliberative (Chambers 2003; Gibson and Woolcock 2008). Although much scholarship in environmental policy focuses on participatory government programs, political parties, NGOs, and social movements also play crucial roles in reform processes (Houtzager 2003).

The outcome of interest in this paper is whether participatory programs enable citizens to participate in decision-making. We consider participatory programs to be successful when citizens are engaged in a sustained fashion in decision-making and perceive that their preferences have been taken into account. This does not require that every individual speak in participatory forums or that decisions favor their preferences – people may be satisfied if their representatives have spoken on their behalf, and it is not possible for a political process to leave all participants satisfied with the outcome. Furthermore, our definition of success does not require that the participatory process lead to better material outcomes for those involved. Even if participation does not improve material outcomes, it is desirable because participation and democratic citizenship are in and of themselves a core element of political freedom (De Tocqueville 1945; Ostrom 1994; Sen 1999; Ribot 2008). There is evidence that participatory processes often lead to better decisions (Speer 2012; Mansuri and Rao 2013; Bixler et al. 2015; Fox 2015), yet these improved outcomes require that the intermediate step, citizen participation, be achieved.

1.2. The three legged stool of participatory stability

We argue that three elements are jointly necessary for the success of participatory programs. The first is a supply of participatory opportunities. As discussed above, literature on participatory reforms in the environment and development arenas have focused on institutional supply. Institutions, in this literature, are understood as the “rules of the game” (North 1990, 1), which constrain and permit human behavior (Ostrom et al. 1994; Ostrom 2005). The institutional focus makes sense because in many developing countries participatory opportunities are limited by centralized decision-making and elite domination which have their roots in a colonial past. Unfortunately, many so-called participatory institutions serve to reinforce the power of post-colonial elites by incorporating formal bureaucratic procedure into previously informal processes, or by privileging technical inputs in terms not accessible to the general public (Ojha 2006; Ribot et al. 2006). Such institutions do not provide the access and standing necessary for the possibility of citizen influence (Senecah 2004; Walker et al. 2006;). As such, these participatory institutions may be seen as rules that elites impose on society in order to perpetuate their political and economic domination (Moe 1990; Knight 1992). Institutional reformers in both developed and developing countries work towards finding ways to open participatory opportunities to a wider audience However, supplying participatory opportunities will be insufficient to create public participation if people’s willingness and ability to use the opportunities are missing. Given that research, discussed above, shows that citizens frequently do not participate even when opportunities are available, institutional supply is clearly insufficient.

The second leg of the stool is demand for participatory opportunities. Demand refers to the expression of interest in participation. People who demand to participate will show up at meetings, and if they are excluded, may protest their exclusion and claim new spaces for participation (Cornwall 2004). Many people do not participate in public decision-making processes because they are not interested in the process or because they are not aware of how to participate (Brady et al. 1995). Participation in decision-making can be costly in terms of time, and also in terms of potential exposure to public scrutiny. Elites may block demands for participation if those demands threaten their power, and if interventions are designed to reinforce elite power, participants may have little motivation for participation (Larson and Ribot 2007; Ribot 2008).

In order to overcome these barriers, participants need motivation. Motivation may be supplied by material rewards that come from engaging in decision-making, such as access to resources or preventing unwanted decisions. While this implies an economic calculus involved in the decision to demand participation, not all motivations for participation are financial – studies in India show that people vote because it gives them a sense of involvement in the community, as well as of personal efficacy and leadership (Carswell and De Neve 2014). While disempowered people may be skeptical of the ability of political processes to bring them rewards, well-off people may also find participation too costly relative to small benefits. This calculus may vary in different decision-making venues– someone who eagerly participates in a village-level government may be reluctant to speak in a regional assembly because they feel shy or out of their area of comfort. Another person may feel that the potential benefits of participating in a powerless village government are too low but may engage in a regional assembly where they believe they can obtain tangible benefits. Demand can be learned – a recent study found that citizens who experienced positive responses from their political participation were more likely to participate in the future (Sjoberg et al. 2017).

The third leg of the stool is the capability to participate. We draw the concept of capabilities from the work of Sen (1987, 1999) and Nussbaum (2000), and their many followers, who use the term to refer to “what people are actually able to do and to be” (Nussbaum 2000, 5). While the concept is similar to the idea of human capital, it differs in that it emphasizes not only the instrumental role of human behavior in achieving economic ends, but also the value of that behavior in enriching human lives (Sen 1997). Thus, referring back to our definition of participatory success, the capability to participate in political processes is valuable not only because participation leads to better outcomes, but because participation enriches human lives and is a core element of democratic freedoms.

Participation requires specific capabilities: time, money, and/or specific skillsets. Many people are constrained by childcare obligations or long working hours from even to obtaining information about participatory opportunities (McNulty 2015). Others lack the money to travel to participatory venues or otherwise engage with participatory processes. These costs can be substantial – McNulty (2015) cites a World Bank report that full participation in Peru’s participatory budgeting process required an expenditure equivalent to nearly 1/12th of a minimum wage income every year. Participation may require organizational skills, procedural understanding, and networks with media, government, and similarly aggrieved groups. Governmental processes require literacy in official languages and understanding of accounting and legal procedures. Those who are best prepared to participate are often those who work in government or other white collar occupations, whereas manual laborers may be poorly prepared (Brady et al. 1995; Moodie 2013). Many people are excluded from participatory processes by their inability to develop these capabilities – for example, in many societies, women’s mobility and voice outside of their homes is restricted (Agarwal 2001). Differential capabilities may contribute to elite capture.

3.1. Participation supply in a low demand, low skill environment: failures of India’s forest institutional reforms

Our first example of participation reveals a common story in participatory reform: New institutions are created to foster participation without considering whether people demand or have the capabilities to participate. India’s forests are owned and managed by state forest departments created during and after the colonial era through a process that involved expropriation of rights held by rural people to utilize forests to support their livelihoods (Gadgil and Guha 1992). There is a long history of resistance against forest department authority, including occasional allowances for increased decision-making by forest villagers (Baker 1984; Guha 1989; Sastry 1989; Agrawal 2005; Sivaramakrishnan 2009). However legal participation in forest governance was mostly limited to forest officials. Villagers continued to use forests to produce their livelihoods in ways that contradicted legal mandates, and this brought them into conflict with authorities. The forest departments were often ineffective at enforcing new laws, creating an open-access regime that contributed to forest degradation (Bromley and Chapagain 1984; Guha et al. 1984; Pathak 1994).

Since 1990, two reforms aimed to address these conflicts. First, Joint Forest Management (JFM), introduced at a large scale in the early 1990s, allowed village committees to participate with forest officials in making decisions about local forests. Villagers were expected to protect forests from overuse, in exchange for some combination of usufruct rights and revenues from timber harvests (Poffenberger and McGean 1996). Second, The Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (FRA) allowed certain classes of people to claim rights to use and manage forests. Although this reform is generally understood to be about rights, rather than participation, the claiming and operation of rights is supposed to be through a participatory process (Duraiappah and Muñoz 2012; Maharashtra CFR-LA 2017). While both reforms, and particularly the FRA, were the result of popular mobilizations (Kumar and Kerr 2012; Maharashtra CFR-LA 2017), the reach of these mobilizations in village societies was limited (Kashwan 2013; Barnes et al. 2016).

Nearly all evaluations of both JFM (Sundar et al. 2001; Springate-Baginski and Blaikie 2007; Lele and Menon 2014) and the FRA (Saxena et al. 2010; Bose 2013; Kashwan 2013; Kumar et al. 2015; Maharashtra CFR-LA 2017) have found that neither programs’ participatory promise has been met on a wide scale. Although several reasons have been identified for this failure, including weak institutional design, power imbalances, and problems of implementation, two elements recur in many explanations. First, many villagers were not interested in the opportunities presented by these participatory programs – they did not demand participation. For example, villagers in Tamil Nadu showed little interest in JFM because the forests they were given the rights to co-manage contained few valuable resources (Matta 2003; Matta and Kerr 2007). In principle these forests might improve and produce valuable products decades in the future, but this exceeded the discount rate of the villagers. In other cases, although forest resources were valuable, the actual rights assigned to local people were insufficient to generate real interest on the part of villagers (Sundar et al. 2001; Springate-Baginski and Blaikie 2007; Lele and Menon 2014). Along similar lines, Kashwan (2011) describes how village leaders in Gujarat who benefitted from existing JFM arrangements often opposed the granting of more extensive rights under the FRA, which might be beneficial to the village as a whole, but would undermine their personal power, illustrating how the interests of elites can conflict with the interest of villagers and thereby suppress political participation.

A second shortcoming was that villagers lacked capabilities to participate fully in the decision-making process. Kashwan (2015) describes how village JFM leaders failed to resist a recentralization of power over JFM resources. These village leaders believed that the power of the forest department was so much greater than theirs that to resist would mean both certain defeat and loss of patronage benefits they obtained by remaining department allies. Similarly, Balooni et al. (2010) describe how inter-elite conflict in a village in Haryana made the village unable to sustain collective action necessary to participate in the JFM program. While it is probably accurate to say that the primary constraint on the success of forest policy reforms in India has been poor institutional supply, the problems illustrated here imply that even an improved institutional design will not automatically lead to improved participation.

3.2. Demand and capabilities can drive institutional supply: the case of Mendha

On the other hand, several case studies have emerged from India demonstrating that even when participatory opportunities are limited, well organized communities that demand participation and have high levels of capabilities sometimes organize to overcome limits in institutional supply. Although similar examples have been documented in other regions of India (Sundar et al. 1996; Singh 2001, 2002; D’Silva and Nagnath 2002; Sarin et al. 2003; Barnes and Van Laerhoven 2013, 2015), we focus on the village of Mendha in Maharashtra. One of the key lessons from this case is that in the context of imperfect institutions such as the JFM and FRA described above, which failed to foster effective collective action in most situations, collective organization and external networks – two aspects of what we term capabilities – may be a prerequisite for effective participation. This is similar to arguments made by Han (2014) about the development of activists in the United States, however the villagers of Mendha live in a far more resource poor environment, and thus their external networks are even more crucial. Many authors have noted that this type of strong collective organization remains rare in rural India (Harriss-White 2003; Chatterjee 2004, 2011; Corbridge et al. 2005, 2013; Witsoe 2013; Harriss-White and Prosperi 2014). Mendha’s level of collective organization is unusual in the Central Indian context, and thus the experience of the village should be seen as an illustrative, albeit not unique, exception.

The village is surrounded by government forest land which produces valuable timber and non-timber forest products. Influenced by village leaders who had been involved in regional political activism, this community began working together to make community decisions in the early 1980s. The village’s high levels of collective action attracted the attention of Gandhian social activists and small NGOs who began visiting the village regularly in the early 1990s, both to learn from the village’s success, as well as to share information and resources with the community as part of an organized study circle (Ghate and Chaturvedi 2004; Pathak and Taraporewala 2008; Tofa and Hiralal No date; Singh No date). One of the problems villagers in Mendha identified was degradation of the forest surrounding the village. In 1987 they began an independent campaign to protect the forest from overharvesting and overgrazing, efforts that brought them into direct conflict with the forest department (Ghate and Chaturvedi 2004). Through their informal network with local NGOs, villagers came to know about Maharashtra’s JFM program when it began in the mid-1990s. Because the village was already working to protect its forest, villagers believed that they were a perfect fit for the JFM program. However the forest department refused, because at that time Maharashtra’s JFM rules only allowed the forest department to make JFM arrangements in degraded forests. Because Mendha’s villagers had already been protecting the forests for several years, the forests were no longer degraded.

In a village with less capability than Mendha, this would have been the end of the discussion, however Mendha successfully mobilized to oppose the denial of JFM in their village, both by drawing on their network of social activist allies, as well as by directly threatening the forest department: they announced that if it was necessary to have a degraded forest in order to obtain benefits from the government, the villagers were willing to degrade their forest so that it would qualify for JFM. After an extended struggle in which villagers successfully translated strong collective action into political power, the villagers were able to work with sympathetic forest officials to create an official JFM committee in the mid-1990s (Ghate and Chaturvedi 2004; Pathak and Taraporewala 2008; Tofa and Hiralal No date; Singh No date). According to the written account of Tofa and Hiralal (respectively the moral leader of Mendha and an external NGO ally who has worked in the village since the late 1980s), Mendha did not “naturally” have a high level of collective capability, but developed its political capabilities through concerted work on the part of villagers, who participate in regular study circles, discussing among themselves and sometimes with members of their external network, how they can improve the quality of life in their village while maintaining cultural traditions (see also Ghate and Chaturvedi 2004).

This initial triumph was followed 20 years later by a similar triumph with regards to the implementation of the FRA. Although the FRA promised to allow communities which met certain criteria to claim rights to manage, harvest, and sell non-timber forest products within the forests which were traditionally held by the village (Government of India 2007), this provision was not widely advertised in many states, including Maharashtra (Saxena et al. 2010). However, due to its network with regional activists, Mendha was aware of and wished to take advantage of the provision because they wished to control the valuable bamboo harvest which was conducted annually by the forest department with no benefit to the village. Their attempts to claim community rights over bamboo management were stymied for several years until they and their allies were able to mobilize the national minister of environment and forests to come to their aid, again illustrating the reach of the villagers’ capabilities (Das 2011). In 2011–2012, as a result of the newly granted rights, villagers in Mendha were able to auction the bamboo for a price of over 10,000,000 rs (roughly US $200,000) (Subramanian 2012). In subsequent years, many villages in the surrounding district have learned from Mendha’s example, and attempted to sell their own bamboo. These villages also had to fight with the forest department and struggle to learn how to conduct auctions, however by 2017 most bamboo sold in the bamboo-rich district was auctioned by communities who have rights under the FRA, leading to significant profits for well over 100 communities (Maharashtra CFR-LA 2017).

The experiences of Mendha with JFM and the FRA illustrate that well-organized, highly capable rural people who demand participation may be able to overcome limits on the supply of participatory institutions through political activism. It is important to point out, however, that Mendha’s residents needed some supply of participatory institutions to validate their collective action. Without JFM and later the FRA, the villagers would have had no formal rights to the forest they were protecting. Under the pre-reform regime, the forest department would have considered the village’s forest ripe for timber harvest – destroying the work of the villagers, and giving them no benefit. The villagers of Mendha wanted to be a part of JFM because it insured formal government recognition of their work. Furthermore, the institutions of the FRA were a necessary precondition of their bamboo harvesting, even if it was not sufficient without the organizing efforts of the community. At the same time, the benefits the villages have received may be limited if participatory rights are not embedded within a broader context of market and political power. According to interviews conducted by the first author in 2014, after 2012 local bamboo buyers formed a syndicate to artificially suppress auction prices, making it difficult for the villagers of Mendha to profit from their rights. Additional collective organizing across multiple villages was necessary to overcome this barrier, and while this existed in Mendha’s district, neighboring areas have been much less successful at exercising forest rights (Maharashtra CFR-LA 2017). This points to the need for participatory initiatives to be embedded within broader agendas of democratic deepening which may be driven by bottom up collective action combined with top-down institutional reforms.

3.3. Long-term synergies between institutional supply, demand, and capabilities: institutional reform in the Calakmul biosphere reserve

In the long-term, the three legs of the participatory stool are synergistic. Institutional supply can help communities that lack demand and capabilities to gain by showing them how they can effectively utilize participatory opportunities. Once communities have developed these skills and demands, they are more likely to turn the tools available to them into participatory instruments. We illustrate this long term synergy by examining the history of participation in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, in Campeche Mexico.

Calakmul is an unlikely case for successful participatory governance. Most of the people currently living in Calakmul arrived as impoverished settlers from other parts of southern Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s (Haenn 2005). Taking advantage of Mexico’s land reform (Assies 2008), they established small communities and practiced swidden cultivation of maize for subsistence and chili for commercial purposes (Turner et al. 2004). Given the marginal nature of land in the region, most settlers were people who had few other options in life, had limited capabilities, and had few ties to others in the region apart from the fact that they had happened to choose the same place to settle. Furthermore, formal government institutions were largely absent from the region. Unlike many other parts of Mexico, where the 1980s saw growth in civil society activity (Fox 1994, 1996), and where subsequent years have seen the growth of strong community forestry institutions (Bray et al. 2003, 2006), Calakmul lacked a history of peasant organizing or social solidarity based on a shared cultural history. Until recently, local politics were dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which used its control over rural populations to maintain its hegemonic status both within Campeche state and the nation as a whole.

Mexican policy towards Calakmul was transformed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by four changes (Rodriguez Solorzano and Fleischman 2018). First, the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve was created in 1989. Mostly unsettled land was designated as a nucleus zone, off limits to future land clearing or extractive activities, while land already allocated to a community was designated as part of a buffer zone. This decision was made in the top-down fashion typical of the time, without local participation (Ruiz-Mallén et al. 2015; Pfaff et al. 2017). Second, the Regional Council for Agriculture and Silviculture of Xpujil (CRASX for its Spanish acronym, Xpujil is the principal town in Calakmul) was created in 1991 (Acopa and Boege 1997). This Council was created through a federal government initiative that aimed to foster governance outside of the boundaries of formal local government. CRASX gave local leaders management authority over money flowing into the region from the central government, as well as from international aid and conservation organizations interested in biodiversity conservation. Third, laws passed in 1992 ended the land distribution program, helping to cement the government’s new commitment to land conservation. Finally, a new council named CRIPX (Regional Popular and Indigenous Council of Xpujil) and Calakmul municipality were created in 1995 and 1996 (Haenn 2005; Calakmul 2012; CRIPX 2012). The municipality overlapped the biosphere reserve boundaries and provided a formal local governance structure. CRIPX emerged as a group of indigenous people who claimed to be excluded from CRASX and who demanded participation in the distribution of resources CRASX controlled.

CRASX was the first institution created in Calakmul that fostered participation in collective decision-making. It was created to bring development and foster natural resources conservation in the region based on a model of inclusion, although fostering clientelistic relationships between the PRI, the biosphere reserve, and local leaders was also a goal (Haenn 2005). CRASX allowed leaders from the communities to make decisions about the use of resources coming to the region that had previously been made by remote government officials. These new leaders had no previous experience participating in decision-making or managing funds outside of their communities. Don Deocundo Acopa, appointed by the central government to make CRASX work, was aware of these limitations, and thus the activities of CRASX were designed to include capability-building activities and to teach people about the importance of conservation. Acopa reflected on the experience in a book chapter, “In general, these organizations (CRIPX and CRASX) served to transmit information, provide technical assistance through contracted staff, create a united front during negotiations over forest policy, supply the organizational vehicle for funding by government and NGOs, promote all of the activities mentioned above, and provide a forum where peasants can learn parliamentary techniques and build their negotiation skills – even if negotiations do sometimes end up in fights” (Acopa and Boege 1997, 95). Thus CRASX supplied participation, but also increased the capabilities of those who participated.

CRASX pursued participation but it was highly imperfect. In fact, CRASX had a goal of fostering support for the ruling party and the biosphere reserve, and excluded people who lacked political connections or were skeptical of the conservation and development model favored by Acopa. Because people saw that those who participated in CRASX were receiving benefits, people who had not initially participated in CRASX demanded benefits as well, through a series of well organized protests. That demand led to the creation of CRIPX, the erosion of power and influence of CRASX and the creation of a formal municipal government. These events are described in much greater detail by Haenn (2005), who details how the creation of CRIPX and later the municipality were in part reactions to organized protests against the power of CRASX, and in part also attempts by PRI leaders to move away from the conservation model favored by Acopa. The organizers of CRIPX specifically drew on resentments against the leaders in CRASX, thereby showing how the expansion of participatory opportunities increased demand for participation even among those who lacked formal participatory opportunities – and how these demands in turn led to the creation of new participatory programs. The creation of a municipal government decreased CRASX’ power and thereby ended its training element, but created a more formal participatory opportunity through the democratically elected municipal government.

CRASX’ influence faded away and CRIPX was never as influential as CRASX after the creation of the municipality in 1996. Yet, the community leaders whose participatory capabilities were enhanced through their experience and training in these organizations remain the dominant political actors in the now-formalized politics of the municipality. Their participation in these councils taught them the benefits of participation and enhanced their capability to be involved in decision-making and to find spaces for participation. Many of these leaders serve at the local level as formal or informal leaders of their ejidos. Some have also occupied elected or appointed positions in the municipal offices, or have served as leaders in the Municipal Council for Sustainable Rural Development (CMDRS), established in the early 2000s as a multi-stakeholder forum for spreading information and resources in the region (GTZ, Ayuntamiento, and CONANP 2006). The lasting impact of this early supply of participatory opportunities and training has been to create a cadre of leaders who continue to provide the backbone of political activity in the region. Thus, while the initial achievements of the program in the 1990s were limited by the creation of the municipality and subsequent withdrawal of local budget management authority and learning opportunities for local people, its long-term consequences on public participation in decision-making have been significant, particularly as the Mexican state has become more broadly responsive to democratic political demands (De La O 2015; Díaz Cayeros et al. 2016; Rodriguez Solorzano and Fleischman 2018).

Together the Mexican government and local people in Calakmul have put the three legs of the stool together. The government put the first leg using foreign and national resources to supply participatory institutions – as well as through a broader period of reform which saw Mexico move from a strongly authoritarian state to an imperfect but functional political democracy. Aware of local people’s limitations, the government reinforced the supply with capability building, which provided a second leg and increased the chances of successful participation. Local people, who realized participatory benefits were large and who have developed the ability to participate, put the last leg on the stool, demanding the creation of further participation opportunities, nurturing subsequent councils and a now vibrant local political scene. The Calakmul municipality, and the ejidos within it, hold politically contested elections in which leaders compete through offers to improve the provision of public goods to rural communities. As a result of this political competition, the delivery of water, education, health, and social welfare programs has increased dramatically in the region, a fact commented on by many of our informants. This political scene allows for far more participatory opportunities than were provided in the past and provides robust empirical evidence about the evolving nature of participation and the synergies between participation supply, demand and capabilities.

Our recognition of the great steps that Calakmul has taken does not mean that participation in Calakmul is complete or perfect. Individuals and communities that have been more effective at playing the participatory game have received more benefits, resulting in rising inequality among the formerly uniformly poor population. Certain subgroups remain excluded (Navarro-Olmedo et al. 2016). Many government programs are plagued by corruption. And the biosphere reserve frequently makes management decisions without involving the community or elected government. For example, UNESCO recognized Calakmul as a mixed world heritage site in June 2014. In a survey of a nested random sample of 280 households from 28 communities (34% of the communities in the region) conducted a few months after this event 80% of the interviewees had heard about this recognition. Most of them received this information only after the regional television news covered the Mexican president’s post-award visit to the site. Despite of the awareness, 52% of the interviewees said they had no idea what the recognition meant and only 34% thought the recognition would benefit them.