Assessing Community-Based Wildlife Conservation Programs with the Gross National Happiness Framework

Abstract

Many wildlife conservation projects aim to create sustainable and effective solutions by incorporating human and community well-being into their projects. While a few of these projects are incorporating a community well-being approach based on non-economic factors such as health, education, culture, community vitality, and good governance, most define well-being in purely economic terms. Often, the goal is equitable sharing of the economic value of wildlife as the primary incentive for communities to conserve wildlife. However, these projects have had variable results due to a variety of factors. The question of how conservation projects can reliably and consistently improve both community well-being and wildlife outcomes has yet to be answered. The authors posit that existing indices that measure well-being such as the government of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) index, can provide a framework to systematically identify well-being factors through a community-driven method. In this article, nine sustainable and successful community-based wildlife conservation projects are assessed to determine what aspects of well-being (as described by the nine domains of Bhutan’s GNH framework) were considered in project planning and implementation. The results indicate that each project did incorporate a variety of aspects of human well-being into planning and implementation, which likely contributed to their success. Future research recommendations include the development and testing of a community-based well-being instrument to analyze and guide community-based wildlife conservation programs.