Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
funded by development agencies shows how their focus on poverty allevia-
tion, while providing valuable funds, can force the ICDP to expend nearly
all its ef ort on development with only weak and insui cient components
targeting the protection of natural resource values. Part of the current
criticism that ICDPs are trying to achieve conservation using indirect
mechanisms comes from this mismatch of agendas - on the one hand the
funding agency wants to see conservation by development, whereas the
conservation agency wants to see conservation gain and will try to design
development interventions to achieve this goal. However, there need not
always be this dichotomy, and there are many situations where conserva-
tion and development agendas directly overlap, especially in poor rural
communities in Africa.
Implementation constraints
Our two example ICDPs, and especially the Uluguru Mountains ICDP
managed by CARE have been dogged by implementation constraints.
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This has af ected the ei ciency of the projects, and has resulted in some
signii cant time delays and failures to achieve some of the planned targets.
This issue has already been explored in some detail in the review by Wells
and McShane (2004) where they note that even a well-designed project
can fail because of problems with its implementation strategy - including
problems of obtaining suitable staf , and so on.
Learning components
One general observation is that ICDPs would benei t from a more scien-
tii c approach, including designing interventions to test hypotheses about
dif erent kinds of interventions. The learning component of many ICDPs
is generally small and often given a low priority. However, this means that
ICDPs will continue to fail to show what they have achieved, or indicate
what interventions give the best value for money.
Local people can collect much of the data required to monitor conser-
vation impact. This can both simplify the methods, allow local under-
standing of what is required and what the project is trying to achieve, and
also keep costs low (Danielsen et al., 2001). However, as with many other
elements of ICDPs, the data collected by local investigators will need peri-
odic i eld validation to ensure that standards are maintained. These locally
based methods of monitoring can tell a lot about resource use and man-
agement actions, but they might not satisfy the requirements of conserva-
tion biologists interested in the number of particular species or details of
ecological services. In these cases more professionally based monitoring
may be required, involving trained scientists.
In addition to measuring biological and threat-related measures within
