The Geographical Journal, Vol. 173, No. 2, June 2007, pp. 157–169 Geographical Journal Vol. 173 No. 2, pp. 157– 169, 2007 0016-7398/07/0002-0001/$00.20/0 © 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © The Royal Geographical Society Blackwell Publishing Ltd Coastal dune conservation on an Irish commonage: community-based management or tragedy of the commons? JOHN MC KENNA*, ANNE MARIE O’HAGAN†, JAMES POWER‡, MICHAEL MACLEOD§ AND ANDREW COOPER* *Centre for Coastal and Marine Research, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland BT52 1SA E-mails: j.mckenna@ulster.ac.uk; jag.cooper@ulster.ac.uk †Marine Law and Ocean Policy Centre, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland E-mail: annemarie.ohagan@nuigalway.ie ‡Environmental Planning Division, AXYS Environmental Consulting Ltd, Suite 300, 805 – 8th AVE SW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2P 1H7 E-mail: jpower@axys.net §Land Economy and Environment Research Group, Scottish Agricultural College, Edinburgh EH9 3JG E-mail: michael.macleod@sac.ac.uk This paper was accepted for publication in October 2006 In Ireland ‘commonage’ refers to lands jointly owned by several individuals who have grazing rights. Commonage can provide the low-intensity grazing regime regarded as optimal for habitat conservation, and it is also unlikely to suffer the negative impacts of building development or coastal engineering. Today, however, the traditional control systems of coastal commonage are generally moribund, leading to habitat degradation. The only viable future management model is likely to be one based on local community control. Community management would have the legitimacy to counter the negative perceptions of external authority that generate environmental degradation. KEY WORDS: Ireland, dune commonage, degradation, conservation, community management Introduction A large number of participatory approaches have been established in the field of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) in the past decade. A major aim of such approaches has been to promote local ‘ownership’, harness local knowledge and invoke local action appropriate to the needs of the community and the resource, so that the coast may be managed sustainably. One such participatory ICZM project was carried out on beach/dune systems in County Donegal in north- west Ireland by the University of Ulster and the local authority, Donegal County Council (Power et al. 2000). The project formed part of the European Union’s (EU) Demonstration Programme on ICZM (European Commission 1997 1999a 1999b). The Donegal project identified tenure type as a major constraint on coastal dune management (Mc Kenna et al. 2005), a finding that contrasts with the appar- ent consensus of the coastal management literature, where tenure type is rarely considered a significant factor (see, for example, the review of coastal sensi- tivity indices in Cooper and Mc Laughlin 1998). Commonage is one of a number of tenure types in which Irish coastal dunes are held and, in this paper, we examine its influence on dune manage- ment, using the Dooey Peninsula in County Donegal as a case study. The wider context of our examination of the commonage mode of tenure is that in recent years there has been a greatly increased interest in, and