Conservation and Development

How can we reconcile environmental conservation and economic development? This book asks what is entailed in approaching environmental conservation and economic development simultaneously, and how that changes our understanding of conservation and development. It does this by exploring the outcomes of attempts in the last four decades to reconcile conservation with development both conceptually and in practice, and how that has changed our understandings of the two.

The text provides a hollistic, interdisciplinary introduction to Conservation and Development. Part I Introduction outlines the historical trajectories that conservation and development have taken; and asks what the challenges and opportunities in integrating these two disparate goals are. The Issues section investigates the effects of large-scale processes such as globalization on rural livelihoods, assessing the need for linking conservation and development. This section will also examine the role of local-scale cultural practices and traditions, exploring whether these can play a role in linking conservation and development. The Instruments section will critically evaluate some of the approaches available for integrating conservation and development, including conservation instruments such as protected areas that have impact on development, ecotourism and environmental education, payments for ecosystem services and payments to maintain forests for carbon sequestration, local knowledge and participatory instruments. This section will ask whether integration between global-scale instruments and local-scale values is possible for increasing the effectiveness of conservation and development.

The text critically examines whether conservation and development should be linked and, if they should, then how we can integrate them effectively. The proponents of integrated conservation and development suggest that by connecting people with conservation, and providing incentives for conservation in the form of community development or poverty-alleviation initiatives such as building schools, providing sanitation or alternative livelihoods, the pressures on conservation areas would be reduced. The sceptics, however, argue that these two objectives should be tackled separately because addressing them together might compromise our ability to satisfy either. This book makes a contribution to this debate by bringing together a number of case studies and illustrations. It provides a useful reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students and academics in interdisciplinary studies as well as practitioners in the field.