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Participation, Conservation and Livelihoods: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Participatory Approaches in Protected Areas

Annual Call for Projects 2006

Keywords

Biodiversity - Conservation - environmental governance

Summary

The number of protected areas in the world has increased rapidly over the past few decades and is currently in excess of 102,000. The question of their ecological and social sustainability is one of the main challenges to global environmental governance today.

Historically, most protected areas were created under the assumption that, for conservation to be successful, humans had to be excluded from these areas. Many studies have presented evidence that this approach was ineffective. Starting in the 1970s, a new approach advocated local participation in the governance and management of protected areas.

It is now widely believed that conservation and human livelihoods are not necessarily incompatible, and that conservation may be best achieved if local participation in governing protected areas is guaranteed. This approach, acknowledged by the World Park Congress held in Durban in 2003 and by the "Programme of Work on Protected Areas" of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and has been labeled "a new paradigm". Most recently-created protected areas include local participation in their design.

But the "participation paradigm" is under challenge. Some conservation biologists and academic researchers are questioning "people-centred" governance models, as well as the influence of social scientists in the design of protected areas. A major problem is that there is no systematic and evidence-based study demonstrating that participatory / co-management approaches actually achieve better conservation, and at the same time improve people’s livelihoods, as it is commonly advocated. There is thus an urgent need to analyse the advantages and disadvantages of participatory models, in view of the current debate in conservation circles.  

This project, supported by the Geneva International Academic Network (GIAN) and developed jointly by the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the Graduate Institute of Development Studies (GIDS), the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD), and the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere programme (MAB), aims at: 1) creating a network of institutions specialised in protected areas' research and development; 2) developing a methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of participatory and co-management approaches in protected areas' governance; 3) testing the developed methodology in pilot protected areas; 4) preparing a large-scale project for gathering evidence on the utility of the participatory approach with regard to conservation and livelihoods.

An added value of the project is that it brings together four ongoing initiatives led by the partners: 1) the "Peoples, Protected Areas and Global Change" project, National Center of Competence in Research North-South (NCCR-NS) led by the GIDS, that compares livelihood strategies, institutional settings, and participation in ten protected areas; 2) the World Conservation Union's World Commission on Protected Areas (IUCN/WCPA) project that assesses the management effectiveness of protected areas; 3) the "Action thématique interdépartementale (ATI) aires protégées", an IRD programme that intends to constitute a network for comparative and prospective research on protected areas; and 4) a UNESCO MAB research project on dialogue and consultation in the framework of the World Network of Biosphere Reserves, which includes a methodology for comparing the diversity of contexts.

The GIAN-supported project will build on these experiences to develop an assessment methodology to investigate the consequences of changes in protected areas’ governance and management brought about by the introduction of participatory approaches. Empirical testing of this methodology will be carried out in several sites in developing countries, selected among the protected areas where the project partners undertake activities.

The methodology developed will allow partners to correlate the effectiveness of participatory approaches, conservation objectives (the conservation of ecosystems, species and natural resources) and social objectives (livelihood and governance). This research is viewed as a pilot project, or as a first phase, on which a longer-term research project could be based.

Taken as a whole, this multi-phase project will analyse the factors determining roles and influence of actors involved with participatory approaches in protected areas. The analysis will examine formal as well as informal norms, competing interests, power and social networks among other areas. All of these elements will be addressed at the local and national levels, using the Governance Analytical Framework methodology developed by Marc Hufty of GIDS. This approach is designed to develop an understanding of the socio-economic and cultural outcomes of participatory approaches. These include poverty, security, community cultural integrity, as well as political outcomes in relation to empowerment, democratisation, decision-making efficacy and the application of the principles of good governance.

The grant provided by the GIAN for this project totals SFr 135,000

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Project Team

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