Conservation, Human Rights, and Poverty Reduction

Recent exchanges in Oryx and Conservation Biology reveal considerable discomfort about the relationships between conservation, human rights, and development needs (Sanderson Brockington Price et al. 2004; Romero Seligmann et al. 2005), revolved around the potential of international conservation NGOs to neglect local people's needs. This discomfort is unproductive because of its disconnections. Compare, for example, Brosius and Terborgh's perceptions of the World Parks Congress (Brosius 2004; Terborgh 2004). Or try to find arenas for constructive engagement between the writings of Brandon et al. (1998) and those of Brechin et al. (2003). Conversely, attempts to find common ground can result in platitudes that fail to confront real problems facing protected areas (e.g., Scherl et al. 2004). Fortunately, an impasse has not been reached, but conservation does need some new directions. Here we make three observations that may generate productive discussion. First, there is an extraordinary dearth of good information about the social impacts of protected areas. Protected areas have expanded threefold in recent years, and the stricter category 1–4 protected areas now number some 49,000 and cover 6% of the land surface of the planet. One should expect this to have involved some evictions. Yet when two of us recently reviewed as much literature on protected-area displacements as we could, we found just under 250 books and papers containing information on just over 150 protected areas (D.B. Amend Bruner et al. 2001; Rao et al. 2002; Bedunah Chapin 2004). We also need to be mindful of the politics of indigeneity. Nongovernmental organizations, local and international, can represent indigenous peoples in problematic ways while consuming funds as overheads. It is difficult for indigenous groups to acquire the requisite official recognition. Recognition requires access to passports, political patronage, and the policy-making elite, which only a few can acquire (Conklin Igoe 2004). Attention to indigenous peoples can marginalize the nonindigenous. For example, popular concern for pastoralists evicted from the Mkomazi Game Reserve in Tanzania has focused on the indigenous Maasai and Parakuyo peoples to the exclusion of nonindigenous groups, who have a longer history of residence in the area (Brockington 2002). This problem is part of a deeper difficulty in current and future conflicts over protected areas. Whether these disputes result in stronger conservation fortresses or devolved collaborations, one can be sure that they will contain a “myriad of marginalizations and inequalities enforced on smaller and smaller scales” (Brockington 2003). Understanding of how protected areas or community conservation works depends on understanding the ways differences in gender, class, ethnicity, and identity structure the distribution of costs and benefits. Finally, it will be vital to understand the ecologies of coexistence, or what Rosenzweig (2003) refers to as “reconciliation ecology.” Decisions to evict people, or restrict their access to resources, should be governed by pragmatic ecological considerations rather than ideals of wilderness. Yet for some conservationists it is the wilderness ideal that really matters. Strictly protected areas containing people are anathema. In many countries national parks are envisaged as places where rural livelihoods do not belong. In these contexts, people in parks are a category error. But it is an invidious one. It fosters antagonisms: there are several cases of animals and forests being deliberately destroyed to avert planned protection (Brandon 1998). The category error also threatens degradation because displaced rural livelihoods can cause considerable environmental problems (Schmidt-Soltau 2005). Finally, it ignores local conservation initiatives; rural groups all over the world set aside places in which they restrict their own resource use and residence. If we deny this category error by accepting that people and nature can coexist in ways that are worth protecting, then we need to answer the following questions: What are the impacts of current human use on the landscape and different taxa? What are the long-term trends of patterns of human resource use? Will currently benign forms of use continue? How can coexistence with diverse aspects of nature be promoted? Ecologists and social scientists both need to contribute answers here, the former because coexistence is fundamentally an ecological question and the latter because the complexities of human society demand a thorough understanding of local politics, economics, and society. We suspect, however, that assessments of ecology are more urgently needed, particularly at smaller scales. A great many assessments of community conservation schemes have analyzed the distribution of benefits to people, but relatively few also analyze their impact on nature and biodiversity (Magome Maestas et al. 2003), Amazonian agroforestry (Anderson et al. 1995), the conservation of Central Asian snow leopards (Mishra et al. 2003), and community forestry in Mexico (Bray et al. 2003) are but a few of the valuable contributions in this field. If these types of studies are coupled with research into the social, economic, and institutional dynamics of coexistence, then conservationists would be in a much stronger position to understand how coexistence can be promoted. For example, Bray et al.'s writings on Mexican forestry are powerfully elucidated by Klooster's work on the same (Klooster 2000), and the conservation of Mongolian snow leopards needs to consider the dynamics of Mongolian pastoralism (Bedunah & Schmidt 2004). The ecologies and social impacts of coexistence are most important because this is an issue that extends far beyond the boundaries of protected areas. Six percent of the world is, after all, not very much from the perspective of conservation on a global scale. The ultimate challenge facing conservationists today is not only to reconcile errors of the past but also to determine how to shape human interactions with nature in landscapes of which people are a part.