Conservation, Human Rights, and Poverty Reduction

Recent exchanges in Oryx and Conservation Biology reveal considerable discomfort about the relationships between conservation, human rights, and development needs (Sanderson & Redford 2003; Brockington & Schmidt-Soltau 2004; Price et al. 2004; Romero & Andrade 2004). The former concerned the problems of combining poverty reduction with conservation priorities. The latter, anticipating an angrier exchange in World Watch (Chapin 2004; Seligmann et al. 2005), revolved around the potential of international conservation NGOs to neglect local people’s needs. This discomfort is unproductive because of its disconnections. Compare, for example, Brosius and Terborgh’s perceptions of the World Parks Congress (Brosius 2004; Terborgh 2004). Or try to find arenas for constructive engagement between the writings of Brandon et al. (1998) and those of Brechin et al. (2003). Conversely, attempts to find common ground can result in platitudes that fail to confront real problems facing protected areas (e.g., Scherl et al. 2004). Fortunately, an impasse has not been reached, but conservation does need some new directions. Here we make three observations that may generate productive discussion. First, there is an extraordinary dearth of good information about the social impacts of protected areas. Protected areas have expanded threefold in recent years, and the stricter category 1–4 protected areas now number some 49,000 and cover 6% of the land surface of the planet. One should expect this to have involved some evictions. Yet when two of us recently reviewed as much literature on protected-area displacements as we could, we found just under 250 books and papers containing information on just over 150 protected areas (D.B. & J.I., unpublished data). Most reports merely mentioned displacement, exploring none of the details. This dearth of information is