Woods Hole Research Center

The findings presented are focused on how deriving a quantitative assessment of protected area values to park adjacent households can help in the design and development of policies and programs to resolve conflict over natural resource use and management through a more contextually nuanced appreciation of the critical role that these resources play in mitigating shocks in rural livelihoods. Households in the study sites in both Mozambique and Uganda are rural, subsistence producers, heavily reliant on natural resources to maintain their livelihoods and typically poor by international standards for less developed economies. However they are also endowed with a relative abundance, when compared to other farming households in the region, of natural resources due to their proximity to national parks, particularly in the absence of effective enforcement of the non-use regulations.

• People living in and around the study sites have long depended on access to these areas for fuelwood, bushmeat and non-timber forest products, particularly at times of the year when other sources of subsistence are very limited. Exploiting such resources is a livelihood strategy which these very poor households employ irrespective of current legal restrictions.
• Being located in or close to a national park helps to reduce the effect of shocks e.g. drought/crop failure and price fluctuations, to the livelihoods system.
• Living in and around a national park however means households tend to be further away from markets. This factor reduces the efficiency and effectiveness of engaging in market-based activities e.g. commercial agriculture such as sale of corn, through higher transport costs and exposure to increased risk in doing business.
• Since international treaties such as the Convention on Biological Diversity have stated that use of protected areas as a way of safeguarding biodiversity should not come at the cost of perpetuating or worsening poverty, finding ways of measuring the true opportunity costs of conservation to communities in developing countries is important. Determinants of the values that park-adjacent households place on access to the resources therein were found to include access to agricultural land and household size.
• Simply improving incomes, a central tenet of poverty alleviation programs, may not help to conserve parks per se, especially without effective enforcement of regulations.
• In addition, working with households closest to the target protected area will be more effective for conservation than working with households further away. In terms of efficiency, defined here as how much conservation money can buy, targeting households that are wealthier and closer to the protected area will yield a bigger impact per unit of investment than working with poorer households or those further away from the forest site.
• We see some interesting paradoxical recommendations derived from the findings, when for example from an efficiency perspective it seems we should work with higher income households and from an equity perspective we should target poorer households.
• Mixing development and conservation objectives in one economic policy tool cannot result in the maximum outcome in one or other of the objectives; it will always be a compromise. From the outset it is necessary for project or policy planners to be clear about the project priority: is it forest conservation or rural development? For example REDD+ is very much a forest conservation policy. The issue then is looking for an optimal solution, maximizing forest conservation benefit whilst minimizing the social and economic costs.
• Any alternative activities to protected area use must be designed to offset the local welfare loss (economic loss) rather than simply the financial loss to maintain household participation. In addition, the social perspective on the value of forest resources is not static and may change over time. A quantitative understanding the scope and nature of costs and benefits helps realistic planning in terms of understanding the investments required to implement successful programs.
• A key challenge for rural poverty reduction stems from the long history of conflict between farmers and state / conservation authorities over land and forest access. Together with the land-extensive needs of traditional farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa, and the insecurity of tenure for poor farmers in areas sought by the state or private interests for non-agricultural purposes, such tensions contribute to rural households’ tendency to relocate frequently and to resist restrictions on desirable land, which are seen as violations of ancestral rights. These defensive strategies of the rural poor will complicate development interventions, especially as climate change increases the value of protected areas to livelihood strategies outside of farming.

From an academic perspective both studies make an important contribution through innovations in terms of methodology and analytical approaches to understating the decisions and tradeoffs people make in managing their livelihood with respect to resource conservation. The Mozambique study focused on efficiency and effectiveness of livelihood strategies revealing how development interventions might be better targeted to maximize the incentives for reducing park use. In contrasting, the Uganda work focused on how to better estimate values that households derive from protected areas and how knowledge of these values can also be applied to targeting and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of protected area management strategies.

From an applied perspective there are important lessons for policy and management of national parks. As user pressures on protected areas increase, so do efforts to put in place more effective management strategies to control access, curb illegal hunting and provide communities with alternative means of ensuring their welfare. Unfortunately, exclusionary management practices tend to create tensions between local people and the authorities. If local communities wish to receive direct benefits from protected areas in the future, and if park authorities wish to see more stringent enforcement of unpopular management rules, it seems essential to put in place a management regime that promotes their acceptance by local communities. Information on the costs of lost access is a key indicator of how much effort must be deployed in order to mitigate the effect of losses by local people.

Acknowledgement of such inequities in traditional (fences and fines) conservation approaches has, over the last 4 decades, given rise to the community dimension in conservation where integrated conservation and development projects (ICDP) have become the accepted means of reconciling local development needs with biodiversity conservation objectives. Such schemes have a mixed reputation in terms of success in achieving either or both of the twin objectives Despite the variable effectiveness in achieving biodiversity conservation or human welfare benefits both protected areas and ICDP continue to be the main stays of conservation strategies in Uganda. These attempts have included:

• supporting technical inputs and training to farmers adjacent to the national parks
• income generating and alternative livelihood strategies and the provision of micro-credit
• establishing a community conservation department within the protected area authorities which meets regularly with the communities
• providing a trust-fund that supports the development of schools, clinics
• community projects and social infrastructure such as water points, clinic and school rehabilitation in the vicinity of protected areas
• allowing restricted access and use of certain forest products

The success of conservation is most often measured against progress in reducing habitat or species loss and not often in terms of the contribution of the protected area to poverty alleviation and local economic development. Improving the economic and social performance of conservation approaches is essential in terms of reconciling local human development needs with international demands for biodiversity conservation. Achieving improvements of conservation strategies in the social dimension requires objective evidence on their effects. This is particularly important in regard to creating policies to influence sustainable land uses, where there is strong competition for conservation lands to meet ever increasing local and national food and economic development needs.