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