0577-A2

Trade-offs between conservation and development in forestry - a brief review of approaches to achieve them

Olivier Dubois ¹

Abstract

The basic assumption of Integrated Conservation and Development Programmes (ICDPs) is that poor individuals whose livelihoods depend heavily on the use and trade of natural resources cannot afford to reduce their level of production or extraction of such resources on environmental grounds, simply because they have no other livelihood options. While this holds some truth, this assumption has been increasingly challenged as being over alarmist, not accounting for the dynamism of ecological conditions, and overlooking the diversification strategies developed by rural households; which reduce the inherent pressure on land and natural resources.

This paper briefly discusses the pros and cons of a series of strategies aimed at finding a balance between conservation and development objectives in rural development interventions, including:

(i) Exclusive strategies - conservation without the people:
• Conservation without development and without people;
• Conservation with alternative use and/ or alternative income;
• Conservation payments.
(ii) Inclusive strategies - conservation with the people:
• Eco-tourism;
• Involvement of forest-dependent communities in sustainable timber extraction;
• Enhancement of local livelihood strategies instead of replacing existing ones.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong or right about the approaches outlined above. They can all be combined with land-use practices that enhance biodiversity conservation. What is important is to develop adaptive policy and planning that allow for locally designed schemes to be developed, learning from local values and involving stakeholders in decision-making. Provision of support over a long period (probably at least ten years), as opposed to large-scale projects with a two- to three-year duration, has also proven a strategy for success in ICDPs.

Introduction

The basic assumption of Integrated Conservation and Development Programmes (ICDPs) is that poor individuals whose livelihoods depends heavily on the use and trade of natural resources cannot afford reducing their level of production or extraction of such resources on environmental grounds, simply because they have no other livelihoods options.

Although this assumption holds definitely some truth, it has been increasingly challenged over the last years from different perspectives:

• Recent research strongly challenges the alarmist view that population pressure and conventional farming practices lead to deforestation, and more broadly to environmental degradation. For instance, the famous example of Machakos District in Kenya illustrates that densely populated areas do not necessarily result in environmental degradation, provided adequate market outlets and an enhancing institutional environment are available.
• The above is often compounded by arguments pertaining to "non-equilibrium ecology", which posits that the theoretical sequence leading to climax/equilibrium vegetation is often disturbed by natural events, such as climatic fluctuations, and that uncertainty is of considerable importance in ecological dynamics;
• It is becoming increasingly evident that rural have "hedged their bets" as regards livelihoods, by combining income from natural resources with that from non-rural activities (seasonal migration to cities for example).

Hereafter we briefly discuss the pros and cons of different approaches to address trade offs between conservation and development².

Exclusion strategies through zoning, protection and compensation

Three main approaches have been used, with different recognition of development issues:

a) 1970s-80s: Conservation without development and without people, where scientists' values prevailed.
b) mid-80s and 1990s: Conservation with alternative use and/ or alternative income activities in "buffer zones", acknowledging the social concerns surrounding natural resources. The outcomes of this strategy have often been disappointing, usually due to errors of perception by outsiders. Activities were not demand-led (e.g. labour-intensive game ranching versus hunting with high return to labour).

The promotion of Alternative Income Activities (AIAs) and Alternative Use Activities (AUAs) are seen as ways to operationalise the controversial link between conservation and development. Given their close link to poverty reduction, AIAs in particular are also of crucial importance for UNDP. The basic assumption underlying this pre-eminence is that one of, if not the major cause of biodiversity loss lies in the overexploitation of natural resources. This, in turn, is supposedly caused by the absence of alternative supply of natural resource products and the absence of alternative income ensuing from the trade of such products. However, experience in ICDP shows that the link between the provision of AUAs and AIAs and conservation impacts is not straightforward and actually extremely complex. To increase the likelihood of significant and rapid impact on conservation, it is recommended to prioritise AUAs versus AIAs because the AUAs are often more directly linked to natural resources than AIAs. Other factors to consider in the selection of activities include (Johansson et al, 2001):

• The fact that the resource is only self-consumed, only traded or both.
  For instance, promotion of cookstoves result in an automatic reduction of fuelwood uptake only if fuelwood is only consumed; otherwise one might observe the substitution of trade for self-consumption.
  
• The gender concerned by the activity.
  Two considerations are of importance here:
  * an increase of income by one gender is far from entailing automatic reduction of income generation by the other gender (e.g. an increase in income by the wife thanks to the sale of Jatropha soap does not automatically result in her husband making less money out of timber trade);
  * AIAs and AUAs are more likely to reduce the pressure on natural resources if the same gender is concerned, i.e. by substituting time spent on the pressuring activity by time on the alternative activities). For instance, assuming that both coffee growing and timber harvesting are carried out by men, promotion of the former activity is most likely to (partly) substitute for the latter.
• The time frame to generate income.
  The longer the time frames, the less the activity is likely to have an impact on conservation in the short and medium term. The typical case is the plantation of timber trees, which usually cannot be harvested before at least five years (for fast growing species and to use as poles) and require some 15-20 years to produce good timber.
  
• The costs of inputs
  These should be as low as possible to increase the likelihood of large adoption in poverty-stricken areas.
• The technical complexity of the activity
  It should obviously be as low as possible, to ensure maintenance, hence sustainability of the activity;
• Comparative income from AIAs and the activity that causes pressure on natural resources
  For instance villagers are more likely to drop, or at least reduce timber harvesting if their income comes from low salaries as workers (e.g. pitsawyers) rather than from the sale of timber.
• The existence of a community-driven/agreed reductions or bans concerning the harvesting of natural resources
  This is likely to increase the adoption rate of AIAs and AUAs (e.g. bee-keeping in Bukoba District, Tanzania).

The above factors are not always mutually exclusive, and the multiplicity of their combinations explains partly the complexity of the link between development activities and conservation.

A complementary way to assess in particular the feasibility of AIAs and AUAs is to ask the following questions before implementing these activities (FAO, 1998):

• Institutional feasibility. Is the activity consistent with the department's mandate, resources and expertise? If not is there any partner institution to which the activity can be referred?
• Social feasibility. Is there a consensus among all the stakeholders affected by the activity? Will participants equitably share the costs and benefits of the activity's implementation? Does the number of beneficiaries justify the activity's implementation? Would the interest group proposing the activity be a reliable partner?
• Environmental feasibility. What will be the impact of the activity on the community's natural environment? Will its implementation lead to a more sustainable and efficient use of natural resources? Is there any hidden environmental risk to be considered? How could this risk be managed and controlled?
• Technical feasibility. Is it actually possible to implement the activity as specified by the community? Is the relevant technical expertise available within the forest department or from other agencies? Are these other similar initiatives within the area or in nearby areas that could validate the proposed technical solution?
• Economic feasibility. What will be the cost of implementing the activity? How will this cost be shared? What inputs will be needed from other projects or agencies? Is this cost acceptable in light of expected benefits? Will it be possible and cost effective to implement the activity as specified by the community? Are there other more effective ways to achieve the same results? (i.e. new technologies?) .

c) Conservation payments This would occur in two guises:

* Compensation schemes, thus recognising the benefits gained by local people from protected areas. The main problems of this approach relate to frequent inequitable sharing of benefits, and overall financial sustainability (either through inadequate national compensation schemes or unrealistic expectations as to the duration of donor funding).

Further reasons for weak performance of exclusion strategies include:

• There has often been a mismatch between protected areas and biodiversity hot-spots, because the establishment of protected areas has often been based more on economic (sites unfavourable for productive uses) and political criteria (availability or weak political clout of local claimants) than biological grounds.
• Limits of protected areas are often not enforced on the ground (i.e. frequent encroachments in protected areas) because to police the area have been inadequate and clashes often exist between official and customary delineation.
• Finally, however good the protection of biodiversity "islands" is, conservation also depends on how the surrounding "seas" are managed.

* Direct payment for conservation performance, whereby farmers are simply paid to protect biodiversity, and it is assumed this allows to buy livelihood goods and services. This has recently been proposed as an alternative to development approaches to conservation (Ferraro, 2001). While this strategy might be more cost effective, it still faces similar implementation difficulties as development approaches. In addition, it increases farmers 'risks by making them more dependent on market conditions.

Mid and end 90s: Inclusive strategies, i.e. conservation with development and people

To date, three types of projects that use such strategies have been implemented in:

d) Eco-tourism is attractive because it can generate revenue trough non-consumptive use of natural resources. Key concerns here include the social impacts of (wealthy, foreign) tourists, and equity in the sharing of benefits between local populations and outside (often urban-based) interests.

e) Involvement of forest dependent communities in sustainable timber extraction. There are a few examples of this approach in Africa, notably in Cameroon. However, it is of limited applicability because communities often cannot compete with the commercial sector in meeting two key requirements of trading, i.e. consistency and quality of supply. Moreover, if communities do engage in logging and timber trading, it remains to be seen if they have an advantage in regenerating rather than converting the logged forest.

f) Enhancement of local livelihood strategies instead of replacing existing ones. This builds on lessons from the foregoing approaches and is based on the recognition that forest dependent people often use resources in a sustainable manner. Local people are thus seen as potential stewards rather than threats to natural resources. This approach involves the improvement of production and trading of products such as Non Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) and domesticated plant species that mimic forest structure. Difficulties inherent to this approach include:

• The (nowadays widely refuted) assumption that local communities always manage resources in a sustainable way, irrespective of outside pressures;
• Finding sufficient local capacities to implement projects - and in particular police resources - in areas where population density is low;
• The financial sustainability of such endeavours; and in particular their benefits to labour requirements;
• Insufficient authority over resources by local users, and frequent opposition by commercial operators to allow progress on that front;
• An institutional context often not flexible enough to be responsive to local needs.

Despite their difficulties, approaches e) and f) usually lead to more cost-effective results than those based on alternative uses (AUA) and/or alternative income activities (AIA). Indeed ICDP approaches that focus on forest resources and on the collaborative process itself:

• Achieve results in a more cost-effective manner;
• Disconnects the success of AIAs or AUAs from the benefits obtained from collaborative forest management in the minds of community members. Indeed, when asked about the benefits of collaborative forest management, villagers involved in such an initiative through a CARE Project in Zanzibar have prioritised security of and control over access to "their" resources and revenues concerning permits for the use of these resources. AIAs and AUAs are seen as complements of not substitutes to forest-related income.

In short, these approaches have followed the current trend ICDP, i.e.

Concluding Remarks

There is nothing intrinsically wrong or right about approaches a) to f) outlined above. They can all be combined with land use practices that enhance biodiversity conservation (i.e. through greater emphasis on natural processes to provide inputs). What is important is to develop adaptive policy and planning which allow for locally-designed schemes to be developed, learning from local values and involving stakeholders in decision-making. Provision of support over a long period (probably at least 10 years), as opposed to large scale projects with a two to three year duration, has also proven a strategy for success in Integrated Conservation and Development Programmes (ICDPs).

Questions that need to be addressed in relation to ICD initiatives include (Gilmour, 1994):

• What do "development" and "conservation" mean to local stakeholders in the prevailing context?
• What is the nature of the linkages between conservation and development at local level?
• What are the attributes of the key stakeholders, and in particular local people in relation to natural resources?
• What is the nature of the interaction between local stakeholders and the protected resource?
• What types of development projects are most appropriate?
• To what extent might some development activities militate against the conservation value of the area?
• What sort of conservation activities are desirable or necessary?

References

Brown, D. 1998. Participatory Biodiversity Conservation Rethinking the Strategy in the Low Tourist Potential Areas of Tropical Africa. ODI Natural Resource Perspectives No 3, August 1998.

Dubois, O. 2001. Facilitation of the Participatory Review of two CARE-Tanzania Joint Forest Management Projects. Report for CARE International, August 2001.

FAO 1998. Developing Participatory and Integrated Watershed Management. Community Forestry Case Study Series No 13.

Ferraro, P.J. 2001. Global Habitat Protection: limitations of development interventions and a role for conservation performance payments. Department of Applied Economics and management Working Paper No 200.03 (revised), Cornel University, Ithaca, NY.

Gilmour, D.A. 1994. Conservation and Development - Seeking the Linkages. Paper presented at the International Symposium on Management of Rain Forest in Asia, University of Oslo, Norway, 23-26 March, 1994.

Johansson, S.; Dubois, O. Sumbi, P; Masindi, I; Kabogoza, J. 2001. Mid-Term Review of the UNDP/FAO/GEF Project on Cross Border Project on the Reduction of Biodiversity Loss in East Africa.

¹ Forestry Policy and Institutions Branch, FAO, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, Italy. [email protected]

² This Section draws a lot on Brown (1998).