Cambridge Journal of Economics 2012, 36, 1143–1162 doi:10.1093/cje/bes034 © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved. An inquiry into power and participatory natural resource management Bengi Akbulut and Ceren Soylu* Decentralised environmental governance based on community participation is increasingly replacing top-down natural resource management. There is increasing awareness, however, that such mechanisms might fail to ensure effective partici- pation by all stakeholders and be prone to producing and/or perpetuating power inequalities. Against this backdrop, we claim that ‘power’ should be positioned at the centre of analyses of natural resource management. In this paper we provide a taxonomy of positions to analyse participatory decision making in natural resource management. We operationalise this framework to analyse two ‘failures’ of partici- patory natural resource management in Turkey, focusing on reasons for failure and the role of power asymmetries. Our results are based on case studies comprising in-depth interviews, focus groups and a survey administered to 944 individuals. We conclude that participatory mechanisms are highly unlikely to bring democratic and equitable outcomes unless power relations are addressed at both institutional and local levels.  Key words: Power, Participatory decision making, Natural resource management, Turkey JEL classiications: Q56, Q57, Q58 1. Introduction It is a truism that over the past three decades, the conservation and management of natural resources have become increasingly important. In an effort to halt or reverse the degradation of natural resources, site conservation programmes and resource man- agement plans have been introduced throughout the world. There has also been a shift in the ways environmental policies are formed and implemented, based on the recognition that centralised, top-down conservation and management mechanisms have failed to resolve resource–use conlicts and generally create new problems. The failure of approaches that exclude local people from decision making has sparked a Manuscript received 4 April 2010; inal version received 20 February 2012. Address for correspondence: Bengi Akbulut, Visnezade Mahallesi Spor Caddesi, Enis Akaygen Sokak Zafer, Apt. No.11/14 Besiktas, Istanbul 34357, Turkey; email: bengi.akbulut@gmail.com * School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, UK (BA) and Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA (CS). The authors would like to thank Fikret Adaman, two anonymous referees and the Ecological Economics Panel participants at the Association for Heterodox Economics 10th Annual Conference (2008) for their comments. FREKANS research company provided valuable logistical support in the survey administration. The usual caveats apply. at Univ. of Massachusetts/Amherst Library on November 9, 2012 http://cje.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from