Regulatory Compliance of Community-Based Conservation Organizations: Empirical Evidence from Annapurna Conservation Area, Nepal

Nabin Baral,Joel T Heinen

doi:10.3390/su12229420

Nabin Baral, Joel T Heinen

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12229420

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Abstract

Community-based conservation in the developing world generally puts more emphasis on voluntary commitments and compliance rather than enforcement of formal laws and regulations for the governance of protected areas. However, as with other forms of organizational management, once institutions are established, they are required to comply with all relevant, legally binding regulations. Furthermore, it is broadly assumed that compliance with established regulations is critical for good governance. In this paper, we review these matters through an empirical study of Conservation Area Management Committees’ degree of compliance with regulations under Nepalese law, within the Annapurna Conservation Area—one of the best-known community-based protected areas worldwide—based on quantitative content analysis of the committees’ meeting minutes from 2008 to 2012. According to the established rules, two to four women and one to five minorities serve as committee members in each instance. On average, fewer members than expected attended meetings, and the number of decisions made per meeting showed a curvilinear relationship with the number of members present as well as their demographic diversity. Of the 13 committees selected for study, only two met the legal mandate of holding six regular meetings annually within two-month intervals. In all the other cases, non-compliance was noted for one to all five years of the committees’ terms. In general, compliance declined over the five-year terms, and some committees were significantly less-compliant than others. Although enforceable decisions were made within both compliant and non-compliant committees, several problems of non-compliance were identified that may affect conservation outcomes. We suggest several possible reasons for non-compliance and argue that these may be symptoms of institutional weaknesses. Organizations that fail to meet their commitments risk liability and may also lose the formal legal authority to govern. Regular monitoring is recommended to address compliance issues.

Highlights

Since compliance may vary over time and space, we explore this issue with regard to how many members are present and the number of decisions made per meeting using data from a sample of conservation area management committees (CAMCs) over five years
We did fieldwork from 25 August to 31 October 2013, and in October 2016, by collecting information from 13 of the 57 CAMCs (Supplementary Materials) within Annapurna Conservation Area (ACA)’s Ghandruk and Lwang Unit Conservation Offices. They were chosen because: (1) ACA began in this region, so those CAMCs had more experience than others; (2) they were formed at different times, so temporal variability could be explored; (3) they had complete data available; and (4) they were more resilient than others during the Maoist insurgency—the decade-long civil war that claimed more than 17,000 human lives and changed the political system from a constitutional monarchy to a federal republic in Nepal, a context crucial to understanding the findings [62,63]
The CAMC approach to community-based conservation (CBC) has been considered successful in ACA and other conservations areas (CAs) in Nepal

Summary

Introduction

It is widely recognized that good governance of protected areas (PAs) is crucial for the conservation of biodiversity [4,5]. In an effort to render conservation programs more effective, efficient and inclusive, and to reduce park-people conflicts common under older “fences and fines” conservation models [6], policies empowering local communities and soliciting their participation in natural resource governance have been implemented in many places; compliance issues often remain [7,8]. Implemented, community-based conservation (CBC) models for its forests and PAs in recent decades (below). Buffer zones and conservations areas (CAs) together account for about 60% of the protected area estate [9] and are governed by CBC programs involving locally elected representatives

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