The Devil is in the (Bio)diversity: Private Sector “Engagement” and the Restructuring of Biodiversity Conservation

Abstract: Intensified relations between biodiversity conservation organizations and private‐sector actors are analyzed through a historical perspective that positions biodiversity conservation as an organized political project. Within this view the organizational dimensions of conservation exist as coordinated agreement and action among a variety of actors that take shape within radically asymmetrical power relations. This paper traces the privileged position of “business” in aligning concepts of sustainable development and ecological modernization within the emerging institutional context of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Global Environment Facility in ways that help to secure continued access to “nature as capital”, and create the institutional conditions to shape the work of conservation organizations. The contemporary emergence of business as a major actor in shaping contemporary biodiversity conservation is explained in part by the organizational characteristics of modernist conservation that subordinates it to larger societal and political projects such as neoliberal capitalism.

Beyond Biodiversity Conservation: Why Policy Needs Social Theory, Social Theory Needs Justice, and Justice Needs Policy

Conservation biologists are confronted with a number of basic questions in their quest to conserve the earth's biological resources. I have distilled these to the following: What are we trying to conserve? Where are the most important places in which to conserve it? How should we go about doing conservation? Who can best carry out conservation? Unfortunately, despite broad agreement on global conservation goals, working on the details of conservation has more often than not resulted in conflict within the conservation movement and divided conservationists to the detriment of what they are trying to accomplish. This conflict has often been to the advantage of those who wish to discredit the conservation movement. It is clear to me that there is a devil in the detail of biodiversity conservation. Answering the first question—What are we trying to conserve?—has probably been the easiest and has engendered the greatest amount of agreement. Biodiversity is the conservation target for governments, U.N. institutions, development agencies, and, of course, conservation organizations. It has become so omnipresent that there is an entire international convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, devoted to it. Yet even with broad agreement, biodiversity has been defined in many ways, many often vague and difficult to assess (Redford & Richter 1999). It is this vagueness that makes it difficult to determine the where, how, and who of biodiversity conservation. Attempting to identify the most important places in which to conserve biodiversity has led conservation biologists to develop strategic, science-based methodologies for establishing conservation priorities. These methodologies have generally addressed threat and species numbers ( Myers et al. 2000 ) and representation ( Olson & Dinerstein 1998 ). The disturbing side of developing such methodologies has been their marketing. We have seen the production of large picture books supporting megadiversity countries and hotspots, and we have seen posters of representational ecoregions with quotes from learned professionals touting the approach as the most important breakthrough in biodiversity conservation. These are the materials that are used to convince the donor ( and voting ) public and government and institutional funders that the scientific community is lined up in support of a specific method and, by inference, that it is better than the rest. This promotion of one method over another in the race for donor funding has been counterproductive. Luckily, the overlap between different methods of deciding where biodiversity should be conserved is extensive, and a number of organizations have adopted the geographical priorities of others, recognizing that the time and resources required to invent another method of establishing biodiversity conservation priorities would be a waste. The real problems start with the question of how should we go about doing conservation. Today, more than ever, we are seeing a plethora of conservation approaches, ranging from calls for more intensive protection ( Oates 1999; Terborgh et al. 2002 ) to greater community control over biodiversity conservation ( Western & Wright 1994; Hulme & Murphree 2001 ). In most cases these approaches are scientifically sound and have the common goal of conserving biological diversity. So far, so good. The problem is in the race for funding. Conservation organizations have tended to promote and market their own single solutions to biodiversity conservation problems at the expense of other approaches. Such a strategy is dangerous. It is unusual for such approaches to have undergone extensive field-testing. More often than not they are based on a set of theories about how we would like conservation to work, and the assumptions upon which these theories are based are rarely explicitly acknowledged. As we have seen over the years, one can shoot holes in almost any of the approaches tried to date. For example, protected areas are a core component of biodiversity conservation. Yet the method for establishing protected areas is fraught with difficulties. The process usually has involved removing those people living on the newly protected land, often without compensation and sometimes by force. In almost all cases, the result is a park surrounded by people who were excluded from the planning of the area, do not understand its purpose, derive little or no benefit from the money poured into its creation, and hence do not support its existence. As a result, local communities develop a lasting distrust of park authorities, in part because of the glaring lack of attention those authorities, supported by conservationists, have paid to the link between park ecology, the survival of wildlife, and the livelihood of displaced people. Out of the experience with protected areas came the development of integrated conservation and development projects, or ICDPs, through which it was believed that conservation would be more successful if the focus was on the welfare of communities in and around protected areas. Encouraged by the frantic quest for examples of sustainable development, ICDPs exploded in popularity, rapidly advancing from an untested idea attracting seed money to "best practice" for biodiversity conservation. The fact that conservation organizations were perhaps not suited to work in the social and economic realms was missed in all the excitement. Successes have been few and far between, and today an expanding barrage of mostly critical literature has fuelled concern among organizations implementing and financing ICDPs. The problems experienced with protected areas and ICDPs have resulted in conservation organizations developing a number of new approaches. These have grown out of the limitations of simple site-based project activities. These new, more complex approaches are attempting to "vertically integrate" site-based projects, surrounding land uses, and policy initiatives. A major challenge for these emerging landscape- or ecoregion-scale approaches will be to position other complementary conservation activities operating on a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Although these approaches are in their infancy, it already seems clear that their success will depend on the links between their constituent parts. In the first analysis of its kind, Redford and colleagues show in this issue of Conservation Biology that there is greater overlap between approaches than was perhaps generally believed. This argues for a broad range of biodiversity conservation tools being available and, more important, marketed by all organizations; simple, one-organization solutions will not work. Perhaps most critical, these efforts to conserve biodiversity cannot be made in isolation. They must involve effective partnerships to address the larger-scale problems that defy local solutions. This leads us to the last question: Who has the experience most appropriate to doing the conservation? Traditionally, conservation organizations have been reluctant to collaborate among themselves or with other professions. This go-it-alone mentality has often been the result of the perceived need for different groups to have their own easily identified portfolios of projects that can be marketed to prospective donors. This has resulted in endless claims and counterclaims over conservation approaches that are themselves a sort of territorial battle of knowledge and experience—a way to show the donors who does conservation right, and best. Such ownership has promoted a lack of collaboration and partnership. It has also fostered in organizations an unwillingness to try a range of approaches; they rely instead on those developed in-house and vigorously defend them from any competing method. It is clear, however, that as conservation approaches have become greater in scale and broader in context, conservation organizations do not have all the skills necessary to get the job done. McShane and Newby ( 2003) found that many of the constraints on biodiversity conservation involved issues with which conservationists tended to be inexperienced or uncomfortable. Conservation organizations must work harder at reaching out within their own profession and to other disciplines. Recently, collaboration and the development of partnerships has moved beyond rhetoric. Newly developed partnerships include the World Wildlife Fund ( WWF ) and CARE in East Africa and Conservation International, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and WWF in the Congo Basin. At the policy level, Conservation International and WWF have written the World Bank (with whom they both have a partnership ) expressing concern over proposed changes to the bank's operational policy for forests. By bringing together a number of different conservation organizations to look at many of the existing approaches to conserving biodiversity, Redford et al. ( 2003 ) have taken an important step in promoting such coordination and collaboration. These are all moves in the right direction, but collaboration must be maintained and nurtured. The issues of funding, fundraising, and project ownership must be part of the process. Biodiversity conservation's devil is the competition for donor funding. We all know that successful biodiversity conservation requires money. Unfortunately, in the pursuit of funds, conservation organizations find themselves making claims based on little more than theory. This marketing of conservation approaches has resulted in a dogmatic debate, outwardly over how best to conserve the world's biodiversity, which is a necessary question, but behind the scenes over how to get the funds before someone else does, which is not. Conservation organizations and the conservation biologists that work for them must look closely at themselves. We all know what we want to conserve, and we broadly agree on where we should be doing conservation. We have a number of approaches to help us do the work, and we know that we are not expert at everything that needs to be done. It is time for the conservation community to put organizational competition aside and work together for biodiversity conservation. There are a few good examples beginning, and we must be build on these.

<i>Integrative Conservation</i>: A new journal from the conservation frontline

The last five years in particular have seen increasing attention paid to biodiversity. This culminated at the Earth Summit last June with the completion of Agenda 21 and a major international Convention on Biological Diversity, a document signed by some 165 nations. Concurrent with the Convention negotiations was the development of a global fund for biodiversity conservation and other environmental priorities, the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The GEF is the largest fund to data put forward by the international community to address biodiversity loss, but, so far, it has failed to set adequate priorities for biodiversity conservation. It has also yet to recognize the full range of biodiversity values and uses and, in general, GEF projects have not taken advantage of existing non-governmental capacity for biodiversity conservation. 1993 is a critical year for the GEF, one in which the GEF can become a critical element of global efforts to conserve biodiversity or remain an important initialive that realized only a fraction of its potential.

Consideration of the ‘social dimensions’ is increasingly gaining currency within the conservation community. A growing body of literature indicates the importance and influence people and societal practices have on the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation. As such, conservationists and their organisations are being urged to embed more social components within their projects and programmes. However, there is self-reported lack of understanding, skills and confidence by many conservationists about the scope and nature of this social dimension within the biodiversity conservation context. This thesis aims to recast the social dimensions of conservation. Specifically, to explore its boundaries and how current understanding can be supplemented using a social practice theoretical lens. It aims to strengthen conceptual understanding and develop pathways of practical application within conservation organisations. This research was undertaken within the context of my own institution, the Zoological Society of London which is a UK zoo-based conservation organisation. The research was exploratory in nature due to the complexity and relatively undefined status of the social dimensions within biodiversity conservation. A mixed method approach was employed using key informant interviews and an online survey instrument to depict and describe practices within the social dimensions of conservation, and to gather perceptions about these practices. The thematic results offer both a recasting of the definition of the social dimensions of conservation and a conceptual model of the ‘ecologies of practices’ at the Zoological Society of London. These new knowledge resources provide a basis to foster further understanding of how people and their practices fit into the conservation landscape. They also offer recommendations for both the Zoological Society of London and the wider biodiversity conservation community, to build individual and organisational capacity towards the social dimensions through future research, training and organisational development.

Stratégies villageoises pour la gestion des paysages forestiers du Menabe Central, Madagascar

This thesis is concerned with the accountability of public international financial institutions to their constituencies at global and local geographic scales. It investigates the compliance of the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) with their own environmental and social policies as they relate to biodiversity protection. While the World Bank and the GEF pursue a global environmental agenda, their environmental and social policies commit the institutions to building bridges between the global and the local levels by requiring the participation of locally affected communities in decision-making. The study investigates the compliance with the policies in a specific geographic, political and economic space. Cameroon was chosen because both institutions consider the country's biodiversity to be of global significance and are financing operations which have indirect and direct impacts on its biodiversity. The operations investigated include World Bank macro-economic policy advice and traditional investments in infrastructure projects as well as a GEF project specifically designed to protect biodiversity. The central finding of this research is that the institutions comply only partially and in an uneven manner with their own mandatory policy guidelines. In order to mitigate the risk of studying the institutions' operations in only one country and to ascertain possible systemic patterns of institutional behaviour, the results of the case studies are contrasted with the institutions internal evaluation reports covering their overall portfolios. A political ecology approach to international financial institutions is used to examine the political factors behind the emergence of the institutions' biodiversity agenda and the implementation of their operational policies. Analytical tools from both political science and the areas of sociology and economics concerned with theory of organization are employed to further the understanding of the functioning of the global institutions. Finally, the thesis seeks to contribute to defining the characteristics of global institutions which can mediate between the global and local levels by creating spaces of negotiation in which a plurality of views are taken into account.

SUMMARYReducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) has emerged as a potentially important component of the global policy mix to mitigate climate change. Against a background of increasing engagement between private sector entities and conservation organizations, private sector investment has emerged in REDD+. Despite slow developments at the international scale, there continues to be private sector interest in REDD+ and continued voluntary investments in REDD+ projects and initiatives. In order to better understand possible models for private sector engagement in REDD+, this study analysed the motivation of private sector stakeholders to engage in REDD+, the perception of the potential of REDD+, the critical obstacles to making REDD+ functional and how actors perceive themselves as part of future REDD+ scenarios. Based on interviews and a workshop with private sector actors, this study found that few expect a regulatory market for REDD+ to emerge and that credits from the voluntary market have to be tailored to specific needs. As a carbon offset, REDD+ provides insufficient motivation for investment, particularly if cheaper alternatives exist. Co-benefits such as biodiversity conservation and community development are more important when traditional corporate social responsibility motivations play a role. Project scale remains important not only for the fact that smaller projects are viewed as offering more visible benefits to stakeholders but also as a means of having more control over risks on the ground, posing a challenge for the design of jurisdictional REDD+. Moving towards supply chains that are free from deforestation offers an opportunity to tackle commodity-driven deforestation. While questions remain about how such an approach might be integrated into REDD+, it could help address a perceived gap between private sector understanding of the values of REDD+ and the risks associated with these values not arising – termed here as a ‘missing middle’.

Protected areas: a prism for a changing world

This chapter discusses the role of the financial mechanism under the Protocol, and the role of other forms of financial solidarity, in turn. The international governance of the financial mechanism under the Nagoya Protocol includes a key role not only for the Protocol's governing body, but also for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Conference of the Parties (COP). In voluntarily providing financial resources through other channels, developed countries are to take into account the needs of developing countries, as identified in their capacity need self-assessments, and may choose between bilateral, regional and multilateral channels. Intergovernmental discussions preparing for the entry into force of the Protocol have already identified the need to take a strategic approach to maximize opportunities for financial support as a complement to the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Governments, organizations, private sector and financial institutions are encouraged to provide financial resources for the implementation of the Protocol.Keywords: Conference of the Parties (COP); Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD); financial mechanism; financial resources; Global Environment Facility (GEF); Nagoya Protocol

Biodiversity conservation in national parks has not shown an expected result. Biological natural resources degradation is still on going and its almost entirely due to human activities. Some researchers have indicated that socio-economic aspect is significantly related with the success of conservation. However, the researches have not yet shown in detail, which variabels were related with the succes conservation variables and how significant were the relations. This research was intended to identify the socio-economic variable(s) that would successfully determine biodiversity conservation in national park. The research was conducted in Gunung Halimun Salak Nasional Park, Ujung Kulon National Park, and Gunung Ciremai National Park from July to October 2015 using direct observation, literature study, and interview methods involving 150 respondents, selected based on random sampling in several resorts in the three national parks. Data were analyzed using pearson correlation tests using SPSS PSAW statistic 18. The achievement of biodiversity conservation was determined by the decrease in the number of individual species, increase in the rate of encroachment, increase of illegal natural resource utilization, increase violation of regulation, positive interaction, and biodiversity utilization. Results showed that variables leading to the succesful biodiversity conservation were: 1) determinant variable to decrease in the number of species is religion &amp; customary system; 2) determinant variables to increase in encroachment rate is age and distance; 3) determinant variable to increase illegal natural resource utilization is land ownership; 4) determinant variable to increase violation of regulation is family dependant; 5) determinant variables to positive interaction is age and distance; 6) determinant variable to biodiversity utilization is education.<br />Keywords: biodiversity conservation, determinant variables, national park, socio-economic variables

Integrated spatial planning for biodiversity conservation and food production

Ecological impact of phytoinvasions in Ukraine

Wetlands are ecosystems in which water covers the land. They provide economical, ecological, societal and recreational benefits to humans. Although complete documentation is lacking, wetlands make a significant part of Ethiopia covering an area of 13,700 km2. Wetlands with a great potential for ecotourism development in the country include the rift valley lakes, the floodplains in Gambella, the Awash River Gorge with spectacular waterfalls, the Lake Tana and the Lake Ashenge, the Wenchi Crater Lake and the Wetlands in Sheko district are among others. Similarly, the Wetlands of Ethiopia are home to various aquatic biodiversity. Some of the biodiversity potential areas are the Cheffa Wetland and Lake Tana basin in the North, the rift valley lakes namely, Lake Zeway, Abaya and Chamo, and the Baro River and the Dabus Wetland in the Western Ethiopia. However, the wetlands in the country are impacted by a combination of social, economic, development related and climatic factors that lead to their destruction. Correspondingly, the wetlands holding a considerable biodiversity potential in the country lack adequate management. To address the challenges and enhance the wetland’s role in ecotourism and biodiversity, a sustainable form of wetland resource use should be developed. As a result, integrating wetlands with ecotourism and developing as livelihood option for local communities is important for sustainable conservation of wetlands. Awareness rising, empowering stakeholders involved in wetland resource conservation, enhancing stakeholders’ participation, undertaking the restoration of degraded wetlands and promoting scientific studies on wetlands of the country are crucial to conserve wetlands and at the same time promote their ecotourism and biodiversity importance. Moreover, implementing the integrated wetland resource management approach and addressing policy, management and coordination issues that arise on wetland resource conservation aids to promote the significance of wetlands in ecotourism and biodiversity conservation in Ethiopia. Key words: Wetlands, ecotourism, biodiversity conservation, implication, Ethiopia.