Community Based Conservancies: Investigating the Prospects for Cooperation and Conflict

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

The research supported by this award will investigate the efficacy of community-based approaches to protecting natural resources. Natural resources provide environmental services such as clean water and air, genetic diversity, and employment opportunities. How to best manage these resources remains a challenge because of the many, often competing, demands made on them by different groups. Over the last few decades, methods of conservation have undergone significant change from approaches that prohibited any human use of key areas to those that recognize the important role that user communities have to play. Understanding if and how community-based approaches to conservation work is important for assuring that future efforts at designing policies and programs for natural resource protection and utilization are efficient and effective. The researcher has chosen to conduct the research in East Africa because she has found a site where some community-based approaches, which are known as Community Based Conservancies or CBCs, have been operating for some time while others are just being introduced. This allows her to carry out a scientifically rigorous comparative project to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of this approach to natural resource management. The region is home to important wildlife species such as lion, elephant, rhino, cheetah and giraffe. These animals live in landscapes alongside communities of livestock herders who depend for their livelihoods on the same resources as the wildlife. Thus, this is an ideal setting in which to understand how community-based approaches to conservation work, their costs and benefits to communities, and whether they are an effective and efficient means of resource management. Data will be collected interviews, observations, surveys, experimental economics, and document analysis. These data will allow the team to study the process of CBC formation, community participation, and how land use rules are designed and implemented. They will assess how CBCs affect cooperation and conflict among CBC members as well as communities that are adjacent to but outside of CBCs. The investigators also will construct computer simulation (agent-based) models to understand how changes brought about by CBCs affect the environment and household well-being. The study will provide education and training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students at two American universities. Study results and the simulation models produced, which will be made publically available, will be applicable to other settings, such as national parks and other key sites in the United States.