Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), once presented
as the best way to protect common pool natural resources, now
attracts a growing chorus of critiques that either question its underlying
assumptions or emphasize problems related to institutional design. These
critiques overlook connections between the definition of rights to natural
resources and membership in political communities. The potential for competing
definitions of political identity and rights across natural resources
arises when property rights regimes differ across natural resources and these
different systems of rights appeal to alternative definitions of community.
In Botswana, the entangling of natural resource policy with identity politics
contributed to a partial recentralization of CBNRM in 2007.