Some of the world's poorest countries now have a significant proportion of their territories designated as protected areas (Table 1). With growing international concern over poverty, protected areas inevitably are drawn into the discussion. This paper seeks to build understanding of the relationship between poverty and protected areas, as a way of helping governments to fulfil their national and international commitments on sustainable development.
Table 1.
Extent of Protected Areas in the World's Poorest Countries
Source: Countries ranked according to Purchasing Power Parity (World Bank Development Indicators 2003); % area protected from Chape et al. 2003.
The primary goal of most protected areas is to conserve biological diversity and provide ecosystem services, not to reduce poverty. However, examination of the linkages between the establishment and management of protected areas and issues of poverty in developing countries has become a practical and ethical necessity. Practical, because to survive, protected areas in the poorer nations must be seen as a land-use option that contributes as positively to sustainable development as other types of land use. And ethical, because human rights and aspirations need to be incorporated into national and global conservation strategies if social justice is to be realised.
An increasingly vocal proportion of the conservation community believes that allocating tracts of land, large and small, for biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of resources needs to be reconciled at the local level with the livelihoods, opportunities and empowerment of the poor. In other words, ‘protected areas should not exist as islands, divorced from the social, cultural and economic context in which they are located’ (Recommendation 5.29, Vth IUCN World Parks Congress). Furthermore, unless they become more relevant to countries' development strategies and the rights and needs of local people, many protected areas will come under increasing threat (Dudley et al. 1999; Barrow and Fabricius 2002).
In a broad sense, the inter-dependence of human welfare and the conservation of natural resources is now internationally recognised and enshrined in policy instruments such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Millennium Development Goals. But protected areas perhaps hold a uniquely contentious place in the conservation toolbox because they are viewed by some as having been established at the expense of local communities (the term includes all people living in and around protected areas) through displacement and dispossession, and regarded by others as responsible for perpetuating poverty by the continued denial of access to land and other resources (e.g., Colchester 1997; Ghimire & Pimbert 1997).
Elephants often raid crops, as these two are doing in Thailand. This crop raiding can often make the difference between hunger or food sufficiency.
Photo: ©J. A. McNeely
Objections to ‘fortress conservation’ have been voiced for several decades, leading to often rancorous debate between conservationists and social advocates. However, as discussed below, approaches to managing protected areas have been evolving for some time: globally, protected areas display a wide spectrum of management regimes ranging from those exclusive of human intervention to those allowing for sustainable exploitation of resources (IUCN 1994; Box 1). Moreover, approaches to the establishment and management of all categories of formal protected areas are evolving towards more socially responsible models that are inclusive of the aspirations and needs of local peoples (Phillips 2003), and the involvement of local communities in protected area management is being actively encouraged in many countries (e.g., Western and Wright 1994; Hulme and Murphree 2001).
The issue of how to deliver benefits from protected areas to local people has long been recognised as of great importance. For example, the fifth objective of the Bali Action Plan, one of the products of the 1982 Third World Parks Congress, was, “to promote the linkage between protected area management and sustainable development” (McNeely & Miller, 1984). The recommendations arising from the Bali Congress specifically recognised that people living in or near protected areas can support protected area management “if they feel they share appropriately in the benefits flowing from protected areas, are compensated appropriately for any lost rights, and are taken into account in planning and operations.” (Recommendation 5, Third World Parks Congress.)
Remote areas in mountainous countries have few economic options, but protected areas may give governments a means of injecting some forms of development into these areas.
Photo: ©J. A. McNeely
Ten years later, at the Fourth World Parks Congress, participants agreed in the Caracas Declaration that management of protected areas “must be carried out in a manner sensitive to the needs and concerns of local people”, and encouraged “communities, non-governmental organisations, and private sector institutions to participate actively in the establishment and management of national parks and protected areas” (McNeely, 1993). The Caracas Action Plan recognised priority concerns for local communities, and focused on people and protected areas, calling on governments to ensure that the planning process for protected areas is properly integrated with programmes for the sustainable development of local cultures and local economies, and that it uses and enhances local knowledge and decision-making mechanisms.
The need to find innovative and effective ways to position protected areas within sustainable development and poverty reduction strategies was highlighted at the Vth IUCN World Parks Congress held in Durban, South Africa, in September 2003. Participants at the Congress agreed numerous recommendations relevant to its theme ‘Benefits Beyond Boundaries’, including a recommendation (5.29, see Annex 1) on Poverty and Protected Areas.
After thirty years of acknowledging that people and protected areas need to be brought together, the conservation community is still washed by a current of acrimony and conflict over the impact of protected areas on rural peoples. This paper builds on the discussions held and case studies presented during the Vth IUCN World Parks Congress, as well as other examples drawn from recent literature. It also examines the role of protected areas in sustainable development strategies.
The widespread habitat destruction caused by cultivation of illicit crops in past decades has been alleviated by the establishment of protected areas, as in Thailand's Doi Inthanon National Park.
Photo: © Boonsong Lekagul