Principal Investigator: Dr Helen Newing
Project Dates: 2003/04
Funding Body: ESRC (Grant RES-000-22-0242)
Over the past 25 years, biodiversity conservation has moved from a ‘fences and fines’ approach based on a system of heavily guarded protected areas to a more inclusive approach where local communities are invited to participate in collaborative management. The rationale for the change has been both practical and ethical: local communities are on the ground and can therefore more easily control access to a nearby protected area, and also they often have legal and moral rights based on ancestral use of the area. However, there is currently a backlash against this approach on the basis that community approaches to conservation ‘haven’t worked’ and cannot work on the long term because local populations will always grow and pressure on natural resources will increase indefinitely. Proponents of this view argue that only strict protection and exclusion of local people can prevent environmental degradation. On the other hand, indigenous and local representatives argue that community conservation has not been given a fair trial, since governments almost never devolve sufficient power or give sufficient legal backing to allow communities to take control.
In order to inform this debate, it is vital to evaluate past experiences in collaborative management and analyse how and why they have adapted or failed to adapt to changing social contexts. Peruvian Communal Reserves were profiled at the 2003 World Parks Congress of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) as a model for collaborative approaches to protected areas management, and are therefore in the forefront of international protected areas policy development. In this research project a detailed case study was undertaken of one of the longest-standing of the six existing communal reserves, the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon, and a broader review was carried out of Peruvian communal reserves as a whole. The results have been used to inform international policy through presentation at the 7th United Nations Conference of the Parties to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD COP 7), and Peruvian national protected areas policy through distribution to key professionals and policymakers.
To summarise the findings of the case study, the initiative to create the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve grew from a strong community action to defend their fishstocks and access to extensive forest uplands from invasion by outsiders. The Reserve has ‘worked’ in the ultimate sense that its biodiversity value has not diminished; there has been no major habitat destruction or degradation or decrease in species diversity. Moreover, decentralised management at the community level has presented a highly flexible system that could adjust to changing needs and conditions. Thus, regulations have been most strictly enforced when resources such as fishstocks are perceived to be in crisis, and relaxed when they are perceived to be abundant. Conversely, restrictions have been lifted temporarily in times of emergency need – a cholera epidemic, a catastrophic flood, major crop failure.
Significantly, the major weakness of the collaborative management has been the lack of government participation rather than of community participation. Moreover, the main threat to biodiversity conservation has not been growth and increased pressure on resources from the original populations, but immigration supported by a government-funded colonisation scheme under way at the time the reserve was created. Furthermore it became apparent during the course of the study that rather than ask the question of how a collaboratively managed protected area can adapt to changing social contexts, it is essential to recognize that the protected area itself often becomes the main driver of social change as it attracts multiple non-governmental organizations and possible also further immigration.
A brief review of other communal reserves and protected areas in Peru suggests that this is not an isolated case. Government settlement schemes or road-building programmes have been a major driver of population growth around five of the six existing communal reserves. Since March 2002 almost 7.5 million hectares have been auctioned off in private logging concessions in a system that excludes local communities because of costly management and bureaucratic requirements, and this process is currently the greatest threat for forest conservation in the Peruvian Amazon. In order to stop their lands being given away in logging concessions, communities throughout the Peruvian Amazon are making formal applications for the creation of new communal reserves; however the government is wary of putting more land under community control.
Government participation in management of communal reserves has been minimal; in at least four of the six existing communal reserves local people are lobbying for government to control illegal logging and gold-mining by outsiders. Part of the reason for the lack of government participation is a structural barrier to balanced partnerships in collaborative management, arising from the reliance of the Peruvian protected areas system upon international funding to mount operations in a new protected area. As a result there tends to be either no government presence or, when project funding is secured, a level of involvement that swamps community initiatives. Similarly, international policy commitments to national planning documents such as biodiversity action plans, national forest strategy and national conservation strategy have resulted in a centralized bureaucratic system with a level of formal documentation that is hard to reconcile with the need for flexible management and tends to exclude local communities; every protected area must have a formal system of documentation that including a 5-year Master plan, a 1-year operational plan and management plans for each type of natural resource use.
In the case of communal reserves, Peru is struggling to develop a special legal regime that would be more appropriate for community management, balancing central needs for documentation and accountability with the need to maintain flexibility to adapt to changing social contexts. Through in-depth longitudinal analysis of the RCTT, this research project has contributed to this process and demonstrated the fact that it is essential to analyse the participation of non-governmental organizations and government as well as local communities in order to gain a realistic understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of collaborative management as a tool for biodiversity conservation.