An article I wrote while at Oxford was published recently in the Journal of Human Welfare. It uses three cases as comparisons to test the theory of political ecology. Here is a link to the journal and a PDF of my article:
http://hwc.gtc.ox.ac.uk/index.php/archives.html
The World Bank and other donors have realized the benefits of allowing communities to manage their own resources in developing countries. Besides allowing people with the most intimate knowledge of their local resources to handle the management, it also empowers rural people as stewards of ecological systems that benefit them in the long run. This paper questions the real benefits of such schemes on a community or local scale, and examines how community based management may help to recreate macro-level economic inequality on smaller scales.
Dr. Kelly Heber Dunning 