Community, Commons and Natural Resource Management in Asia, edited by Haruka Yanagisawa [Book Review]

It is common to conflate “sustainability” with a pre-modern lifestyle, to hold that historical communities lived in harmony with nature until the forces of modernity—capitalism, individualism and political centralization—destroyed communal authority. By unleashing modern “selfish” individuals, those acting in their own self-interest destroyed communal resources, thus harming the population as a whole, in a phenomenon now known as the “tragedy of the commons.”

This view is challenged in Community, Commons and Natural Resource Management in Asia, a compilation of academic papers edited by the late Professor Haruka Yanagisawa. One might expect an academic volume on “community resource management” to be on the dry side, but the book’s studies of communal resource management throughout East and South Asia are a surprisingly lively read.

This is an except from a review of Community, Commons and Natural Resource Management in Asia, edited by Haruka Yanagisawa, originally published in the Asian Review of Books on November 10th, 2015. The full review can be accessed here.