Community-Based Conservation Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Community-based conservation is commonly seen as having two central objectives: to enhance conservation of wildlife, biodiversity, and/ or the environment; and to provide economic, social, cultural, and political benefits to local people. These objectives are connected; when communities benefit from conservation, they will be more likely to support it. Community-based conservation is also a process achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including devolution of control over resources from states to communities, development of community institutions to manage those resources, meaningful participation of communities in decision making about conservation, and legalization of property rights. Central to the community-based conservation concept is the assumption that people living closest to and depending on a resource will be most affected by its depletion, and thus have high stakes in its sustainable management.

The predecessors of community-based conservation include the concept of buffer zones, introduced by UNESCO in 1979, and Integrated Conservation and Development Projects, popularized in the late 1980s and early 90s. Both have been criticized for their failure to adequately involve local people in planning. In theory, community-based conservation is different than its predecessors, because it places the community’s involvement at the center of conservation, rather than the mechanism (such as a park or project) for achieving it. Thus, participation is critical to the community-based conservation concept, and takes place ideally at all stages, from planning to implementation, management, and monitoring.

Response to “Fences and Fines”

Community-based conservation and its predecessors arose in response to critiques of the traditional parks and protected areas, or “fences and fines” approach to conservation. This approach relies on excluding people from protected areas, eliminating consumption of resources within those areas, minimizing the impacts of preferred forms of use (leisure, recreation, and scientific research), and enforcing rules by the state. Critiques of this traditional approach address pragmatic, philosophical, and justice concerns. Pragmatically, the amount of land that can ultimately be protected and the costs and effectiveness of protection efforts have been questioned. Without local support, the biological goals of conservation can be undermined through encroachment and illegal harvesting activities, and efforts to enforce exclusion can consume disproportionate amounts of conservation funds. Philosophically, parks and protected areas historically were linked to North American romanticism and European utilitarianism, both of which emphasize the separateness of humans from nature. This vision of separateness has routinely conflicted with local visions of human-environment relations in many developing countries and can undermine local cultural and social norms, and traditional knowledge. From a justice standpoint, parks and protected areas impact most on local human populations living near them by restricting access to resources and associated livelihood activities. Thus, parks can exacerbate inequities between rural people living next to them and those who gain through visiting parks or receiving wider environmental benefits of protection. Thus, community-based conservation operates on a principle that local residents with legitimate claims to land or resources must be allowed to participate in their management and conservation.

The rise of community-based conservation also reflects more general trends, including the global spread of democracy, interest in social justice, and indigenous rights movements as well as the overall emphasis on sustainable development. With conservation and development defined as “opposite sides of the same coin,” conservation organizations began to acknowledge the development needs of local people, and community-based conservation was envisioned as the way to meet these needs. The concept was so widely promoted in the 1990s that it became almost impossible to talk about conservation without referencing the community’s involvement. Community-based conservation was in danger of becoming little more than a conservation catchphrase, appealing as it did to a wide array of conservation and development policymakers and practitioners.

Community-based conservation has experienced mixed success in practice, encountering several major obstacles. First, its implementers have failed to operationalize community participation in project identification, design, and management. Participation is, rather, often seen as a means to get people to support predetermined conservation programs. Second, community-based conservation projects have often been undertaken without an adequate understanding of local social and economic contexts and by environmental nongovernment organizations with limited experience in community development. A common recommendation for community-based wildlife conservation projects, for example, is the uncritical promotion of ecotourism, an activity that often relies on the continued existence of parks and protected areas. Third, community is a problematic term, too often treated as self-evident or generic. Communities are assumed to be homogenous entities, acting collectively to achieve common environmental goals. Little consideration is given to individuals within communities and the motives they might have to work against conservation programs. Fourth, the preoccupation with community has often meant that the ways in which communities are embedded in (and constrained by) larger economic and political systems have been overlooked. Finally, community-based conservation projects have focused too much on economic incentives and have often failed to enable genuine empowerment and social justice.

Proponents argue that critiques of communitybased conservation arise from failure to properly implement it, rather than from any fundamental flaw with the concept itself. In contrast, a “resurgent protectionist” argument that calls for a return to people-free parks and protected areas is increasingly evident. Driven by some prominent conservation biologists, the argument cites the failure of community-based conservation to adequately protect biodiversity. What is not clear is how such a return will be done without also returning to original critiques of the protectionist paradigm. While community-based conservation may be flawed, it arose in response to real problems with parks and protected areas and it should not be deserted lightly.

Bibliography:

Arun Agrawal and Clark Gibson, , Communities and the Environment: Ethnicity, Gender, and the State in Community-Based Conservation (Rutgers University Press, 2001);
David Hulme and Marshall Murphree, , African Wildlife and Livelihoods: The Promise and Performance of Community Conservation (James Currey, 2001);
David Western and Michael Wright, eds., Natural Connections: Perspectives in Community-Based Conservation (Island Press, 1994).