This issue has just three articles and each is dedicated to community management of natural resources in biologically and culturally rich Oaxaca, Mexico. Effective biodiversity conservation is taking place in this state despite the scarcity of officially protected areas or government policies.

Salvador Anta Fonseca and Leticia Merino's article, Community Management of Natural Resources in Oaxaca, provides an introduction and background to the statewide phenomenon of voluntary conservation of biodiversity. Facts and statistics about Oaxaca's superlative biocultural diversity are followed by a description of sustainable land management processes and initiatives undertaken by indigenous communities throughout the state, e.g., forest management programs, Forest Stewardship Council certification, community protected areas, wildlife management units, community land use planning and organic coffee production. Twelve percent of Oaxacan land is considered to be under sustainable management, which is attributed to good local organization, institutional arrangements and collective land rights. Nevertheless, the authors point to the poor integration of current environmental, land tenure, agro-fishery and forest policies as well as problems in the national agrarian sector as limitions to the expansion of community-based conservation initiatives.

The article, Community-based Forest Management in Oaxaca, by Ricardo Ramírez Domínguez describes six varieties of enterprises centered on sustainable resource use that have developed over the past twenty years in the Sierra Norte and Sierra Sur. These schemes include sustainable commercial timber production and forest certification, harvesting of pine resin, commercial bottling of spring water, community-based ecotourism, mushroom cultivation, and orchid and bromeliad cultivation. Various benefits of these projects include biodiversity conservation, increases in community standards of living, local valuation of forests previously considered of little use, employment opportunities for women, strengthening of community social capital and governance, revival of traditional knowledge, and technical capacity building of local people. The author concludes that these schemes are based not only on conservation and economic advancement, but also on equitable benefit sharing and cultural survival.

Community-based Biological Diversity Management Strategies: The experience of Santa María Huatulco, Oaxaca, Mexico by Marco Antonio González Ortiz, outlines a story in the coastal dry tropics of 13 communal protected areas that complement the conservation measures of a neighboring official national park. The communities avoided inclusion in the national park because of a preference to continue their traditional environmental management and governance practices. The author's Oaxacan NGO, Grupo Autónomo para la Investigación Ambiental, A.C. (GAIA), has supported the co-existence of the park and surrounding communities through various schemes, including territorial mapping and zoning, an administrative and governance system, and local institution strengthening. These communities together are conserving 30% more land than the national park, and the trend for participation has been spreading to other communities in the area under a conservation initiative called Sistema Comunitario para la Biodiversidad.

Prepared by Megan Glore

Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN) was established in 1992 to test a hypothesis that if “a viable enterprise is linked to the biodiversity of a site and generates benefits for a community of stakeholders who have sufficient capacity, then the stakeholders will act to counter the threats to the resources” (pg. 1586). It began with funding 39 community-based enterprises across Asia and the Pacific. Enterprises ranged from ecotourism lodges to producing jams from forest fruits and harvesting timber. A key feature of the program was that the community worked with BCN staff to collect the biological, enterprise, and social data necessary to test the hypothesis, examining the relationship between a series of enterprise, benefit, social factors and biodiversity conservation. The authors stress that biodiversity conservation is extremely difficult to define and measure in the context of a specific site, especially over the brief 3-4 year period in which they worked and all results must be viewed with this in mind.

Their results in relation to the enterprises themselves revealed that only seven had made a profit and 23 covered their costs, with the remaining making minimal to no revenues. Salafsky, et al. found factors determining success of the enterprises include good management and bookkeeping skills, an established but not too competitive market, good market research, and a simple enterprise that used skills and technologies already possessed by the local community. As such there was a strong association between enterprise success and the degree of community involvement in the ownership and management of the enterprise. In terms of conservation there was a weak association between enterprise success and conservation success. There was, however, a strong association between local involvement in the enterprise and conservation success regardless of whether or not the enterprise was linked to conservation. The authors believe perceptions explain this result: the community’s perception of linkage between the enterprise and conservation was more important than an actual connection. Or it could imply that a direct link between the enterprise and conservation is not necessary for conservation, at least in the short-term.

In regards to benefits, the authors found, contrary to their expectations, that conservation occurred regardless of the percentage of the community receiving cash benefits or the average amount of benefits each household received. However, there was a strong correlation between conservation and the receipt of high levels of non-cash benefits. Conservation success was also positively correlated with continued right to access the resources. And of even greater importance, was the community’s ability to enforce these rights against both internal and external threats.

Seemingly contradictory, several of the most successful projects in terms of conservation did not have successful enterprises. Salafsky, et al. believe this is because the enterprises did not take place as a lone strategy, with most participants using a variety of conservation strategies, including direct protection, management and restoration, and education and awareness, along with the BCN enterprise strategy. Additionally, since non-cash benefits were found to be very important, including empowerment and equity, many communities took action in support of conservation in sites where they had good working relationships with the BCN staff.

BCN was one of the first programs to systematically evaluate a specific conservation strategy by simultaneously supporting the projects and working with the communities to collect the data in order to test it. In conclusion, the authors state that by combining action and research at the local level they were able to improve the conservation impact while also developing as an organization. Additionally, the most important lesson learned from the BCN projects was the use of an adaptive management process at the programme level, one that formally tested assumptions, adapted and learned from the results. Overall conservation projects need to use a mixture of conservation strategies that are tailored to meet local conditions and need to find ways to assist community participants to use scientific principles to define, measure, guide the strategy, and capture the knowledge they hold and have gained.

Prepared by Erin Smith

In this essay, Fikret Berkes, a long time proponent of community-based conservation, explores many concerns facing community based conservation today, lessons that have been learned, and offers ideas for where CBC can go from here to make it more successful. Since it has become a more popular approach to conservation, there have also been many debates surrounding it implementation and success. This debate can be summarized into two positions: one which holds the failure of community conservation is due to improper implementation, especially in regard to the devolution of authority, rather than weakness or impracticality of the concept itself; and second which holds that, while both equally important, conservation and development objectives should be “delinked” because together they do not serve either objective well. Berkes believes, however, that asking whether CBC works or not is the wrong question: sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. Of greater importance is the exploration of the conditions under which it does work and which it does not. To get at this understanding he begins by exploring conceptual shifts in the field of ecology that influenced the beginning of CBC and will influence the direction it is heading and its success. These shifts include the shift from reductionism to a systems view of the world, a shift to include humans in the ecosystem, and a shift from an expert-based approach to participatory conservation and management.

Along with these shifts, Berkes suggests that the future of conservation and ultimately the success of CBC lie in a new truly interdisciplinary and adaptive view and practice of conservation, taking lessons from many differing fields as well as the communities themselves. The rest of the essay is a discussion of many of these ideas for a successful and sustainable CBC.

To begin with, since communities are elusive and constantly changing Berkes argues that it is more productive to focus not on “communities” but on institutions, which are vital to the conservation process and for the greatest success would involve distributing authority across multiple institutions.

Nature is complex. And if so, Berkes argues that central management of such complex systems is a “poor fit”, working neither at the level of the government nor the community. Since conservation deals with complex systems problems then these problems need to be addressed at various levels simultaneously. And since the community level is essential in successful and sustainable conservation, the multi-level, or “cross-scale” approach has to be planned bottom-up rather than top down. In other words, the goal should be “as much local solution as possible and only so much government regulation as necessary” (pg. 626).

A typical conservation case may involve either of the following: 1) three levels of organization, community, regional or national, and international, 2) a number of local groups at the intra-community level, 3) a variety of NGO’ and governmental agencies, and 4) one or more international groups. Therefore, co-management of conservation in practice is a linkage of all of these parties. Berkes proposes that co-management alone is not enough and CBC needs to adopt adaptive co-management practices. By sharing power and responsibility, as opposed to a “token consultation and passive participation”, and creating a context that encourages learning and stewardship and builds mutual trust, adaptive co-management can play a significant role in making CBC successful.

To Berkes there is little debate regarding the importance of incentives in conservation but there has often been a mismatch between what conservationists thought of as community benefits and what communities saw as benefits. Rural communities in the developing world rarely equate benefits with simple monetary reward and various social and political benefits are also likely to be important, such as equity, empowerment, and access to resources.

Since objective and worldviews may differ greatly between conservationists and those of indigenous communities they are working with, Berkes states that it has been difficult at times to truly blend traditional ecological knowledge with scientific knowledge. Because these differences will often be there, community based conservation involving traditional knowledge works best when the community and traditional knowledge are involved from the outset of projects, allowing for the most seamless integration of knowledge. Along the same lines, the author continues to argue that there needs to be a development of a cross-cultural conservation ethic. Our current definition of conservation is too simplistic and Western-centric. A broader and more encompassing definition of conservation would allow for a more sustainable conservation model.

Prepared by Erin Smith

This paper examines community-based conservation implemented to facilitate sustainable wildlife management on the peripheries of protected areas, a concept referred to by the acronym, CBC-PA. As wildlife conservation is the driving force behind initiating CBC-PA, a common deficiency of such projects is that inadequate attention is paid to socioeconomic development issues of the local communities. Drawing on development theory, the author focuses on four project variables, -rights, capacity, governance, and revenue, and emphasizes their importance to producing results that mutually benefit communities and protected areas. Balint explores each of these interconnected variables within the context of three projects he studied in El Naranjito and San Miguelito El Salvador during 1999-2000, and in Mahenye, Zimbabwe in 2004.

The author makes a point of distinguishing CBC-PA from the community institutions that regulate common-pool resources in what scholars refer to as 'the commons'. The main distinction is that in the commons, communal environmental stewardship is self-organized and self-governed and has evolved over time, whereas in CBC-PA, limited power to manage natural resources is devolved from higher up authorities unto the community according to the agendas of the project implementers. Therefore, Balint declares the body of literature analyzing natural resource management in the commons as not fully applicable to the study of CBC-PA. This clarification prompts Balint to specify four development variables that he assesses as directly relevant to CBC-PA.

Development theory argues that the essential indicator of success in human development is the extent to which the freedom of project constituents is expanded. Optimum levels and distribution of rights, capacity, governance, and revenues are determinant factors in the expansion of freedom at project sites.
The United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development and smaller entities are cited as agencies that promote these variables as focal points for general and natural resource-based community development projects.

Balint discusses ways to define the variables for any given project and the methods available for measuring them. He notes how each variable affects one another and how they in turn influence the desired outcomes of conservation and development, and he represents these interactions in a diagram. Definitions of the variables, their indicators and the interactions amongst them are summarized in a table. The three case studies provide examples of both successful considerations of the four variables, as well as their unsuccessful oversight.

In theory, these four development variables of CBC-PA receive widespread recognition by agencies seeking to lessen the gap between the demands of protected areas and local inhabitants, but in practice, it is a substantial challenge to adequately attend to identifying, assessing and strengthening them. Balint urges project implementers to adopt a more explicit focus on rights, capacity, governance, and revenues and suggests that systematic examination and research of these highly correlated variables be conducted at the community level.

Prepared by Megan Glore