Who Breathes the Smoke: Technologies for Community-Based Natural Resource Management

Abstract

While technologists have investigated environmental sustainability and conservation problems from a variety of angles, rural communities who manage natural resources have underexplored opportunities to benefit from new technologies. Many rural, Indigenous, and non-industrialized communities around the world have developed mature environmental governance structures and practiced effective resource management for thousands of years, and western environmental studies are increasingly recognizing the importance of social, cultural, and institutional factors. To date, technologists' engagement with community-based environmental management has been sparse for reasons including cultural differences between rural resource managers and urban technologists, underdevelopment of participant-led research methods, and the up-front investment needed to deploy technologies in remote and low-income settings. We argue that the time is ripe for engagement between technologists and community-based resource management institutions, and use we Elinor Ostrom's design principals for common resource governance to suggest potential technology applications: such as defining and communicating about resource boundaries, mutual monitoring among resource users, and social capacity building. To achieve the best environmental outcomes, technologists need to adopt participant-led research methods that leverage local communities' expertise about their own environments, social institutions, and cultural norms.