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