Rural natural resource management (rnrm) and social capital: Contribution of grassroots women's organisations in rural India

Natural resources have central relevance in sustainable rural development process. This article aims to examine gender centric enhanced insights of social capital evinced in rural grassroots women's organisation's (henceforth GWO's) for rural natural resource management (henceforth RNRM) by analysing four distinctive cases encompassing pan-rural India canvas. Coupled with four stages this paper uses both qualitative and review based data to analyse subtle issues involved in RNRM. A careful exercise has also been done to explore the taxonomy of fundamental determinants of GWO's and social capital for RNRM validating six essential criteria's which may help in designing and replicating such models in similar environments for future policy implications. The findings reported few dominant factors that played crucial role for the emergence of social capital among the GWO's such as: microfinance activities, social space, ecological incentives, external support, nature-defensible actions and strong group accountability towards resource stewardship facilitated in conservation of RNRM. One of the significant findings is it strengthen grassroots women's group agency and self-reliance towards negotiating local challenges in the endowed social space for RNRM.