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Wildlife& Poverty Study by DFID Livestock & Wildlife Advisory Group,
December 2002 80pp, unpriced. To obtain a hard or electronic
copy of the DFID report email Joanna Elliot at J-Elliott@difd.gov.uk
Reviewed by Steve Johnson
The study is essentially an internal study by a team
with the UK's Department for International Development
(DFID) to evaluate recent perspectives which have lead
to a decrease in DFID funding for wildlife related initiatives,
for which it was previously well known. The more recent
focus on poverty reduction approaches has apparently
seen that wildlife is not central to poverty reduction
when compared with other sectors such as health, education
and agriculture. The evaluation focuses on the ways
that wildlife is and can be used to satisfy the needs
of poor people.
In the study, DFID defines wildlife in the narrow sense
as mammals and other terrestrial vertebrates. It focuses
on exploring the potential for poverty reduction through
four themes: community based wildlife management, pro-poor
tourism, sustainable bushmeat conservation and pro-poor
conservation. The DFID team use three conceptual approaches
to the study: a sustainable livelihoods approach; disaggregating
the total economic value of wildlife; and, assessing
the role of wildlife as an international good.
A key finding is that much of the evidence relating
to the role that wildlife plays as a socio-economic
good is anecdotal, and therefore hard to use as a component
of livelihood strategies. Analysis of case studies shows
a lack of project specific socio-economic data for analysing
the impact of wildlife interventions on poverty and
assessing the scale of poverty-wildlife linkages. However,
the report shows that wildlife is used as a livelihood
safety net for significant numbers of people, where
bushmeat plays a crucial role in food security, even
if its importance to different groups is not well understood.
There is evidence that wildlife-poverty linkages reduce
vulnerability and that trading harvested wildlife products
is a significant source of income for the poor
With regard to pro-poor tourism, the authors consider
that it should receive more attention as a means of
contributing to the livelihoods of people in wildlife
rich areas. The positive spin-offs are seen to out-weigh
the negatives despite the vicissitudes of the global
tourism markets.
The bushmeat industry is rated as important in securing
the livelihoods of the rural poor, despite the largely
anecdotal nature of the data, stemming from the informal
and often unlawful nature of the activity. This hampers
the analysis of the real importance of this key factor
in the livelihood strategies of millions of people in
developing countries. An interesting observation is
the issue of developing countries continuing to invest
considerable resources in protected area systems. As
these systems are heavily subsidised by central government
and donor agencies, their aggregate impact on the plight
of the poor is not known. The study team suspect that
the net distribution of costs and benefits is highly
skewed, with the poor receiving a small share of the
benefits.
In conclusion the study suggests that community-based
and co-management approaches to wildlife management
can successfully help reduce poverty and improve livelihoods.
However, the ongoing high level of 'transaction costs'
for community-based resource management and the costs
of reaching the poor in sparsely populated areas are
likely to detract from the ability of wildlife initiatives
to attract donor attention. Nevertheless cost effectiveness
can be increased by careful management and leveraging
'multiplier' impacts.
Overall the study is a valuable contribution to our
understanding of the role that wildlife plays in livelihood
strategies of the marginalized rural poor. It confirms
many of the inherent suppositions that natural resource
management (NRM) practitioners have about the importance
of wildlife in socio-economic terms, and that have been
the fundamental tenets of community-based NRM over the
past decade. It indicates that wildlife should still
be considered in DFID's development strategies as a
means of addressing poverty issues, whilst also meeting
global needs to protect biodiversity as a public good.
"We conclude that wildlife-poverty linkages appear
to be under represented in poverty reduction strategies
(PSPs) and country strategy papers (CSPs) and that they
receive less attention in CSPs than in PSPs."
These findings are of great value to the NRM field,
in that they provide significant weight to sustainable
use arguments and the ongoing drive to maintain viable
levels of funding for conservation and natural resources
management initiatives in these times of reduced funding.
The OECD document - "Harnessing Markets for Biodiversity"
which can be found at: http://www1.oecd.org/publications/e-book/9703031E.PDF
is considered highly relevant.
Steve Johnson is Deputy Chair of the Southern Africa
Sustainable Use Specialist Group and a consultant at
Resource Dynamics Africa. He is based in Botswana: sjohnson it.bw
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