Community management is the task of sustainably managing a common resource, such as a coastal fishing area.
Community management is the task of sustainably managing a common resource. A common pool resource is a natural resource shared in common with a group of people who use that resource collectively. An example would be fishing in the coastal zone. While this natural resource may be renewable, it can also be depleted if overused. The goal of community management is to prevent depletion and ensure fair use of the resource by all stakeholders.
The task of managing a community resource can be difficult because ownership responsibility is shared within the community. The distribution of responsibility among a population dilutes the personal responsibility of each individual for the degradation of the resource. This makes it difficult to target an offending party in the event of asset damage. Policing community pool users to ensure fair and sustainable use often requires a government entity. This entity may have the legal capacity to enforce compliance in cases of excessive use by individual users.
Effective community management implies continuous monitoring of the common resource. This may be necessary to determine if the resource is being degraded and, if so, why. The community manager can also determine who the stakeholders of the resources are and how best to ensure a fair allocation among those stakeholders.
An example of a common resource might be a small coastal fishery used by various peoples who depend on the harvest for their survival. If a large fishing operation comes in and starts using industrial processes that consume much more of the harvest than the available resource can support without depleting, a community manager can try to mitigate that depletion. The community can be managed by a group or an individual. In any case, the administrator would work with each interested party to negotiate a sustainable and fair use of the resource.
Successful community management implies an accurate and continuous evaluation of the common resource. A key issue in community management is the precise definition of the problem, which is not always apparent on the surface. This requires ongoing scientific research that monitors and compares data on the resource over time.
Community management is a dynamic process as market forces can change and evolve. New commodities derived from natural resources may grow in demand beyond what the resource can provide without degradation. Or, this product can be mined using a manufacturing method that exceeds the regeneration capacity of the resource. This may be successful from a profit point of view, but this new activity may also deplete a shared water resource in an area.