Inappropriate Institutions for Conservation

Contemporary thinking on conservation represents an evolution away from preserving nature for its own sake towards the sustainable use of natural resources with a stronger emphasis on livelihoods. Despite this most wildlife conservation institutions have tended to view the livelihood needs of local people as secondary to their conservation objectives and do not recognise the complex interrelations between bio-diversity conservation and peoples' livelihoods. As a result livestock-producers take no responsibility for, and feel no sense of ownership of, wildlife resources, and impact negatively upon them, both directly by poaching and indirectly through competition for grazing (discussion on loss of wildlife biodiversity).

Inappropriate institutions for conservation are those which effectively exclude indigenous resource users from key resource use decision making processes. These institutions are based on the models of ‘protected area management and preservation’, designed with the express and primary aim of conserving bio-diversity.

The key negative features of ‘protectionist’ institutions are:

- that they are based on the predominant view that rural people are mismanagers of natural resources
- that they are centralised, top down and remove indigenous or local resource users from resource use decision making processes thereby ignoring customary rights to wild resources
- that they ignore the fact that most bio-diversity rich areas are social spaces, where culture and nature are renewed with, by and for local people
- that they impact on the livelihoods, well-being, existing natural resource management practices and social cohesion of local people living in and around protected areas.
- that they attempt the physical exclusion of local people from areas of rich bio-diversity; such exclusion is rarely practical and leads only to the institutions being viewed as little more than wildlife law enforcement agents

Such institutions have the effect of threatening bio-diversity (particularly wildlife), in the following ways:

- in excluding local resource users from resource management such institutions significantly reduce local incentives for conserving wildlife resources
- by excluding local people from protected areas, inappropriate conservation institutions remove the human-generated disturbance of ecosystems which may be essential for the generation and conservation of biological diversity
- in restricting access to wild resources protectionist institutions effectively redefine local resources users who infringe exclusion ‘rules’ as ‘poachers’ and ‘squatters’. Treated in this way, local resource users tend to exploit wild resources in unsustainable ways – altering their use tactics in order to maximise their own security resulting in minimal concerns for sustainability

Related Policy Options

Building appropriate institutions

Research/Appraisal Methods

To examine the appropriateness of conservation institutions requires implementing methods that seek to measure the extent to which the institutions meet their stated conservation and/or livelihood development objectives. The former requires the use of natural science methodologies based on establishing the status of wildlife populations over time. Where such institutions explicitly recognise the importance of support for local livelihoods, social science methodologies using a mixture of participatory (e.g. PRA) and quantitative assessments aims to establish the impacts of institutional interventions on the welfare and livelihoods of local people, but also the extent to which people have a role in resource use decision making.

Key references

- Blaikie, P. and Jeanrenaud, S. 1996. Biodiversity and Human Welfare, discussion Paper No 72, February 1996. UNRISD, Geneva,
- Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). 1994. Text and Annexes, Geneva, Switzerland.
- Ghimire, K.B., and Pimbert, M.P. (eds) 1997. Social Change and Conservation: environmental Politics and Impacts of National Parks and Protected Areas, Earthscan Publications, London, United Kingdom.
- IIED. 1994. Whose Eden? An Overview of Community Approaches to Wildlife Management. Report published for the Overseas Development Administration, United Kingdom.
- Marks, S.A. 1984. The Imperial Lion: Human Dimensions of Wildlife Management in Central Africa. Colorado (USA): Westview Press.

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