West et al. (2006). Annu.Rev.Anthropol. 35:251-77.
Summary by the journal club guest Aili Pyhälä

On the 21st of December, I was invited by the Global Change and Conservation group of Helsinki University to their weekly “Journal Club” seminar to present and discuss a paper of my choosing. In the end, I ended up presenting two papers. The first was a review paper by West et al. (2006) examining the social, economic and political effects of Protected Areas (PAs), which takes a philosophical look at the nature-culture dichotomy, and also looks at conflict and power relations related to PAs. The paper looks at two key questions: a) what are the social, material and symbolic effects of protected areas, and b) how do protected areas impact peoples’ lives and their surroundings?
The second paper I presented was one by Wilkie et al. (2006) which criticizes current arguments of PAs having negative effects on local communities, claiming that they are not based on sound science.
The reason I chose these two papers was because I am personally very interested particularly in the socio-cultural and socio-political contexts in which PAs are established and managed. What continues to intrigue me are the incentives (and disincentives) that drive local communities to engage or not in conservation efforts, especially in a context of external socio-economic pressures that often are aimed at promoting a type of “development” that is inherently contradictory to conservation. With these two papers, I intended to present two opposing arguments – each of which could perhaps be considered at either extreme end of a scale in the ‘people and parks’ debate – thereby also hoping to trigger a lively discussion in the seminar.
The seminar discussion was lively, to say the least!
I first presented some of the points raised by West et al. (2006) that I personally think are valid, and worth re-mentioning:
– The World Database on Protected Areas is “blind” to individual, and informal collective, activity. Informal conservation such as sacred groves and community conservation (both significant contributions to global conservation) are also omitted from the Database (pg. 254-255)
– The European nature/culture dichotomy continues to be imposed on places and people where the distinction between nature and culture did not previously exist (pg. 255)
– There is a kind of “generification” of the external world – e.g. when the IUCN takes an externally imagined set of categories and restructures the world to fit these categories with limited regard for the national or local descriptive categories (pg. 256)
– The point made that “some indigenous people are more indigenous than others” (pg. 259) and that “indigenous people are not always the most-marginal people displaced and impoverished by protected areas.”(pg. 259)
– The increasing “commodification of biodiversity” , or in other words “a neoliberal conservation agenda that needs biodiversity or nature to become commodities…” (pg. 257) and the “gentrification or decomplexication” of people and cultures (pg. 261)
– That conservation efforts may sometimes change the ways people see themselves in relation to their surroundings (pg. 261)
The West et al. (2006) paper gave us, the seminar group, a good base from which to discuss local perceptions and values, different worldviews of actors involved in conservation, imposed conservation paradigms (e.g. IUCN categories of conservation), and about cultural clashes and acculturation.
Wilkie et al., in contrast, raise some very good points in juxtaposition to the West et al. paper:
– Assertions that PAs do not justly recompense local communities are often “emotive”, and “apocryphal” (pg. 247), especially as “little empirical evidence exists to substantiate the contention that parks are bad for local people” (pg. 247).
– It is difficult to assess the social impacts of PAs without baseline data, and most assessments lack this (they are either ex ante predictions or post facto measures of present welfare)
– Longitudinal studies have not been conducted that track changes in human welfare indicators over time within the same households local to a protected area, and
– Studies have also been conducted mostly without `control households´ (i.e. comparable households near to but not in a protected area) and consequently “one cannot assess whether changes in the welfare of park proximal households over time result from the establishment of the PAs or from other exogenous factors such as a change in currency or commodity values…”
Wilkie et al. propose several ideas on how local welfare in PAs could be assessed, including remote sensing to estimate relative abundance and spatial distribution of natural and anthropogenic types of land cover across distance and time, as well as studies on self-perceptions of health, economic welfare, dietary sufficiency, community cohesion, and conflict amongst others. They have already started a study on the effect s of PAs on human welfare in Gabon, and all their research protocols and details of data collection methods are available on request, something that I thought may well interest the GCC group.
Having presented these two papers, the floor was open to discussion, and we spent the next two hours speaking of a range of issues related to the above papers. We spoke about the importance of processes, discourses and narratives in the establishment and communication of PAs, about conflict prevention (rather than just conflict resolution), about rights and interest groups, and complex land tenure systems. We also touched upon local community dynamics, and the importance of understanding and acknowledging local social history (in other words, the social context within which a PA is being established), in order to understand and successfully co-manage the process of change and adaptation that will inevitably result from PA establishment.
There were many other interesting comments and opinions voiced in the seminar group. One person said she felt that social anthropology has not evolved at all in the past 2-3 decades, and that she felt that in the West et al (2006) paper the issues raised were the same issues that had been discussed already two decades earlier. Another critique of the West et al. paper was that – as is often the case – the paper manages to quite extensively list all the problems related to PAs, yet it does not even attempt to examine possible solutions to the problems.
Yet another criticism was that West et al (2006) failed to give any description of the methods used to systematically select the papers they had chosen to review. Might they have intentionally left out all the positive case studies of PAs?
At least in our group we knew of many examples of how bottom up (e.g. collective action) strategies can work in sustainable natural resource management (see all of Elinor Ostrom’s literature). Another question is whether there are any positive examples of top-down strategies of PA management working? One opinion in the group was that current strategies of conservation payments, economic incentives and payments for ecosystem services (including REDD) can, in a sense, all be considered as top-down approaches.
Furthermore, the West et al. (2006) paper does not explore any of the explanatory variables in depth (of what are the actual causes of so many of the problems they list)? It seems to look only at the symptoms of the problems rather than the fundamental causes, which is brought us to question where efforts should be focused in the first place?
Another critique of the West et al. paper was that while it clearly focuses on PAs, it does not at any point mention a) why we need PAs, and b) the fundamental problem of population pressure (both at a local and global scale) – one of the greatest challenges to PAs worldwide.
Related to the first point, about whether or why we need PAs, someone in the seminar mentioned a recently published paper that reviews the effectiveness of PAs and finds that PAs really do work
Clearly, we found many weaknesses in the West et al. (2006) paper, but it certainly served as thought-provoking and useful basis upon which to build discussion. One positive (or optimistic) note that the West et al. paper does raise is the in-country scientific capacity building potential that PAs have. Perhaps this is something that the GCC group would be interested in exploring further (especially in relation to its work in Madagascar?)
One conclusion we came to was that when it comes to PAs, there are so many intricate differences at a multitude of levels, and that both problems and solutions are so case-specific, that it is extremely hard (and dangerous) to generalize. Another question that arose was: “Who, really, are the ‘local’ people”?
Ultimately, we all agreed that local (including indigenous) people and cultures will keep evolving, as will the environment. Change is inevitable. Yet interestingly, there is a very similar or parallel debate ongoing in both the social sciences as well as in the conservation literature, namely that of managing or maintaining “traditional” culture or “pristine” environments.
Towards the end of the seminar, after enjoying a table-full of traditional Finnish Christmas season treats, including glögi, gingerbread, and joulutorttuja, the discussion drifted off to many other strands, that, while no less interesting, were perhaps more related to the realization that it was the 21st of December (which can be read with many interpretations), with questions bouncing from the fine line between human rights and cultural relativism, to questions on “rights” in general vis-à-vis “eco-imperialism”, and opinions on the global market economy and its contradictions (e.g. that it is still so focused on money and growth, while what we really need is a de-coupling of money and value, or “imaginary wealth” and the real value of natural resources). Perhaps it is time we start looking into the opportunities (rather than threats) that the economic crisis can bring, both to people and parks.

References
West, P., Igoe, J. and Brockington, D. (2006) Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas. Annual Review of Anthropology, 35: 251-77
Wilke, D.S., Morelli, G.A., Demmer, J., Starkey, M., Telfer, P. and Steil, M. (2006) Parks and People: Assessing the Human Welfare Effects of Establishing Protected Areas for Biodiversity Conservation. Conservation Biology, 20(1):247-249