Protected Areas: The Issues

Context

The remarkable expansion of the network of national parks and protected areas in the recent years has made as important contribution to the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems, and has also been instrumental in generating employment and foreign exchange earnings through tourism. However, the absorption of vast areas in to strictly protected regimes has had other long term social, economic and environmental effect as well. The impacts on local livelihoods and culture in particular have not received adequate attention during project design and implementation. In some cases, lack of attention to human needs has resulted in further acts of encroachment and poaching, as well as sabotage and the unnecessary destruction of natural resources and biodiversity.

The present style of conservation has neglected the needs and aspiration of local people, their indigenous knowledge and management systems, their institutions and social organizations, and the value to them of wild resources. The dominant ideology underpinning this conservation has been that people are bad for natural resources. Policies and practice have sought to exclude people and so discourage local participation. As a result, social conflicts have grown in and around many protected areas, and conservation goals themselves have frequently been threatened.

Now this conservation itself needs rethinking. In the dominant “positivist-rationalist” paradigm, professionals assume that they know best and so can analyses and influence the management of natural resource in the ways they desire. This approach is generally highly reductionist, taking into account only the presence of a particular species or total species diversity as indicators of value. But this preservationist ideology fails to take into account the growing body of empirical evidence that local people have long influenced natural systems in ways that improve biodiversity together with their livelihoods. Many apparently “primary” forests or habitats did in fact support large numbers of people in the past, whose actions significantly influenced what remains today.

This proposed study will investigates all conservation models, the undesirable process and attempts to indicate how protected areas management could be better integrated with the socio-economic development of surrounding areas. In particular, the research programme seeks to encourage debate and investigative thinking among individuals and institutions with interest in the social dimensions of environmental changes and conservation policies.

The Problem

In India, a study of 171 national parks and sanctuaries conducted in mid 1980s found that there were 1.6 million people living in the 118 parks and that were inhabited (Kothari et al., 1989). By 1993, protected areas in India had already displaced some 600,000 tribal people, some 20 percent of the country’s tribal people. If the Ministry of Environment and Forest proceeds with its plans to establish a further 150 national parks and 650 wild life sanctuaries in the next few years, Indian social activists estimate that a similar number of people may be displaced (PRIA, 1993).

The problem is that most national parks in the developing world have been created on the model pioneered at Yellowstone. Some remarkable exceptions apart, the basic underlying attitude is isolationist, whereby both the design and management seek to protect the park or reserve from local communities. Decisions on which land or water areas of the country should be incorporated in the national parks are made by the state, which also independently designs and executes park management plans. There are now close to 8,500 major protected areas throughout the world. These are widely distributed across continents. Worldwide, the growth in national parks and protected areas has been relatively rapid over the last two decades. Protected areas now exist in 169 countries and they cover about 7,734,900 square kilometers, or some 5.2 percent of the earth’s land areas (an area roughly equivalent to twice the size of India). In 115 countries, about 1328 sites covering some 3,061,300 square kilometers have marine or coastal elements within them (WCMC, 1992). Strictly protected areas (national parks, strict natures reserves, natural monuments) constitute 3 percent of the earth’s surface. Of these, 1508 are national parks of the Yellowstone model. At last another 40,000 protected areas of various sorts have been established that do not meet the criteria set by the Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas (CNPPA), but which contribute the biodiversity conservation. This brings the total land area protected up to almost 10 percent of the earth’s surface (McNeely, 1994).

Several international organizations continue to call for an expansion of the network of protected areas in the 1990s. This is because parks and natural reserves are seen as central instruments for the conservation of biodiversity. The IVth World Congress on National Parks and Protected Areas, held in Caracas in 1992, called for each country to designate a minimum of 10 per cent of each biome under its jurisdiction (e.g. oceans, forests, tundra, wetland, grasslands, etc.) as a protected areas (CNPPA, 1993). Several countries have already included more than 10 per cent of their territories in protected areas. These include Costa Rica with 29 percent, Honduras with 22 percent, Bhutan with 22 percent, Botswana and Panama with 18 percent, Guatemala with 16 percent, Nicaragua with 14 percent, Central African Republic with 12 percent, Malaysia, Benin and Tanzania with 11.5 percent each, Senegal with 10.8 percent and Rawanda with 10.4 percent (MacKinnon et al., 1986; Utting, 1993; CNPPA, 1993).

Following the Earth Summit in Rio and the ratification of the Biodiversity Conservation, many more developing countries are seeking to transform “as much land as possible” to strictly protected regimes. Some of the ideas behind protected areas management are changing. Internationally accepted criteria for defining protected Area (IUCN, 1994) now recognized a wide spectrum of categories ranging from strictly protected nature reserves to managed resource protected areas. The inclusion of a category that allows the sustainable use of resources in protected areas should be managed in ways that sustain both local livelihoods and the conservation of nature. This view sharply contrasts with the conservation thinking that has informed much protected area management during the past century.

In South and South East Asia, for example, some 200-300 million people live in close association with forests. Yet most of these people are politically and culturally marginalized, being officially distinguished from the society of the national majority by a wide range of heavily value-laden terms. These include the “Scheduled Tribes” in India, the “Hill Tribes” in Thailand, the “Minority Nationalities” of China, the “Cultural Minorities” of Taiwan, and the “Aborigines” of peninsular Malaysia, and the “Natives” of Borneo (Colchester, 1992).

The designation and expansion of protected areas has also entitled associated social and ecological costs. These are rarely considered as likely to be significant during the process of designation, yet may eventually come to threaten the long term viability of the protected areas themselves. Conservation has tended to be achieved through enforcement. International conservation agencies, together with groups of national elites, have tended to put their combined efforts behind preservationist, “people out” approaches. Often, these have been supported by the mobilization of armed police forces or the army. In addition, heavy penalties have been imposed on those who break conservation laws and regulations. However, this approach to protected areas management has brought many social costs. It also raises both technical and ethical issues which need to be considered by policy makers. Traditional organizations are resources to be strengthened, changed and develop, not ignored and suppresses. The problem with many newly-imposed institutions is that they do not do the job as envisaged. Institution building is not easy, and there have been many mistakes made in the name of participation and conservation. Thus, in India, attempts to place local resources under the control of Panchyats (Village Council) have not been too large and undemocratic (Agarawal and Narain, 1989).

gray areas

The contradictions of conventional protected areas programme

• The designation of protected areas
• Coercion and control in nature conservation

The social and ecological costs of protected area management

• The exclusion of local people
• The neglect of indigenous knowledge and management systems
• The suppression of local institutions and social organization
• The neglected value of wild resources
• The neglect of different ways of satisfying human needs
• The high cost of preservation

The professionalism and the narrowness of conservation science

• Positivism as the prevailing scientific method
• Reductionist science and disciplinary specialization
• Preservationist ideology
• The blueprint approach of normal conservation professionalism

Alternatives to the positivist paradigm for conservation

• Emerging themes
• Underlying principles of alternative paradigms
• The transition to a new conservation science

Participation Vs conservation science

• Local people as conservers
• Multiple interpretations of participation
• Typology of participation in conservation
• Alternative system of learning and interaction

Challenges for a new vision of protected area management

• The need for alternative and reversals
• Towards a new professionalism for conservation
• The existing policy context
• Operational components of an alternative conservation practice

Policy vision

• Enabling policy for vernacular conservation of protected areas
• Enabling policy for local action
• Conditionality for joint & co-management partnership