Governance // Natural Resource Governance at Multiple Scales in the Hindu Kush Himalaya
By Susan Sellars-Shrestha, Amy Sellmyer and Christopher. Human efforts to address poverty, enhance welfare, and conserve natural resources and the environment often fail because of faulty governance and implementation. Improvements in governance are consistently viewed as means to address the failures of sustainable development and natural resource management. Indeed, calls by international development organizations, donors, and researchers for decentralization, stronger development institutions, better alignment of private and social incentives, and the protection of ecologies are, at their roots, also calls for improving governance. Effective governance enables and, where appropriate, sets limits on permissible actors and actions, decisions, and decision makers. It helps determine whether and to what extent actions related to development and conservation programmes match the design of such programmes, and their appropriateness in relation to local cultural and ecological contexts.