Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
have continued to protect National Parks, at great risk to their lives. For example,
during the Rwandan genocide, the Virunga National Park was protected by local
rangers after the evacuation of expatriate staff, ensuring the safety of the mountain
gorilla population (Hart and Hart 2003).
This means enabling people to stop over-using natural resources by giving them
another way to make their living (also called distractions—see the typology in
Table 6.1). The steps involved are:
Investigate
alternatives
Alter
attractiveness
Users shift
activities
The
underlying philosophy
is that individuals have the moral right to choose to
make their livelihoods as they wish, within local societal norms. If wider society
wishes them to change their behaviour, then a viable alternative activity must be
made available to them. The move away from natural resource use should be
voluntary and costless
(ideally beneficial) to the users.
The
scope
of this approach is most usually small-scale conservation at the village
level. Often external NGOs initiate the management activity. Partly this is because
they have no power to institute and enforce regulations, and so offering alternative
livelihoods and public awareness are the only ways in which they can realistically
intervene. The approach is very popular nowadays, because it avoids some of the
moral issues that are inherent in imposing and enforcing regulations on people
who are bearing the cost of living with wildlife for the benefit of a wider (usually
Western) society. By offering alternative livelihoods, NGOs hope to ensure that
conservation has
popular support
, and is seen as going hand-in-hand with devel-
opment (Box 6.5). Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs or
ICADs) are seen as the ethical, effective and people-orientated way forward for
conservation, and often have the provision of alternatives at their heart. There has
been criticism of the ICDP approach from both the development (e.g. Sekhran
1996) and conservation sides (Oates 1999), and they are certainly not an easy
option. As an example of the issues that ICDPs must struggle to overcome, Vrije
Universiteit's (2001) evaluation of the Mount Elgon ICDP highlighted adminis-
trative problems which delayed the receipt of equipment by project officers on the
ground; local people's attitudes of dependency due to previous development
initiatives in the area; progressive reduction of commitment to the project by exter-
nal donors; inflexible planning; and flawed project design. Although ICDPs are
usually associated with small-scale conservation in areas where local people's
activities are perceived to be the main threat to biodiversity, distraction in the broader
sense could also include finding alternative products for natural resources such as
timber or plant oils, or consumers switching away from traditional medicines
towards synthetic alternatives.
