Targeting conservation–development initiatives in tropical forests: insights from analyses of rain forest use and economic reliance among Amazonian peasants

Abstract

An important barrier to successful implementation of conservation–development initiatives by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is the problem of effective targeting (i.e., “with whom specifically should we work and why?”). In this paper, we demonstrate how two concepts—resource draw and economic reliance—provide the analytical means to improve targeting in tropical rain forests where protected areas often cover large, remote areas of forest with high biological diversity, and local populations are typically poor and settlements dispersed. Combining an “asset-based” conceptual approach to rural livelihoods and data from surveys conducted with forest peasant in the Pacaya–Samiria National Reserve area of Peru ( n=263 households, eight villages), this study examines the empirical relations between the volume of extraction (draw) and the share of income (reliance) contributed by fishing, hunting, and resource extraction, as well as critical biological resources (moriche palm fruit, Mauritia flexuosa; paiche, Arapaima gigas; aquarium fish). Results indicate that resource draw can be highly concentrated among just a few households in selected villages, that economic reliance may or may not be associated with resource draw, and that the predictors of resource draw and reliance, such as land poverty, labour access, household lifecycle, or past experience, vary markedly across resource use activities. As such, our findings explicate heterogeneity in peasant forest resource use—pointing to the critical importance of differential household asset holdings—and challenge the prevailing assumption that asset poor households are the primary extractors of critical biological resources. Attention to differential patterns of resource use is crucial in the design of the next generation of conservation–development initiatives for tropical forests and rapid rural appraisal instruments can be readily refined to provide much needed information on resource draw and economic reliance.