Who governs biodiversity conservation?

Insights from the second DIIS seminar on local participation in protected area management

Biodiversity conservation in developing countries is often seen as the responsibility of the state, undertaken through the establishment of National Parks and other formally recognized protected areas. In recent years, there has furthermore been a trend towards involving local communities and other stakeholders in the management of such areas. But to what extent have these approaches actually worked, and are there other ways of governing protected areas that have been ignored so far? This was the subject of a DIIS seminar on October 28, attended by Danish and international practitioners and researchers working with poverty and environment in developing countries. The seminar was the second to focus on biodiversity conservation and protected areas, as part of a longer-running seminar series on poverty, environment and development.

Broadening our understanding of protected area governance
The seminar began with a talk by Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend, a prominent specialist in protected area governance within the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Borrini-Feyerabend placed particular emphasis on the need to open up for a broader range of approaches to how we manage and govern protected areas: Currently, much emphasis is placed on state-led approaches, and while this sometimes includes local communities in collaborative management arrangements, the overall initiative and authority tends to remain with the state.

There are, however, other ways of ensuring biodiversity conservation that have received much less attention in the discussion of community-based approaches. This includes in particular the indigenous protected areas that are managed by local communities on a daily basis with no external assistance: In many areas, communities have established “sacred forests” where no tree-cutting is allowed, while in other places, traditional “no-fishing” or “no-hunting” areas have ensured that fishery and wildlife resources are not overexploited. Until recently, such indigenously managed areas have been largely ignored by national decision makers and often have no legal national status. There is a need to change this and recognize such indigenous mechanisms as a legitimate form of protected area governance in itself.

Indigenously managed areas furthermore illustrate how protected area governance can and should exist in a variety of forms with different roles for the various stakeholders involved, depending on the local context. One important step in recognizing this has been the adoption of a revised set of principles for how protected areas are classified by the IUCN and its members, including different governance arrangements.

Group and plenary discussions
The presentation was followed by group and plenary discussions, among which the following issues were emphasized:

There is a need to understand better what roles the different stakeholders in biodiversity conservation can and should play in different types of protected areas – in principle and in practice. For instance, much debate has focused on whether there is a place for communities in state-led protected area management. But what (if any) is the role of the state in community-led protected area management?
The role of power and inequality remain crucial to address in protected area governance, regardless of what approach and model is taken. For instance, community-managed protected areas do not necessarily support the interests and livelihoods of all community members, and may even be against the needs of the poor. One option here is to approach protected area governance as an ongoing process of negotiation between different parties with different interests, and then ensure support to the weakest groups in this process.
Experiences from collaborative protected area governance highlights the importance of addressing not just organizational arrangements but also fundamental issues of rights – including local land rights and use rights to eg forests and wildlife resources. This is also one of the key lessons for the currently developing approaches to climate change mitigation, where developing countries will receive financial compensation for forest conservation: If this is done without taking existing local rights into consideration, there is a risk that such forest areas will repeat the conflicts experienced in protected area management.

Next seminar in the series
The next two seminars in the Poverty & Environment series will focus on Conflict and Cooperation in Water Governance. The first of these takes place on 25 November, 2008, 13.30-16.30 in the DIIS Main Auditorium. The overall programme for the seminar series is available here

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