Conserving Tropical Biodiversity amid Weak Institutions

Abstract

Tropical-biodiversity conservation has changed radically over the past generation. Until the early 1980s, conventional wisdom held that central governments should manage all conservation efforts in developing countries. Over the past 15 years or so, scholars, conservation practitioners, and policymakers have advocated an alternative approach based on bottom-up direction by local communities in response to real or perceived government malfeasance, misfeasance, or nonfeasance under the previous top-down model. Now that some of the pitfalls of community authority over conservation decisions have become apparent, the question is what, if any, best-bet strategies exist if the institutions of both government agencies and communities are ill equipped to handle the challenges of biodiversity conservation? (We follow Douglass North's [1990] definition of institutions as "the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, . . .the humanly derived constraints that shape human interaction[p. 3]." Thus, we distinguish between organizations and institutions. For example, a bank is an organization, but within it are many formal and informal rules—institutions—that guide individuals' behavior.) In this article, we address the broad question of where decisionmaking authority for tropical-biodiversity conservation should lie. In so doing, we advance four claims. First, the current fashion for community-based natural resource management overemphasizes the place of local communities in tropical-conservation efforts, much as the previous top-down model underemphasized communities' prospective role. Second, given the variability of economic and biophysical scales and institutional landscapes, the best management designs adapt to suit the biophysical and socioeconomic context and commonly involve distributing authority across multiple institutions rather than concentrating it in just one. Third, the greatest challenge to implementing such designs, indeed to achieving sustainable tropical-biodiversity conservation at all, is the weakness of existing institutions at all levels. Fourth, the necessary establishment or rehabilitation of institutions in tropical countries and of effective coordination among them will therefore require greater commitments of financial and technical assistance at both the international and national levels. Conventional wisdom holds that the fences-and-fines approach to protected-area management, which vests authority over natural resources in the hands of the central government, has not worked in low-income countries. Under this approach, the empowered government writes and enforces laws prohibiting or severely limiting human use of a resource. Historically, states have delegated little, if any, decisionmaking authority to local communities. Critics of this form of conservation management claim that governments in low-income countries have proved incapable of making or enforcing effective rules and have thereby failed to ensure biodiversity conservation in the tropics and subtropics while simultaneously contributing to the marginalization and poverty of rural communities excluded from parks (Ludwig et al. 1993, Brandon et al. 1998). These criticisms helped to spawn new strategies intended to empower local communities with decisionmaking authority over certain natural resources. Known generally under the label community-based natural resource management, these approaches seek to structure programs that capture locally the potential social benefits of sustainable resource use, with the idea that when biodiversity is more valuable to locals, they will do more to conserve it (Western and Wright 1994, Getz et al. 1999). Given the real possibility of win–win outcomes through an approach that gives more to the poor while trying to improve conservation indicators, community-based natural resource management understandably excites the interest and imagination of conservation groups and international development agencies worldwide. The success of community-based schemes so far has generally not matched the fanfare. While supporters tout a few well-known programs (e.g., the CAMPFIRE program in Zimbabwe), studies rarely incorporate rigorous data on conservation or poverty indicators. Indeed, empirical researchers confront nongovernmental organizations and foreign aid missions that exhibit little interest in allowing thorough investigation of "their" community-based conservation projects. Moreover, careful comparative analyses of community-based programs are rare. In the absence of serious research by independent analysts validating the effects of community-based efforts on conservation outcomes, any claimed success should be greeted with skepticism. Although careful students of community-based approaches do acknowledge that performance varies widely and depends on satisfying certain ecological and institutional conditions, discussions about community-based conservation often sidestep the deeper issues on which successful conservation efforts depend. In particular, implementation of community-based schemes too often proceeds from untested biological and socioeconomic assumptions, some of which are likely to be false in many, if not most, situations (Wells and Brandon 1992, Barrett and Arcese 1995, Brandon 2000). In particular, assumptions regarding ecological and social scales and community-level institutions are rarely explored deeply. (The subsequent sections of this article discuss these issues in turn.) If scholars, policymakers, and conservation practitioners continue to ignore these assumptions, an excessive focus on community-based conservation projects may lead to squandered opportunities for conservation and development and inflamed rather than alleviated tensions between poor tropical communities and conservationists. The core challenge of tropical conservation lies in reconciling private and social incentives, or what economists term the problem of externalities. (An externality arises when a person's decision imposes costs or confers benefits on someone other than the decisionmaker. A classic example is a consumption choice that involves disposal of wastes at no charge to the consumer but that produces pollution that affects others.) As Garrett Hardin (1968) pointed out, self-interested individuals making decisions in isolation from one another may have no incentive to take account of the common good of environmental conservation, leading to rational overexploitation of a natural resource for private gain. Hardin recommended either individualized or state control over land and other natural resources as the best means to internalize resource use externalities and thereby conserve the commons. (The term commons refers to a resource over which there do not exist private property rights. As a consequence, multiple persons have legitimate, overlapping claims, giving rise to externalities [Hardin 1968, Ostrom 1990].) In general, there is no single best means to resolve externality problems; the best approach depends heavily on the context. Much work on common-property management regimes focuses on resources for which solving the externality problem can greatly increase the welfare of a well-defined user group. Hardin's pastoralists could individually gain from collectively resisting their temptation to put more sheep on a common pasture, thereby degrading it. Rangeland grazing, maintenance of common irrigation infrastructure, and forest management are familiar examples of relatively circumscribed resources considered valuable by a local, identifiable population of users (Ostrom 1990, Bromley 1992). A voluminous analytical and empirical literature demonstrates that halting natural resource degradation in such settings probably requires that a strong role be played by communities (Baland and Platteau 1996). Thus, when the aim is the maintenance of ecosystem services valued primarily, if not exclusively, by local residents, communities can often be the foundation for effective conservation management (although tough institutional questions remain). Demands for in situ biodiversity conservation typically involve externalities that are both ecologically and socially broader than those of familiar commons problems. The necessary ecological scale typically far exceeds the space that any single community can ably manage. Migratory species exacerbate this problem. To take extreme cases that highlight the more general point, no single community could possibly manage whale or wildebeest conservation successfully. The social side of conservation externalities is equally problematic. Economists have devoted considerable energy over the past 2 decades to measuring the apparently substantial nonuse values associated with aesthetic or spiritual appreciation or with the desire to bequeath a robust environment to future generations or to retain the option to use the resource at some unspecified future date. Distant and better-off populations may highly value the conservation of carbon sinks in tropical rainforests, ecosystems with high rates of endemism that might contain genetic material important to medicine or agriculture, or charismatic megafauna that hold intrinsic appeal. The challenge is factoring outsiders' valuation of natural resources into local use decisions. The international Convention on Biological Diversity attempted to solve this problem by granting to host nations sovereign rights over the natural resources contained within their borders. But clear delineation of property rights only resolves externality problems when there are no transaction costs. The substantial transaction costs involved in bringing together, for example, a California conservationist and forest dwellers in the Central African Republic have proved a significant obstacle to the commercialization of conservation, as manifested in the relatively meager sums involved in ecotourism, bioprospecting, or marketing of nontimber forest products (Barrett and Lybbert 2000). The property rights clarification by the Convention on Biological Diversity helps ensure an equitable sharing of what revenues can be generated from commercial exploitation of biodiversity, but only a trivial portion of the external valuation of biodiversity can be captured in this manner (Simpson 1999). Official and nonprofit financial transfers do not begin to close the gap between total external, nonuse valuation, and commercial conservation–related flows of funds. For example, protected-area management costs almost 3% of the gross domestic product in Kenya, where 44% of the population of 26 million people fall below the national poverty line, with a per-capita annual income of only $160 among those 11.5 million persons (Norton-Griffiths and Southey 1995, Kenya Ministry of Planning and National Development 1998). It is both unrealistic and unjust to expect continued highly regressive financing of conservation efforts that have global benefit, and with respected organizations such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature suggesting that a minimum of 10% to 12% of each country's landmass be devoted to conservation, the expansion of community-based designs to the minimum necessary ecological scale runs headlong into formidable institutional challenges as to how to internalize the significant and dispersed externalities associated with the social scale of tropical-biodiversity conservation. The institutional landscape should be approached as carefully as the ecological if biodiversity conservation is to be successful. It makes no more sense to valorize the community as the best defender of conservation in all cases than it does to claim that national governments are always in the best position to protect nature. Discussion about which institutions are appropriate to govern biodiversity conservation must move beyond the false dichotomy of community versus central government. Instead, scholars and policymakers must focus first on how institutions work at multiple levels and explore which configurations appear best for different types of biodiversity conservation. Currently, however, the community-based approach is so popular as to be nearly unassailable, despite the fact that proponents of community-based management often fail to define or examine the communities they champion (Brechin et al. n.d.). Advocates tend to naively assume that communities encompass homogeneous groups of people with common goals and effective, evolutionarily stable mechanisms to achieve them (Brosious et al. 1998, Agrawal and Gibson 1999, Belsky 1999). However, anthropologists have long documented communities divided by gender, generation, and economics. Local communities contain individuals harboring different aspirations, leadership rivalries, and varying degrees and kinds of resource exploitation and overexploitation (Gusfield 1978, Redford 1992, Redford and Mansour 1998, Leach et al. 1999). Creating community-level institutions to conserve biodiversity can prove very difficult where economic, social, or technological conditions are highly variable (Ostrom 1990, Bromley 1992, Baland and Platteau 1999). To take but one example from the Peruvian Amazon, consumptive use of species is highly concentrated among just a few households or clans who stand to lose disproportionately from serious conservation measures, while the benefits of conservation are spread broadly, setting up a collective action problem in which the minority with significant interests prevails over the majority, who gain little per capita from forcing change (Olson 1965, Takasaki et al. 2001). Inventing social harmony where there is none will not only fail to ensure the success of community-based approaches, it may blind reformers to the need for understanding the array of institutions at the local level. The capacity of communities to self-govern their natural resources also cannot be assumed. Comparative work on the conditions under which communities can successfully manage their natural resources is infrequent, and biased case selection is the norm, in part because social scientists generally investigate institutions that persist rather than those that have failed and disappeared. Current research in this vein teaches us that communities both succeed and fail in conservation tasks. Some communities have strong institutions that have dealt well with change. Most are probably too weak to resist the temptation to overuse their resources or to overcome outsiders seeking to exploit or control the resources. Governments in many parts of the tropics also have poor conservation records. The politics of natural resources generally emphasize exploitation and redistribution, sometimes including the cooptation of purportedly community-based efforts (Bates 1981, Hill 1991, Gibson and Marks 1995, Dauvergne 1997, Gibson 1999). Governments can be quite effective in some sectors—raising an army, for instance, or funding urban development—but most central authorities lack clear incentives to protect biodiversity. Such conservation is costly, has a limited domestic constituency, and carries with it the opportunity cost of distributing a country's natural wealth to political allies. (The economic concept of opportunity cost refers to the value of the best option foregone. In the present context, there is often considerable political value in granting key supporters access to natural resources for their use and exploitation.) Even in the rare case when political incentives are somewhat aligned with a desire to conserve biodiversity, corrupt and inefficient bureaucracies can undermine conservation on the ground. Community-based methods work best when there are strong (formal or informal) local systems of social control to enforce access restrictions, while government-run systems fare well in the hands of a competent bureaucracy. In much of the tropics, however, weakness of both systems is the norm. Traditional management systems are often overwhelmed, eroded, or nonexistent at the community level. Commercial natural resource markets are commonly incomplete and inefficient, and many countries are generally fiscally and politically fragile. Thus, there is no uniformly preferable locus of conservation authority in tropical settings. While work regarding the effects of institutions on conservation outcomes is ongoing, some general agreement does exist on at least four core ideas. Successful conservation institutions, at whatever scale, must possess (1) the authority, ability, and willingness to restrict access and use; (2) the wherewithal to offer incentives to use resources sustainably (which in some cases may mean no use at all); (3) the technical capacity to ecological and social and the to the array of incentives and the rules of access so as to with in the of the resource or users et al. 1994, Ostrom et al. 1999). Conservation programs by the central governments of many tropical countries commonly have all of these Community-based conservation on the other too often emphasize only incentives while the other Although of conservation programs focus on incentives, this does not mean the incentive they offer are well and 1992, Barrett and Arcese an important the of by regarding the structure of incentives under by the for of For example, most community-based conservation program designs assume that poor households have income and do not opportunities beyond those if projects can households this need consumptive to natural conservation goals will be The more common however, is that with little and few between the incentives and the conservation more resource et al. 1998, Barrett and Arcese 1998). The of community-based also many projects to because they do not have the to use or the of incentives (Barrett and Arcese 1998, et al. 1998, and 1998). Conservation schemes based on also require flows to spread the While some conservation projects of external aid or high from which may (e.g., or CAMPFIRE few countries can on such financial resources. In the absence of significant external conservation efforts must use existing and prospective institutional governments communities are uniformly for tropical-biodiversity conservation, what are there for The key to that question lies in that biodiversity conservation a of and environmental technical of ecological and social among and enforcing rules within that or comparative in economic across tasks. A community might have very effective local rules for use of a forest and enforcing rules have no capacity to broader of the value of the to from who value those or to the population the central government, a local a of resource user or an international might have and Comparative in conservation is likely to be if based on those of ecological and social scales and the institutional landscape For example, Ostrom has a of for effective resource management by communities that these and common of effective parks have et al. 1998). is a need for and empirical to robust of institutional comparative in conservation and to the for conservation when should authority be in central when should it to local and when should there be some form of or management the of multiple In the some are from economic of These explore for and for and services that any of organizations could in 1991, and First, where are the to most effective should be given conservation authority because the costs of coordination between organizations will almost the potential from by The with which one of the foundation for the The of organizations should be through either coordination within many communities certain in for resources from a few governments within the of by the central coordination within a in a such as through or of communities a or of national governments an commons 1990, et al. 1999, Ostrom et al. 1999, 1999). is just the economic of comparative which states that of to Third, coordination can to among which must be can be and broad of other among organizations can lead to and outcomes that undermine popular for the core The case relatively greater of authority to relatively greater of authority prevails when Fourth, when coordination is costly, it can be preferable to authority in a single in of at necessary tasks. must be careful not to the gross benefits of coordination with the gross benefits coordination which can be high in tropical settings by political poor infrastructure, and are under with or institutional for conservation, for example, of ecosystems by communities and national and of forest user Such need to be carefully and in a comparative manner so that for conservation management can be In to the absence of a or empirical to conservation the other obstacle is the of effective institutions in the low-income and markets are the of these The conservation community not only to in to questions it also to in and effective conservation institutions and organizations the rules that institutions. or institutions are not so we do not mean to that this is a just that it is too it is to and of in which interests can be and worked through to the common among interest groups 1992, and 1998, Barrett and 1999). coordination may prove too difficult to and with the that of conservation authority in a single may be the best of a of the benefits of tropical-biodiversity conservation typically far beyond the communities of local resource users or the of their a significant of the costs of developing and the institutional capacity to internalize biodiversity externalities must fall on foreign and Tropical-biodiversity conservation cannot be on the The global of biodiversity must not authority and to either tropical states or communities but rather must work to improve the capacity of institutions to and enforce tropical conservation.