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ABSTRACTThis article addresses the relationship between democracy, equity and common property resource management in South Asia, both at the national and at the local level. Its substantive focus will be largely on forests, and its geographical concentration mostly on India, although other sectors (primarily water) and areas (Nepal and Bangladesh) will also be included. The article opens by looking at Garrett Hardin's (1968) three strategies to preserve the commons. It finds that democratic politics is compatible with both privatization and centralization as conserving strategies (although not necessarily successful). With the third approach—local control—democracy has at best a problematic relationship, for where governmental units are the relevant actors, there tends to be more interest in consuming than in conserving or preserving resources at the local level. Local user groups, however, do much better at common property resource management, because they can restrict membership and thus avoid free riders, and they can establish a close linkage in their members' minds between benefits and costs of participating in group discipline to maintain the resource.

A review essay on Guy Gran's Development by People: Citizen Construction of a Just World (New York: Praeger, 1983); Goran Hyden's No Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in Perspective (London: Heinemann, 1983); Dennis A. Rondinelli's Development Projects as Policy Experiments: An Adaptive Approach to Development Administration (London: Methuen, 1983); & Gerald E. Sussman's The Challenge of Integrated Rural Development in India: A Policy and Management Perspective (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1983 [see listings in IRPSPPD No. 12]). These works discuss new approaches to development assistance. Rondinelli suggests a "bureaucratic reorientation" to increase both internal & external bureaucratic responsiveness. Sussman describes the comprehensive Community Development Program in Ru India during the 1950s & 1960s; however, despite his protestations, evidence suggests that the project favored village elites & never reached the Ru poor. Gran attributes the problems associated with development programs to the complementary power & control needs of both donor & recipient governments & bureaucracies, which prevent real reform. Participatory development is presented as a solution to this problem. According to Hyden, development is hindered because most of the Ru population is beyond the control of either government or marketplace. It is suggested that capitalism could draw Ru producers into the macroeconomic system. It is cautioned that the success of these projects depends on allowing them sufficient time to work -- a minimum of 15-20 years -- a fact not favorable to political leaders & program bureaucrats who demand immediate results. 14 References. K. Hyatt

ABSTRACTGiven the system of parliamentary democracy that India developed after its independence in 1947, it is understandable that pluralism came to be the major paradigm used to explain Indian politics. But just as the persistence of economic inequality was instrumental in calling pluralism into question as an appropriate model for explaining the American political system, so the continuation and even increase of inequality in India led social scientists to question the pluralist approach for India. And, as in the American case, a number of scholars turned to a Marxist class analysis to explain the Indian situation; by the mid-1970s a political economy model had begun to take shape that did offer a reason able explanation of the pervasive inequality in India. Also, Mrs Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–1977 fits very easily into this class analysis approach. But then came the elections of 1977 and the ouster of Mrs Gandhi at the polls, an event not explicable in terms of the Marxist model, but which fits very well into the pluralist framework. Which model, then, is more appropriate to employ in accounting for the Indian system ? The best answer seems to be to try to fit the pluralist approach within the Marxist one, with the latter carrying most of the explanatory load.

Frequent elections and a long tradition of census taking in India should combine to provide excellent scope for aggregate data analysis, but so far they have not, largely because the electoral constituencies and the census tracts do not match. A number of ways have been devised to surmount the problem, none of them very satisfactory. This paper offers a new solution in the form of isoplethic mapping, a method that avoids the shortcomings of other approaches and permits use of demographic and voting data at the level of the state legislative assembly constituency.Substantively the paper traces patterns of voting for Muslim candidates to the Bihar Legislative Assembly and the relationship between Muslim population distribution and vote polled by different political parties over six elections. Instead of becoming more integrated over time within the general body politic, it appears that the Muslim minority group has become more politically cohesive and better able to elect Muslims to office where their numbers are strong. At the same time, Muslims have become less able to win elections where they are fewer in numbers. This tendency has not reached a state of political polarization between the Hindu and Muslim communities, however.