Zanjera as Community Resource Management 141.0

Robert Siy found lessons from a resilient Philippine model
I think I have a gem in Robert Siy’s book, published in 1982 and out-of-print. This post is more a story of the sleuthing for nuggets of wisdom than of the gems themselves.

I picked my second-hand copy up yesterday from Johnny Air Cargo at the basement of the Valdez Building on Aguirre St. behind the AIM. I had bought it for US$20.00 from Reflections of Asia in Citrus Heights, California on November 20. As of today, the next available copy is being sold at US$108.43 by an Oregon bookstore. Hahah …

I found Dr. Siy via Professor Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Prize winner for Economics. She referred to Dr. Siy’s work in her own defining book, Governing the Commons, The Evolution of Institutes for Collective Action (1990) as one of the clinical cases with others in Europe and Japan to develop grounded theory, in the mode of Eisenhardt (1989) that is a popular post in SYNTHESiST.

(Note that both these books were published the same time as Eisenhardt’ s journal (1989) though earlier work Glaser and Strauss (1969) and a contemporary one by Yin (1989) already described the methodology clearly visible in Siy and Ostrom on deriving grounded theory from cases.)

I am pleasantly surprised to learn that Dr. Siy was a long-time professor of rural development at the Asian Institute of Management where I am now an adjunct faculty member.

I have not met Dr. Siy yet but I now know where he works. A schoolmate at Cornell tells me his friends call him Robbie (and more of her later in another post). A former associate says he is soft spoken and mabait. If you get to know him maybe it will cost less to treat him to dinner if he does not charge global consulting rates. Just kidding!

I will let the endorsers at the back cover of his book below speak about his work – they are very credible people. They speak of the detail work, the possibilities for replicating institutions and structures, the multi-disciplinarity that pre-dated the transformation of rural management into development management, the hard-nosed and un-romanticized approach, and the international comparisons. From what I have read, I agree with their comments. The book is truly a gem rediscovered!

The work of Professor Ostrom and Dr. Siy more than twenty years ago about common property (and the related open-access commons) are very relevant today because of issues like global warming, clean air and sustainability.

For me, Dr. Siy’s work is also very relevant because it tells of the zanjera as an indigenous, Filipino approach (including conflict management techniques, distribution of benefits and costs, and ownership structures) that has worked resiliently for a century despite the annual destruction from natural typhoons and floods.

Today, the system has also been assaulted by mega-infrastructures designed and run by technocrats who expect the farmers to just follow the strictures of big technology. The first of this assaults in the late 1970s is documented in the book published in 1982 before a later typhoon destroyed some parts of the infrastructure. I hear a new World Bank project is being contemplated …

I believed Professor Ostrom, who is a political scientist whose use of math is in game theory and is more comfortable with the case method, won the Nobel price for economics over the math modelers because the subjects she wrote about are very relevant for the future – commons as property and open-access resource in the time of global warming, clean air and sustainability, in general. Her studies provide insights about how to move forward…

Note: Ostrom (2000) is a more recent paper which delves much deeper into commons and the different values and methodologies for using them in her usual extremely logical manner.

Being more a practitioner of innovation and change management and less an academic, I will suspend judgment about the current state of the zanjera … and the potential for replication.

I intend to visit and smell the flowers. Maybe, there is something for us to learn as we manage our patrimony (though, as Professor Ostrom warns, we must be careful in deriving policy ‘as metaphor’ from inductively-derived theory.)

The correct approach, I think, is discovery-driven with each new case treated on its own merits and as extension of the previous documented ones. Then we can move forward with respect from Dr. Siy’s work and of the zanjera farmers. Even and, more so, in practice…