Wanting to update myself on the Community-Based Conservation literature of the past decade, and inspired by much of Kothari’s work recently, I decided to bring to this week’s journal club a paper (published earlier this year in Conservation and Society) that touches upon several themes and issues that researchers at GCC are working with currently (e.g. conservation, governance, protected areas, and indigenous peoples, just to mention a few).

The title of the paper already caught my eye: “Conservation as if People also Mattered: Policy and Practice of Community-Based Conservation”. Written by Ashish Kothari, Philip Cammill and Jessica Brown, the paper gives a nice overview and background to how local community aspects and rights have been integrated into conservation discourse and decision-making over the past few decades, and what changes have taken place at high-level conventions and conservation agendas in recent years. It was certainly useful for me to get this update, and to get a feeling for how things have progressed – at least on paper!

With the help of four case studies, the paper explores particularly two forms of Community-based Conservation: 1) Collaborative Management of Protected Areas (CMPA) and 2) Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Community Conserved Territories and Areas (ICCAs). What immediately struck me as unclear is how these new terms differentiate or relate to Community-based Conservation (CBC), or to associated concepts such as Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs), or Community-based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) , and all the other terms and acronyms that have been used already for two or more decades to refer to projects linking conservation and local communities. Already when reading the abstract, where it says that “documentation of [CBC’s] main achievements and shortcomings, and the key issues it faces, is still at a nascent stage”, I was surprised. Having taken a break from academia for almost 10 years, I am not too familiar with what has been published on the topic in the last decade, but I certainly recall that already in the early 2000s there were already a lot of papers come out discussing (often with case studies and new theoretical frameworks) the concepts of Community-based Conservation. I am guessing that this discussion has continued, and probably even grown, since then. This leads me to wonder whether we are to some extent re-inventing the wheel here. Are we at risk of using too many different labels and words to refer to ultimately the same concept?

What I see is a trend of replacing previously common terms (eg. ICDPs, CBNRM, etc) with similar but different terms (like CMPA, ICCA). Is this changing and constant replacement of terms and acronyms in the CBC world reflecting an attempt to show how the new term depicts an “improved” version of previous terms and strategies? if so, I still don’t find the use of new terms very convincing, as not much argument is being used to show how the new approaches differ from the old, nor how to deal with all the overlap between the concepts.

So, coming back to the Kothari et al. (2013) article being discussed today, perhaps the supposed “limited documentation” is because all the documentation has to date used different names or labels when talking about CBC.

Henna Fabritius raised a good point in our discussion: CBC of what? This is also not made very clear in all these discussions. While much of the literature focuses exclusively on protected areas, this article goes beyond park boundaries to acknowledge and stress the importance (in biodiversity and conservation terms) of everything from small sacred groves to entire landscapes. But, the discussion is vague when not focused, and buffer zones were for instance not even mentioned in this paper.

Interesting also to observe how my fellow natural scientists colleagues react to a paper that “has no graphs”. One comment made was that there is no quantitative evidence for the conclusions. For natural scientists, the conclusions therefore appear to be more as impressions than scientifically derived conclusions, and the question was raised: can we make science based on impressions?

This led us to talk about how much of science actually is based on impressions (and “truth-building” based on gut feelings or a few case studies, but lacking broader evidence to support that truth). We all agreed that there is much of this, including “hindsight bias”, whereby “truths” are established based on what a few convincing (often well-established-in-their-field) people say, and the believer will often even go so far as to convince themselves that they have believed in that same truth all along, (even if they haven’t necessarily).

So, our concern as an interdisciplinary group of scientists is that many biologists’/ natural scientists’ out there are likely to have this same first impression of the paper, i.e: “where are the graphs?”;  “where are the numbers?” or;  “why such poetic writing?” But those in our group who today admitted having had such a first impression also acknowledged their own bias very shortly after.

But there is also the argument – recently raised by renowned ecologist Bill Adams – that not everything in science needs to be based on evidence. We discussed this, and agreed that sometimes success is, indeed due to hard-to-measure or hard-to-compare factors such as enthusiasm, personality, social networks, etc., which at least to date are not the “evidence” being studied or used in the conservation world to show whether strategies are working or not.

Other issues we went on to talk about were the need to emphasise the positive (pro-biodiversity/pro-conservation) activities that individuals and communities around the world are engaged in, and the need to incorporate these as well into biodiversity conservation planning and evaluation models, which currently tend to focus so much more on the negative impacts/ the threats, etc). Why not take more into account all those traditional (and new!) practices and activities, belief systems and socio-political structures that are doing more than just “not depleting” biodiversity and natural resources. Some are even going beyond simply “protecting” or “maintaining” to actually “creating” biodiversity (a good example being the ‘abundance’ philosophy and approach of permaculture).

Yet another point raised was the often forgotten yet still fundamental issue of population growth. Are there any known case studies and practices that work to maintain a “sustainable” population, and/or at least to ensure that in some way (whether through social, technical, or environmental mechanisms supply always meets demand within a given space and time?

The idea also arose of going back to some of those CBC “success stories” of the 1990s and early 2000s and see whether they are still today considered as “success stories”, and why or why not? What has enabled some cases to remain successful and others not? Are there any common patterns/denominators (e.g. land tenure regimes, cultural or social aspects, natural resource management regimes, etc, and with a large enough sample, could this somehow be shown quantitatively?

We also talked about land ownership, and whether it makes a difference as to whether conserved areas are in private ownership (like much of Finland’s forests) or in communal ownerships (like in Nepal, for instance). This in turn raised the question of rural-urban migration patterns and drivers and whether there are differences in trends between tropical and non-tropical latitudes (the former offering much higher productivity rates, hence higher supplies of food and resources, as compared to non-tropical latitudes, where it is much more difficult to be self-sufficient, both energy and food-wise).

Last but not least, one thing that struck me is the contraction between this paper and another paper published in this very same journal (even the same volume!) written by George Holmes, whose ethically troubling conclusion state that “local support is not necessary essential for conservation”. Without having analysed the Holmes paper in as much detail, our initial reaction to it is that in cases lacking local support for conservation, the pressure of the conflict must inevitably be shifted elsewhere, be it in time (to a later date, when there may well be protests and open conflict) or in space (use of natural resources shifted from official conservation area to somewhere else nearby, causing negative conservation results there), hence the conclusion is applicable only to the unit studied, but may be very different if longer periods of time and surrounding spaces were added to the equation.

All in all, yet another stimulating and inspiring journal club session. Many thanks to everyone who took part!