Integrated Conservation And Development Projects Research Articles

Why Target Communities Remain Subjects Rather than Partners of Development Agencies in Integrated Conservation and Development Projects in Latin America

AbstractDespite repeated calls for locally anchored Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs), the decision-making authority of targeted Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) remains limited. This paper is grounded on an Institutional Logics perspective to examine the role of major development agencies—the World Bank (WB), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the German Development Bank (KfW)—in perpetuating this challenge. Interviews with project managers in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region reveal complex internal hierarchies, risk-focus, high performance pressure, a “better than nothing” rationale, and a hands-off approach to community participation. We argue that these tendencies are rooted in organisational structure and individual mentalities that constitute a project management logic, which in turn raises concerns about the ability and willingness of development agencies to foster local project ownership of ICDPs. The paper calls for the international donor community to reflect on and transform such management logic, and to allocate more substantial decision-making power and resources to local representatives.

Can REDD+ succeed? Occurrence and influence of various combinations of interventions in subnational initiatives

The institutional predecessor of REDD+ is the integrated conservation and development project (ICDP) that combines restrictions on forest access and conversion (negative interventions) withnon-conditionaldirect benefits (positive interventions) to compensate local stakeholders for income losses from those restrictions. The idea of REDD+ was to improve on the ICDP model with a different kind of positive intervention:conditional direct benefits, often known as payments for environmental services or PES. How has this idea played out in reality? In a sample of 17 (out of 377) active REDD+ initiatives across the global South, we identified the combinations of interventions actually deployed and elicited household assessments of how those interventions affected their land use decisions with respect to forests. We found that 71 % of the households in our sample had participated in some number of forest interventions ranging from one to ten. About a quarter of those households were offered conditional direct benefits, most often in combination with non-conditional direct benefits. Nearly half of the households had received only non-conditional direct benefits. Many of those households were also subject to restrictions of various kinds. Thus, rather than abandoning the well-established ICDP approach in favor of the conditional incentives that conceptually define REDD+, most initiative proponents opted to deploy multiple interventions. Their approach is validated by our finding that the likelihood a household reports that the interventions caused them to adopt land use changes that could be classified as reducing carbon emissions is positively and significantly related to the number of interventions that they experienced, but not affected by whether any of those interventions are conditional. We also find that restrictions play an important role: 37 % of the households were subject to at least one negative intervention, and those households were significantly more likely to report that the interventions had induced land use changes that could be classified as reducing carbon emissions.

Still viable despite criticism: complexities of evaluating the performance of ICDPs

Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) are widely used in countries of the Global South to link conservation with rural socio-economic advances. Notwithstanding, ICDPs face much criticism. A dominant complaint is that ICDPs fail to provide evidence concerning the very purpose they were established for, namely, to erase poverty and institutional capacity barriers, which invariably lead to the reduction of adverse human impacts on nature. Here, I explore the challenges that ICDPs face in seeking to provide empirical proof for positive long-term effects at the local level. I highlight certain specific difficulties in monitoring and evaluating ICDPs, and also examine the role that performance evaluation may play for ICDPs as instruments leading to transformative change. Besides the fact that a diverse set of stakeholders, through negotiations of power, constantly challenge the implementation of ICDPs, I argue that the goals and values of donor parties ultimately drive the overall evaluation and long-term sustainability of ICDPs and will govern transformative change. Future research is needed to explore this relationship more fully.

Beyond conservation: Assessing broader development outcomes of protected areas in Nepal

Protected Areas (PAs) are set aside for biodiversity conservation but at the same time they are recognized for their role in supporting development goals. However, the benefits provided by PAs also come with costs to local people. Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) are a PA management approach that aim to maximize local benefits through enhancing conservation and development outcomes, while also reducing costs. We implemented a household level survey in two PAs in Nepal managed using an ICDP approach to assess local people's perceived benefits and costs and determine if this approach was achieving its intended outcomes. Since both PAs are popular nature-based tourism (NBT) destinations, respondents were asked questions specific to this activity and others more general to the PA. The coded qualitative responses revealed ten categories of benefits and twelve categories of costs. Most respondents perceived extraction benefits from PAs, and when asked to reflect specifically on NBT, they mostly identified economic benefits. Crop and livestock loss was the main perceived costs from PAs, whereas sociocultural costs were the main costs from NBT. Chi square tests showed that proximity to the PA office and residency status had the most significant differences in perceptions of benefits and costs from both PAs and NBT. People perceived very few benefits related to participation, cost mitigation, and conservation, which does not match the intended outcomes of ICDPs. Although there may be practical implications for engaging distant communities in management, this may help to enhance conservation and development outcomes from PAs.

How are institutions included in Integrated Conservation and Development Projects? Developing and testing a diagnostic approach on the World Bank’s Forest and Community project in Salta, Argentina

The opportunities and challenges of ensuring participation and success of Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) have been fairly studied. However, it is not often well-established which institutional mechanisms explain the failure in meeting participatory and project goals. To fill this gap, we develop a telecoupling-inspired diagnostic approach to assess the level of institutional distance and opportunity for collective decision-making in ICDPs by looking at project information flows, project asset flows, and rules and regulation flows between project actors. We construct three management archetypes based on the direction and directness of such flows: decoupled management, telecoupled management and collaborative management. The archetypes are applied to a case study of a World Bank-financed ICDP in Argentina, drawing on qualitative data collected from individual interviews with project actors. Our findings challenge the notion that a project becomes participatory if the project design provides guidelines for participatory implementation. We find that our diagnostic approach helps to concretize the call for inclusion of local project actors across the project cycle, which is needed to make projects collaborative, relevant, and socially just. Finally, we advocate future project assessments to build on this approach and map the practical institutional relationships between project actors to provide transparency on the de facto level of project collaboration. This article is relevant for both academics and practitioners designing and implementing conservation and development projects.

Exploring the effectiveness and resilience of integrated conservation and development projects to global disruptions: a comparative case study in the Cook Islands and Tonga

Remote Coastal Communities (RCC) are at the forefront of humanitarian and climatic change. Faced with the stressors of sustaining growing populations in the context of natural resource degradation, RCC must also adapt to globalisation and the subsequent economic linkage and flows of resources and people. In an attempt to support the social-ecological wellbeing of marginalised communities, Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) were introduced in the late 1980s. Today, ICDPs, such as eco-tourism projects, are used to reduce reliance on natural resources, generate economic benefits, and increase local support for conservation. However, the effectiveness of ICDPs in meeting either conservation or development goals has long been debated. Furthermore, limited studies have explored the effectiveness and resilience of ICDPs to global disruptions. Based on the existing literature, it is unclear how major disruptions will impact RCCs in a globalised world and if ICDPs can effectively support the social-ecological wellbeing of host communities during and after global disruptions. This presentation will reveal preliminary findings from research in the Cook Islands and Tonga on the resilience and effectiveness of ICDPs in supporting the social-ecological wellbeing of two coastal communities in the wake of the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

INTEGRATED NATURAL RESOURCE AND CONSERVATION DEVELOPMENT PROJECT: A REVIEW OF SUCCESS FACTORS FROM A SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE

AbstractIntegrated Natural Resource and Conservation Development (INRCD) Projects is an umbrella term for a variety of Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs), a concept first introduced by the World Wide Fund for Nature in the mid 1980s to target practice-oriented efforts in developing countries; and Integrated Natural Resource Management (INRM) research and development projects introduced as adaptive management for fisheries, wildlife, forest, and rangeland to target analysis-oriented efforts in developing and developed countries. Both efforts seek to balance economic development and natural resource conservation. This paper reviews the literature over the past four decades in an attempt to determine which planning and execution methods lead to greater success. A thematic analysis revealed three broad areas of importance: community inclusion and income diversification, inadequate training and management, and inability to properly quantify data. A systems design optimization approach for such projects is advocated to support project decision making in these areas of importance.

Increasing livestock grazing, the unintended consequence of community development funding on giant panda habitat

Indirect approaches such as Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDP) aspire to combat biodiversity loss. Unfortunately, with increasing cases of failure, the link between poverty alleviation and conservation is now controversial. We revisited the earliest ICDP project in China after 12 years. The project area experienced increasing free-ranging livestock after 2004, which degraded the panda habitat. We collected livestock and socio-economic data using constructed household surveys and applied logit and zero-truncated Poisson models to understand the effect of ICDP. About 76% of livestock activities were in the panda habitat. Receipt of ICDP funds increased the chance of a household to become a livestock owner. The participation in ICDP also increased the numbers of both the traditional livestock — cattle by 83% — as well as the emerging type horses by 203%. Horses were encouraged for tourism and later raised for meat production. The income from alternative livelihoods such as tourism and off-farm jobs reduced the reliance on cattle but encouraged having more horses. Our results show that with the ban on logging and reduced cropland, assistance from ICDP facilitated the participants to accumulate wealth much quicker than others and to increase their livestock holdings. The immediate success in reducing reliance on certain natural resources and the community development of the short-duration projects could fail the long-term goals of conserving the endangered species habitat. Future conservation projects should either establish long-term mechanisms such as conditionality for incentives or create self-interests in conservation among the communities to cope with unexpected threats in the future.

Adding rewards to regulation: The impacts of watershed conservation on land cover and household wellbeing in Moyobamba, Peru.

We estimate the effects of Peru’s oldest watershed payments for environmental services (PES) initiative in Moyobamba (Andes–Amazon transition zone) and disentangle the complex intervention into its two main forest conservation treatments. First, a state-managed protected area (PA) was established, allowing sustainable use but drastically limiting de facto land use and land rights of households in the upper watershed through command-and-control interventions. Second, a subset of those environmentally regulated households also received incentives: PES-like voluntary contracts with conditional in-kind rewards, combined with access to participation in sustainable income-generating activities of the integrated conservation and development project (ICDP) type. To evaluate impacts, we perform matching procedures and adjustment regressions to obtain the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) of each intervention. We investigate impacts on plot-level forest cover and household welfare for the period 2010–2016. We find that both treatments—command-and-control restrictions and the incentive package—modestly but significantly mitigated primary forest loss. Incentive-induced conservation gains came at elevated per-hectare implementation costs. We also find positive effects on incentive-treated households’ incomes and assets; however, their self-perceived wellbeing counterintuitively declined. We hypothesise that locally frustrated beneficiary expectations vis-a-vis the ambitiously designed PES-cum-ICDP intervention help explain this surprising finding. We finalise with some recommendations for watershed incentives and policy mix design in Moyobamba and beyond.

Making sense of conservation behaviours in Mustang, Nepal

Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) have been undertaken in many countries due to expectations of their supporting both natural resource sustainability and livelihoods. However, they have been challenged by critics over the years, who claim that conservation goals take precedence over local development in practice, thereby worsening the vulnerability of resource-dependent people. Nonetheless, one ICDP implemented in Nepal, the Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP), has been largely regarded by researchers and practitioners as an ICDP success case. Under the authority of a conservation-oriented NGO, ACAP, the ICDP engages local communities participatory for resource management. One community within ACAP has been found to have a substantial timber surplus that satisfies conservation goals, but could also become a sizeable and sustainable source of income for local development. We interrogate the rules and practices of timber management in this community to explore the why behind this practice, discussing how modes of environmental governance aimed at producing behaviors to manage natural resources in particular ways (‘environmentalists’) feature in the seemingly conservation-oriented de jure rules and de facto practices and in authority relations in and around the community.

Comparing the community dependence on natural resources in Nyungwe National Park and the contribution of revenue sharing through integrated conservation and development projects

Rwanda Development Board (RDB) has recently established a tourism Revenue Sharing Scheme (RSS) to create a win-win approach in protected areas for effective biodiversity conservation and management. Through this scheme, around 1 billion Rwandan francs wereinvested to support around 152 Community Based Conservation Projects (CBCs), and integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs). This paper assessed the contribution of CDCs projects around Nyungwe National Park (NNP) by evaluating their efficiency and effectiveness, and their socioeconomic impact to the local community development. Secondary data about the revenue sharing projects and the amount of money allocated to each project were collected from RDB office. Primary data were collected through the interview and focus group discussions. To verify the findings from RDB, interview and focus group discussion (FGD) were used. Interview was done with 500 households of local people around Nyungwe National Park and with community conservation wardens, while threats to NNP were verified by the consultation of reports from ranger based monitoring officers. The results showed that the value of resources collected by people from the park is higher than the revenue sharing support offered by RDB as (31.3 %) of respondents mentioned that exotic tree species were stolen and sold as poles where one pole was sold at around 6,800 Rwandan francs and 38.6 % of respondents proven that mining gave the much income. and consequently the revenue sharing scheme did not significantly reduce threats to biodiversity and its impact around NNP.A small percentage of people are happy because they were supported but a big number becomes unhappier and threaten the Park due to the gap in creating a win-win situation in biodiversity conservation. We recommend the revision of the whole revenue sharing scheme, taking into account the cost of livelihoods of community surrounding the park.Keywords: Efficiency, Effectiveness, Integrated Conservation, Development Projects, Revenue Sharing Scheme

Assessing community reforestation projects for biodiversity improvement and poverty alleviation

Biodiversity loss through deforestation and poverty are major global issues and their combined mitigation has become an important political objective. Integrated conservation and development projects (ICDP) like community-based reforestation projects aim to both conserve biodiversity and alleviate poverty. It is debatable, however, whether ICDP, and in particular community-based reforestation projects, achieve this effectively and systematic assessment of multiple studies using a common organisational framework is still missing. The Conservation Excellence Model (CEM) allows analysis of the linkage between biodiversity management, community interventions, and their influence on both community outcomes and biodiversity improvements, so could be a suitable framework for ICDP. CEM assessment provides field-based evidence from multiple and balanced perspectives and an understanding of organisational processes to inform understanding of ICDP effectiveness. This review calls for CEM assessment and comparison of community-based reforestation projects in areas that are biodiversity hotspots and also characterised by high levels of rural poverty. There is a strong argument that the assessment of such community-based reforestation projects would provide a globally-relevant model for effective ICDPs and give insight into effective practices.

The Perceived Benefits of Protected Areas in the Virunga-bwindi Massif

SummaryDespite decades of continuous research highlighting the biological success of mountain gorilla conservation in the Virunga-Bwindi Massif, there is little knowledge of whether people living near the mountain gorilla parks perceive benefits from protected areas (PAs). This paper is the first study in the region to use the sustainable livelihoods framework to understand drivers of local perceptions of PA benefits. We used a logit regression to examine the relationship between household socioeconomic characteristics and the costs and benefits that 752 men and women living near mountain gorilla PAs reported. Integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) in the Virunga-Bwindi Massif have improved perceptions of mountain gorilla PAs, but they need to prioritize projects that improve human and social capital. The frustration voiced about inequitable benefit distribution highlights the need for further social equity research to ensure ICDPs, including revenue-sharing schemes, are managed transparently and equitably.

Contextualising integrated conservation and development projects: Restoring the lost ‘harambee’ link in Kenya

Kenya was at the vanguard of adopting Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) in the 1980s in response to high population growth rates that posed a serious threat to globally valued ecological zones. But most ICDPs were criticised for failing to deliver on the promise of sustainable development. The failure by project planners to internalise contextual socio-economic factors into project design is often cited as a major cause for the unsatisfactory outcomes. Development practitioners in Kenya consistently utilise self-help collectives structured on a nationally popular concept known as “harambee” to distribute project resources in order to satisfy prevailing community inclusion imperatives. This research utilises a political ecology approach to examine the perceptions of local and external actors involved in implementing a forest-adjacent ICDP among two communities. The study found that the assumed trickle-down effects from the introduced income-generating activities largely failed to materialise. Harambee collectives have a strong normative component for social cohesion in addition to surplus creation functions. The failure to appreciate and internalise these two sometimes contradictory aims by development practitioners resulted in missed opportunities for adaptive learning and greater community engagement that could be potentially transformative to rural development practice in Kenya and beyond.

Contribution of Community Conservation and Ecotourism Projects on Improving Livelihoods and Sustainable Biodiversity Conservation in and around Nyungwe National Park (NNP)

The Rwanda Development Board has established the Revenue Sharing Scheme to create a win-win approach in protected areas conservation and management. Through this scheme, RwF 1,133,195,986 have been invested in 152 Community Based Conservation Projects (CBCs) and Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs). This paper provides inputs for improving the prospects of ICDPs by giving consideration to each of the five capitals namely natural, social, human, built, and financial. The language of ICDPs has been adopted by development agencies of all persuasions. There is now some urgency to identify the characteristics of the environment and the community in which success is most likely. This paper assesses the contribution of Revenue Sharing Scheme in strengthening CBCs and ICDPs around Nyungwe National Park. We looked at the efficiency and effectiveness of the mentioned projects. The study was guided by the following key objectives; to examine the social economic impact of tourism revenue sharing program towards the development on local communities, and analyse the challenges faced by local administration and beneficiaries in management of these revenue sharing. To archive the set objectives, a cross sectional research design was used, combined with qualitative and quantitative approach. We collected secondary data from RDB. The study adopted descriptive and statistical approaches in processing data and Special Program for Social Scientist (SPSS) computer program was employed in data analysis. The findings show that above 50% of community conservation projects that were funded through revenue sharing scheme are not any more there because there was no strategy for monitoring and impact evaluation. The findings also show that there is no significant contribution of revenue sharing to reducing the threats to biodiversity in Nyungwe National Park. RDB put a lot of efforts in law enforcement than in community conservation. As a recommendation, RDB needs to increase efforts in community conservation and review the revenue sharing scheme to make it more successful given that it will increase to 10% from the fiscal year 2018-2019.

Collaborative information behaviour of butterfly farmers in Eastern Usambara Mountains, Tanzania

This study investigated collaborative information behaviour of butterfly farmers working in the Integrated Conservation and Development Project (ICDP) located in the neighbourhood of Amani Nature Reserve, Tanzania. The study was motivated by the fact that despite extensive studies on collaborative information behavior in such domains as education, medical, and the military there is a knowledge gap in our understanding of farmers’ collaborative information behavior in the context of collaborative farming. The investigation sought to investigate the shared information needs of farmers in the ICDP project; the patterns of collaborative seeking, sharing and exchanging information of farmers in ICDP; and how butterfly farmers, ANR and TFCG officials in ICDP perceive the link between collaborative farming and collaborative information behaviour. The study applied qualitative approach in analysing group information behaviour guide by the social capital theoretical lens. The data were collected through interviews and observation and analysed using thematic categorisation. The findings of the study revealed that collaborative farming practices, formal structure of relationship between farmers and characteristics farmers were the factors which shaped the way farmers sought, shared and exchanged knowledge and information. It was further revealed that the interplay between collaborative information behaviour and collaborative farming practices were strong enough to support effective implementation of ICDP goals. The study has demonstrated the importance of using social capital factors particularly group structure, embedded resources and shared goals to understand human information behaviour. The findings also shed light to policy and decision makers in the sectors of agriculture and natural resources on the importance of understanding the relationships between information, conservation and development. With regard to practice, the findings have implications to stakeholders engaging on different ICDPs in understanding the role of information on promoting integrated and sustainable agricultural practices.

English

Integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) have recently been criticized for their ignorance of community heterogeneity, mismatch between project output and expectations, and lack of connection between conservation and development initiatives. Using Nepal’s Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP) as an example this paper examined how perceived benefits from one ICDP varied between stakeholder groups and how local resources were allocated. Data collection for this research was conducted through 96 interviews with three groups, that is, ICDP staff, local management committee members, and marginalized peoples. Results showed that the programs introduced by ACAP and their resource allocations were not perceived as having a fair and equitable impact across all households, community, and regions within the protected area. Moreover, there was a perceived discrepancy between ACAP allocation of resources in certain sectors, local residents’ expectations from ACAP and outcomes of the funding, that is, conservation vs. tourism. Future research is suggested for collecting more data from additional residents, communities and with other ICDPs. Key words: Annapurna conservation area, conservation, development, integrated conservation and development project, marginal groups.

Unpacking the impacts of ‘participatory’ forestry policies: Evidence from Kenya

We evaluate the livelihoods of member and non-members of Community Forestry Associations under Kenya's participatory forest management (PFM) programme. We use propensity score matching of households based on recall based data from before implementation of PFM from 286 households and comparison of current incomes (2012), as well as review of records and interviews. Results reveal that members have higher total and forest-related incomes than non-members and indicate that impacts derive from labour and market opportunities supported by donor institutions, more than from differential access to forest products. In terms of governance the Kenya Forest Service largely remains in control of decision-making. Thus, PFM resembles Integrated Conservation and Development Project (ICDP) approaches. We conclude that current forest governance approaches in Kenya appear not to support participation in practice. Further, we conclude that impact evaluations must examine both outcomes and participatory forestry to provide meaningful policy evidence.

Profiling unauthorized natural resource users for better targeting of conservation interventions.

Unauthorized use of natural resources is a key threat to many protected areas. Approaches to reducing this threat include law enforcement and integrated conservation and development (ICD) projects, but for such ICDs to be targeted effectively, it is important to understand who is illegally using which natural resources and why. The nature of unauthorized behavior makes it difficult to ascertain this information through direct questioning. Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda, has many ICD projects, including authorizing some local people to use certain nontimber forest resources from the park. However, despite over 25 years of ICD, unauthorized resource use continues. We used household surveys, indirect questioning (unmatched count technique), and focus group discussions to generate profiles of authorized and unauthorized resource users and to explore motivations for unauthorized activity. Overall, unauthorized resource use was most common among people from poor households who lived closest to the park boundary and farthest from roads and trading centers. Other motivations for unauthorized resource use included crop raiding by wild animals, inequity of revenue sharing, and lack of employment, factors that created resentment among the poorest communities. In some communities, benefits obtained from ICD were reported to be the greatest deterrents against unauthorized activity, although law enforcement ranked highest overall. Despite the sensitive nature of exploring unauthorized resource use, management‐relevant insights into the profiles and motivations of unauthorized resource users can be gained from a combination of survey techniques, as adopted here. To reduce unauthorized activity at Bwindi, we suggest ICD benefit the poorest people living in remote areas and near the park boundary by providing affordable alternative sources of forest products and addressing crop raiding. To prevent resentment from driving further unauthorized activity, ICDs should be managed transparently and equitably.

Implementing REDD+ in view of integrated conservation and development projects: Leveraging empirical lessons

There are diverse lessons that subnational projects designed to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) should learn from integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) working in developing country settings. This paper develops and applies a lesson learning framework to identify and analyse lessons that the Kasigau REDD+ project learns from a governmental ICDP (national park) and a nongovernmental ICDP (World Vision) that have been implemented in Taita-Taveta county, Kenya. Fieldwork and document reviews revealed 24 lessons drawn from both positive and negative ICDP experiences. At the design level, the REDD+ project maintained the commonly critiqued top-down intervening approach as used by the ICDPs by excluding community input into its globally-linked design. At the implementation level, the REDD+ project promoted better community representation in project decisions and benefit sharing when compared to the ICDPs. A landscape approach, democratic institutional choices and pro-poor benefit sharing were the key interventions that enabled the REDD+ project to improve on the ICDP experiences. The usefulness of the ICDP experiences was however weakened by a lack of direct consultative platform between the projectsl. The REDD+ project relied mainly on the local community to learn fromICDP experiences, but this led to partial implementation deficits by promoting local participation interests over global mitigation goals. Further, community-driven lesson learning appeared to disconnect the project from State institutions that the community perceived negatively due to past resource centralization regimes. These State institutions are however the legal custodians of most assets (such as land) required for REDD+ implementation. ICDP lessons are therefore necessary for effective REDD+ implementation but can only be useful if the process of adopting lessons is cognizant of relevant stakeholders such as the State.