Choosing management approaches - Conservation and Sustainable Use - page 201

hand, aim to shift people's focus away from resource harvesting towards other, less
damaging activities. Top-down interventions usually aim to change the behaviour
of overarching institutions at the large scale (for example, by influencing govern-
ment policy) and are usually initiatives from outside. Bottom-up interventions, on
the other hand, are in theory ideas that come from the local people themselves, and
can then be facilitated by outsiders. Regulation/Persuasion captures whether the
intervention aims to change rules or to encourage people to comply voluntarily,
while cause/symptom concerns whether the intervention is addressing the under-
lying issues causing unsustainable resource use, or whether it is focussed instead on
controlling the resource use without fixing the underlying issues. Long-term sus-
tainability requires that the causes of unsustainable use are addressed, although in
the short run addressing the symptoms may be the only way to ensure species are
not extirpated.
One management intervention might be supporting a local hunting coopera-
tive in a village to set and manage sustainable hunting quotas (Box 6.3). The typ-
ology would then be as in Table 6.2. Another example is the listing of big-leaf
mahogany on Appendix 2 of CITES, which requires that national management
authorities only import or export the species after issuing a licence (Table 6.2;
Blundell 2004). In order to issue the licence they need to make a 'non-detriment'
finding that the sale of this shipment will not have a detrimental effect on the
survival of the species in the wild.
Bushmeat hunting is one of the more intractable problems for policy-makers
because it is multi-species, widely practised and informal, thus being extremely
hard to govern (Milner-Gulland et al . 2003). Table 6.3 gives some examples of the
types of policies that have been suggested to tackle unsustainable bushmeat hunt-
ing, with their pros and cons. These interventions address a range of components
of the typology, and the table demonstrates how this way of thinking can lead to a
more focussed assessment of management options.
6.3 How can we intervene?
Once we decide to intervene, there are a range of potential management
approaches (Figure 6.3). In this section we look in more detail at the types of man-
agement intervention that target the people living with resources, and take a broad
look at their underlying philosophy, strengths and weaknesses.
Assuming that conservation intervention only occurs when there is some cur-
rent or potential issue of concern, people's behaviour has to be altered. However,
there are two ways of doing this—either directly by controlling their resource use,
or indirectly by changing their attitudes and opportunities so that they themselves
change their use. If we intervene directly to control people's use of a resource, this
must involve the setting and enforcing of rules. So we start by considering the
issues surrounding rule-setting. Rules can either regulate use to a sustainable level,
or prohibit use entirely. If use can be made financially, socially and ecologically