- Resource System
- Woodland ecosystem
- Resource Units
- Floral and faunal resources, including timber, medicinal herbs, vegetables, and wildlife
The Nyamaropa communal area encompasses a total of five villages located in the Nyanga District in Zimbabwe. Beyond individual homestead plots and fields, the communities have access rights to an unspecified acreage of grazing/woodland commons that consist of miombo woodlands on mountain and hill slopes and Terminalia-Combretum vegetation in the lowlands. The time period examined involves a snapshot in time in approximately the late 1990s and is based on the author’s personal observations, informal interviews, and responses to a questionnaire that randomly sampled 40 households in each of the villages to catalogue an action situation involving approximately 200 households who draw on woodland resources for shelter, medicine, and food. Woodland resources (timber, medicinal herbs, vegetables and meat) are the main stationary and fugitive resource units.
The original case study author focused on the flow of woodland resource units within and across villages.. The case study has subsequently been used in comparative analyses regarding Ostrom's Design Principles (see bibliography).
. 2001. Use of woodland resources within and across villages in a Zimbabwean communal area. Agriculture and Human Values. 18:177-194.
. 2010. A Review of Design Principles for Community-based Natural Resource Management. Ecology and Society. 15(4):38.
. 2016. Explaining success and failure in the commons: the configural nature of Ostrom’s institutional design principles. International Journal of the Commons. 10(2):417–439.