Beyond exclusion: alternative approaches to biodiversity conservation

When the variety of biological life is so rich, interconnected, and diverse, it seems peculiarly shortsighted and inflexible to adopt one single approach to conservation¹.

Protected areas have played a huge role in conserving biodiversity rich spaces. However, they belong to a vision that is entrenched in a colonial past and in Western notions of how wild spaces should be defined. Such approaches are surprisingly inflexible and hostile in their admission to human influences, even in densely inhabited regions in Asia, where forest dwelling tribes and peoples have played a fundamental role in shaping and preserving the space they have occupied. In short, ecosystems that need protection have been conceptualized as ‘ideally’ bereft of human habitation, use and access, whereas history and research show that these landscapes have been shaped by human use.

The conservation and livelihood programme at ATREE has sought to find a middle ground between the biodiversity conservation set in artificially ‘pristine spaces’ as well as open access spaces, and the need for local communities to use natural resources as a means of sustenance and income. This article by Sharachchandra Lele, Peter Wilshusen, Dan Brockington, Reinmar Seidler and Kamaljit Bawa examines the potential of non-exclusionary approaches from a perspective that values biodiversity as well as socio-economic gains.

Specifically, the review examines the role, design, assumptions and implementation of community-based conservation (CBC), its subset – enterprise-based conservation (EBC), and payments-based conservation (PES) programs. The review suggests that ‘(a) comprehensive socio–ecological and comparative studies of such initiatives are surprisingly scarce, (b) enterprise-based conservation offers some potential if design flaws, poor implementation, assumptions about homogeneous communities, and inattention to tenurial change and security are addressed, (c) payments-based programs require caution because of their focus on economic efficiency, and simplified assumptions regarding the nature of rights, biological information, monitoring costs, and state interventions, and (d) the alternatives to exclusion have often not been given adequate state support and space to function, nor is the ongoing neo-liberalization of the political-economic system conducive to giving them that space, except when they fit the direction of this larger process.’

The authors summarise that protectionist approaches are losing their legitimacy because of their unfair, undemocratic nature, and community voice and unrest against their diktats. At the same time ‘local communities are neither inevitably the destroyers (when not involved) nor (when involved) the saviours of biodiversity.’ The authors recommend factoring in local contexts and history, as well as understanding how responsibilities and rights to resources and biodiversity might be distributed between individuals, communities and state. Article – Beyond exclusion: alternative approaches to biodiversity conservation in the developing tropics

¹ Elinor Ostrom and Harini Nagendra, Be diverse, Our Planet, May 2010. Magazine of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)