The traditional water harvesting system that existed decades ago in various Indian states is as relevant today as it was then and perhaps even more. Present day India is no stranger to nature’s fury like floods, drought, famine and hurricanes, and it would be well to learn from the old but true wisdom of traditional customs of water harvesting. There is also need to provide qualitative and quantitative irrigation to various agriculture fields to enhance the production of food grains and improve the livelihood of people in India.

Rural common property resources represent the historically evolved institutional arrangements made by communities in dry regions (in the present case) to guard against the vulnerabilities and risks created by the biophysical and environmental circumstances characteristic of these areas. Despite their valuable contributions, CPRS are faced with decline in terms of both extent as well as contribution to the people, and therefore consequent neglect by the communities.

The livelihoods of poor livestock keepers in India primarily depend on the productivity of edible biomass available from common property resources (CPRs) like village commons, the roadsides, along railway tracts, canals, bunds etc. A pro-poor livestock development programme should focus on rejuvenating these resources through enabling policy measures and appropriate technology interventions which may increase the productivity of these lands, thereby increasing the livestock productivity dependant on them.

The transformation of human settlements over time can affect the relationship between communities and commons when, for example, social geographies change from rural to urban, or from traditional systems of management to modern bureaucratic systems. Communities that were dependent on particular commons could become less dependent, or abandon those commons. New communities of interest might emerge. Examining the transformation of a lake in Bangalore, this paper argues that in the community struggle towards creating and claiming commons, claiming the sphere of planning is fundamental.

The right to the city, an idea mooted by French radical philosophers in 1968, has become a popular slogan among right to housing activists and inclusive growth policymakers. In Indian cities unprecedented and unregulated growth, incremental land use change, privatisation and chaotic civic infrastructure provisioning are fracturing resources created over centuries and reducing the right to the city to mere right to housing and property, thus short-changing the concept’s transformative potential.

Mumbai is in reality a city of places that are not a part of the current set of fantasies that rule the minds of urban planners but are yet integrally linked to capitalist processes, to urban practices of place-making and to urbanism itself. From this perspective, this enquiry seeks not only to better understand and explain the processes that are forcing out the city’s less privileged from its commons, but also imagine how a more inclusive future could be achieved.

From an understanding of the commons as a rural artefact, the concept has expanded to include urban spaces and practices. The destruction of common resources and the communities that depend upon them is a long-standing outcome of capitalist expansion. It is also a cause for concern, given the ultimate centrality of the commons to the reproduction of urban populations and ecosystems.

Scientific evidence suggests that increasing amounts of carbon in the atmosphere are causing climate change that will result in global warming, sea -level rise and more extreme weather events. In response to anthropogenic climate change, market-based mechanisms have been proposed to mitigate these rising carbon dioxide emissions. One of these mechanisms is known
as REDD (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation). It works to prevent the loss of forests that play a key role in sequestering carbon and regulating the global climate.

This article highlights the land tenure implications of payment for environmental services (PES) mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions and enhance carbon sequestration, and offers suggestions for incorporating tenure into PES strategies.

About fifty literatures published during 1980 to date were reviewed for the common property resources, CPRs, especially pasturelands. They were categorized in three aspects viz. linkages, livelihood and share of income, and effect on CPRs and role of CPRs. It was analyzed for their linkages, the strong and the weak linkages were identified.

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