Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
presence of the alternative means that people spend less time harvesting the
resource. But in the long term, a lack of linkage means that other threats may not
be averted, or the original threat may resurface when the alternative becomes
less attractive. For example, if villagers are diverted into smallstock raising, they
may no longer have any interest in preserving forested areas for their bushmeat
content, increasing the likelihood that these areas will be logged or converted for
agriculture. This concern for long-term sustainability is why it is important to
link alternative livelihoods explicitly to conservation within an ICDP.
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By definition the alternatives are initially less attractive than the unsustainable
resource use, otherwise people would already be doing them. There is thus a need
to identify the
reasons why
people are not already diversifying away from natural
resources. If there is a simple barrier such as lack of access to microcredit, training
or suitable markets then external intervention can act to lift it. It might be that a
single capital injection would lead to sustained viability of alternatives (such as
building ecotourist lodges and paying for the initial publicity). More usually,
analysis suggests that alternatives need to be permanently subsidised in order to
make them attractive to people. This then increases incomes, potentially causing
more pressure on resources, and may lead to inwards migration to the area.
Unless the underlying causes of over-dependence on a declining natural resource
base are identified and addressed, alternative livelihoods will only ever be a
stop-gap measure that fails once support is removed.
The
framework for analysis
works at two scales. Household economics enables us
to analyse how individual households allocate their labour between competing
activities (e.g. Barrett and Arcese 1998). Institutional analysis looks at how insti-
tutions can best be structured to ensure that the incentives for good management
are correct (Anderies
et al
. 2004). The
sustainable livelihoods approach
, which is
widely used in development, is a qualitative approach that identifies the aspects of
people's livelihoods that are vulnerable to stresses (DFID 2001). It is useful as a
framework for baseline studies, but has less to say about how best to structure
interventions such as ICDPs.
The
issues
inherent in this approach are at the opposite extreme to those raised by
the sticks approach of preventing use or setting rules. When is it appropriate to pro-
vide alternatives to people who are causing costs to wider society by damaging the
public benefit of biodiversity? How do we define the user group which is entitled to
these alternative benefits? For example, when does a settler or itinerant hunter
become a 'local' person? The ethics of development intervention demand that no
one should be disadvantaged by your actions (see Chapter 3), but the control of
resource use for the benefit of wider society always has costs; the question then
becomes who should bear these costs (Norton-Griffiths and Southey 1995). A good
example of the context-dependence of ethical viewpoints about who is considered
to have the right to use resources is
bushmeat hunting
. Hunting bushmeat for
commercial sale is seen by some in the West as undesirable, while those who use it for
subsistence are seen to have rights that need defending (for example, the Bushmeat
