The Devil in the Detail of Biodiversity Conservation

Conservation biologists are confronted with a number of basic questions in their quest to conserve the earth's biological resources. I have distilled these to the following: What are we trying to conserve? Where are the most important places in which to conserve it? How should we go about doing conservation? Who can best carry out conservation? Unfortunately, despite broad agreement on global conservation goals, working on the details of conservation has more often than not resulted in conflict within the conservation movement and divided conservationists to the detriment of what they are trying to accomplish. This conflict has often been to the advantage of those who wish to discredit the conservation movement. It is clear to me that there is a devil in the detail of biodiversity conservation. Answering the first question—What are we trying to conserve?—has probably been the easiest and has engendered the greatest amount of agreement. Biodiversity is the conservation target for governments, U.N. institutions, development agencies, and, of course, conservation organizations. It has become so omnipresent that there is an entire international convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, devoted to it. Yet even with broad agreement, biodiversity has been defined in many ways, many often vague and difficult to assess (Redford Terborgh et al. 2002 ) to greater community control over biodiversity conservation ( Western Hulme simple, one-organization solutions will not work. Perhaps most critical, these efforts to conserve biodiversity cannot be made in isolation. They must involve effective partnerships to address the larger-scale problems that defy local solutions. This leads us to the last question: Who has the experience most appropriate to doing the conservation? Traditionally, conservation organizations have been reluctant to collaborate among themselves or with other professions. This go-it-alone mentality has often been the result of the perceived need for different groups to have their own easily identified portfolios of projects that can be marketed to prospective donors. This has resulted in endless claims and counterclaims over conservation approaches that are themselves a sort of territorial battle of knowledge and experience—a way to show the donors who does conservation right, and best. Such ownership has promoted a lack of collaboration and partnership. It has also fostered in organizations an unwillingness to try a range of approaches; they rely instead on those developed in-house and vigorously defend them from any competing method. It is clear, however, that as conservation approaches have become greater in scale and broader in context, conservation organizations do not have all the skills necessary to get the job done. McShane and Newby ( 2003) found that many of the constraints on biodiversity conservation involved issues with which conservationists tended to be inexperienced or uncomfortable. Conservation organizations must work harder at reaching out within their own profession and to other disciplines. Recently, collaboration and the development of partnerships has moved beyond rhetoric. Newly developed partnerships include the World Wildlife Fund ( WWF ) and CARE in East Africa and Conservation International, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and WWF in the Congo Basin. At the policy level, Conservation International and WWF have written the World Bank (with whom they both have a partnership ) expressing concern over proposed changes to the bank's operational policy for forests. By bringing together a number of different conservation organizations to look at many of the existing approaches to conserving biodiversity, Redford et al. ( 2003 ) have taken an important step in promoting such coordination and collaboration. These are all moves in the right direction, but collaboration must be maintained and nurtured. The issues of funding, fundraising, and project ownership must be part of the process. Biodiversity conservation's devil is the competition for donor funding. We all know that successful biodiversity conservation requires money. Unfortunately, in the pursuit of funds, conservation organizations find themselves making claims based on little more than theory. This marketing of conservation approaches has resulted in a dogmatic debate, outwardly over how best to conserve the world's biodiversity, which is a necessary question, but behind the scenes over how to get the funds before someone else does, which is not. Conservation organizations and the conservation biologists that work for them must look closely at themselves. We all know what we want to conserve, and we broadly agree on where we should be doing conservation. We have a number of approaches to help us do the work, and we know that we are not expert at everything that needs to be done. It is time for the conservation community to put organizational competition aside and work together for biodiversity conservation. There are a few good examples beginning, and we must be build on these.