Title
WCS Working Paper No. 26 - Poverty, development, and biodiversity conservation: Shooting in the dark?
Author(s)
Arun Agrawal, Kent Redford
Published
2006
Abstract
Poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation are basic social goals and part of the policy agenda of postcolonial states and international agencies. It is not surprising therefore that a large number of programmatic interventions have aimed to achieve the two goals at the same time. These interventions are funded by governments, conservation NGOs, bilateral and multilateral donor agencies, and private sector organizations. In this paper, we first examine the concep¬tual discussion around poverty and biodiversity, and then analyze three such interventions: community-based wildlife management, extractive reserves, and ecotourism. Our discussion shows that the literature on these programmatic interventions depends on relatively simplified understandings of poverty and biodiversity in stark contrast to the theoretical literature on the two concepts. Further, writings on programmatic interventions tend to operationalize poverty and biodiversity in distinct and quite different ways.
Our analysis focuses on peer-reviewed writings and finds that 34 of the 37 identified studies share two common features: a focus on processes and out¬comes in a single case and single time period, and a drastic simplification of the complex concepts of poverty and biodiversity. In addition, the cases we exam¬ine are relatively inattentive to the relationships between observed outcomes and the contextual features of programmatic interventions. As a result of these shared features, the mass of scholarly work on the subject does not permit sys¬tematic and context-sensitive generalizations about the conditions under which it may be possible to achieve poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation simultaneously. The vast sums channeled toward joint achievement of poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation are all the more remarkable in light of the basic lack of evidence on the extent to which these goals can jointly be reached. In conclusion, we discuss steps toward a rejuvenated research agenda for better knowledge and policies related to the links between poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation.
Keywords
governance, sustainable development, community-based conservation, environmental policy, decentralization, ecotourism, extractive reserves
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