Capitalizing on Nature: Protected Area Management

How national context, project design, and local community characteristics influence success in community-based conservation projects

“…CBC often promotes the welfare and cooperation of people living in and around areas of conservation interest by providing development opportunities, guaranteeing rights to harvest, emphasizing community involvement and autonomy, and administering payments for ecosystem services. Such approaches have become prominent, especially in the developing world (2)(3)(4), as problems associated with protectionism, including human rights infractions (5), high financial costs of protected areas management (6), and difficulty achieving biodiversity conservation without exacerbating poverty (7), became apparent. The rationale is that engaging with communities and promoting socioeconomic benefits, either directly or by compensating for opportunity costs associated with conservation, can contribute to both poverty alleviation and biodiversity protection.…”

Preserving Biodiversity and Ecosystems: Catalyzing Conservation Contagion

“…These community conservation projects have been based on ethical, theoretical, and practical arguments of conservation practitioners and social scientists (Borrini-Feyerabend, 1996;Broad, 1994;Brosius et al, 1998;Davey, 1998;Gadgil & Guha, 1993;Ham et al, 1993;Johnson, 1992;Oates, 1999;Stolton & Dudley, 1999). However, in recent years there has been growing criticism of communitybased conservation programs and a call for renewal of protected areas that exclude local communities from the programs and their management (Brandon et al, 1998;Inamdar et al, 1999;Robinson, 1993;Terborgh, 1999). While many critics of community conservation projects are biologists (Oates, 1999;Terborgh, 1999), social scientists have also criticized these projects (Belsky, 1999;Brechin et al, 2002).…”

Locating Tropical Biodiversity Conservation Amid Weak Institutions

“…Further, lest we forget the construction of conservation institutions is more than an exercise in optimizing over biological and economic parameters, the political costs and benefits of institutional creation and maintenance can also scuttle the best-made technical designs. The specific conditions prevailing with respect to any given resource in need of conservation vary widely enough that a portfolio approach involving coordinated nested institutions at multiple levels is surely necessary (18). Two problems immediately emerge.…”