The Nature Conservancy - The Poverty Question

Diver
Spearfishing, Myanmar

Making the Case for Conservation

Can conservation help the poor?
A new report, sponsored by The Nature Conservancy, the Australian government, Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and WWF-Indonesia says yes — in certain circumstances.

The report, “Nature’s Investment Bank: How Marine Protected Areas Contribute to Poverty Reduction,” finds that well-managed marine protected areas can lead to improved fish catches, new jobs (mostly in tourism), stronger local governance, health benefits and empowerment for women.

The 44-page report, released in November, is based on a year-long study of four marine parks — one each in Fiji, Indonesia, the Philippines and the Solomon Islands — that included interviews with more than 1,100 local people. The sites were deliberately chosen because experts believed marine conservation efforts there had contributed to poverty reduction.

“I think of these marine protected areas [MPAs] as outliers,” explains Craig Leisher, lead author of the report and a senior policy adviser for the Conservancy. “They’re what is called positive deviance. They deviate from the norm. There have been lots of failures, but these are the ones that were successful.” He adds, “What we were aiming for in the study, in addition to showing categorically that the MPAs reduced poverty, was to highlight common characteristics — preconditions — that led these sites to be successful where many others failed.”

The researchers found that all four sites had community management of the MPA, a conducive legal environment and some kind of catalytic outside support, such as a nongovernmental organization providing financing and technical assistance. The Conservancy aims to replicate those qualities in future marine work.

— C.L.

Nature Conservancy: Can conservation groups really expect to measure poverty alleviation? Development agencies struggle to measure it, and conservation groups still have a hard time measuring their own conservation results.

Dickson: I agree absolutely. Nevertheless, faced with the real difficulties of measuring conservation impacts, we don’t throw up our hands and say we might as well pack up and go home. We try to do conservation and measure impacts. Similarly, I’m inclined to say that given the limited but real responsibility we have to poor people, we can’t use the difficulty in measuring our impacts on them as a reason to abdicate our responsibility to them altogether.

Kareiva: If the World Bank were coming in and doing a poverty-alleviation study, it would want to quantify the number of people lifted out of poverty. What the Conservancy does is ask the people who come into contact with our projects, How has your well-being changed?

Leisher: Really all you have to do is ask local people whether they perceive that the changes in conservation benefit their lives. Local people don’t always perceive things accurately, but I’ve argued that it doesn’t matter. All that really matters is that the local people perceive that they’re benefiting. That’s enough for them, and that should be enough for us. It’s not as difficult as it sounds. The natural scientists get really stuck on this because the causality has not been shown definitively and may not be reproducible.

People are unlikely to say life has gotten better if they’re still starving. But they may say life has gotten better [even] if they’re still well below $1 a day.

Redford: It’s not just about getting better; it’s to what point we or anyone else takes responsibility for how far “better” gets. That might be defined as optimal poverty. We don’t want to undertake getting people as wealthy as we are; we just don’t want them to be as poor as they are. That’s an unspoken and shameful fact that underlies conservation thinking about poverty alleviation. How much is enough, and who gets to decide, and who takes responsibility for achieving that?

Kareiva: A utopia of complete equity is unrealistic and unachievable. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do some good in the places where we work. It’s not that the Conservancy is in the business of poverty alleviation, but in some places where we work — it might only be 20 to 30 percent of the places we work — it makes sense.

Nature Conservancy: In some respects, the five of you don’t sound that far apart. What’s the big debate?

Redford: Conservation organizations are bailing out on their responsibility to the natural world and taking on poverty, not as a strategy but as an objective. I think that’s a dangerous move — particularly dangerous for the natural world, which has so few defenses. This is a dangerous infatuation on the part of conservation organizations because we know so little about the topic and because for at least 60 years there have been hundreds of billions [of dollars] devoted to this, and poverty is only increasing. As a result, if we take our meager funds and throw them in this much larger pool, not only will we probably make little difference because we’re innocent players, but we will also be reallocating those funds away from the conservation of nature.

Kakabadse N.: If conservation groups jump into this poverty agenda, we might and may be dropping out of our agenda some very important issues that have been left out of the development agenda over the past five years — issues that, in my perception, are much more meaningful in terms of addressing poverty than just the focus on the efforts to “improve the quality of life.” If you just deal with the poor — rather than the causes of poverty — you’re not doing anything more than cosmetic changes.

Dickson: There is a temptation to overstate what conservation groups can actually deliver in terms of poverty reduction. I doubt whether conservation, as traditionally conceived, can lift large numbers of people out of poverty. And if we can’t do that, then we should not be claiming that we can.

Leisher: We should never present this as akin to education or health programs. It’s not on par with those — conservation is always going to be a bit peripheral to development activities. But I’d argue that it ought to be part of it. Why can’t you have a project where you not only conserve biodiversity, but the local people [also] benefit? I’d argue that in a global population and ever-increasing global trade, it’s a fallacy to expect to be able to do traditional conservation projects, where you focus primarily on the biodiversity — to the exclusion of people. The future is you’ve got to have both.

Kakabadse N.: We [conservationists] come from a different starting point that has given us enough information to be certain that nature is the basis of the survival of humanity. We have to keep a very clear focus that what we need to do is to ensure the sustainability of the different ecosystems.

Kareiva: Conservation organizations are in the business of conservation. We’re not looking to go into the streets of Calcutta to work with dense populations of poor people. We are looking to save biological diversity, to protect areas of intact ecosystems and places of natural beauty. But once we begin to work in those places, we should not ignore the people who live there. We should avoid making their lives worse — we must not be in the business of poverty creation — and where possible, we should make their lives better. When we establish a protected area, we should not only collect data on the wildlife populations inside that protected area but also collect data on the impacts of that protected area on the livelihoods of indigenous peoples inside the park and people living around the park. We should do this both because it will make our conservation efforts more successful and because it’s the right thing to do.

Dickson: To me, the argument is about how we do conservation. My own view is that it is entirely appropriate that we will try to achieve our conservation goals in a way that at the very least will not have an impact on the poorest, most vulnerable people and at the most will benefit them.

1 2 3 4 Next»