Placing Humans at the Heart of Conservation

There has always been some tension between different approaches to conservation, particularly between approaches that emphasize the protection of biodiversity against conservation in support of human wellbeing. While not necessarily mutually exclusive, protectionist conservation has had a history of human exclusion, while prioritizing human livelihoods undoubtedly impacts ‘wild nature.’ The balance between these approaches has been debated for many years with no coherent outcome. Integrated conservation and development projects sought to bridge the gap between the two approaches, but largely failed owing to the inherent biases of such projects in favor of one approach or the other (Sayer & Campbell 2004). Human-dominated tropical agroecosystems can have considerable biodiversity value, Madagascar and the Western Ghats in India being just two examples. On smaller scales, remnant forest patches, marshes, or ponds, long conserved within largely agricultural landscapes by traditional belief systems, or retained for the valuable goods and services they provide, are testament to the diverse values that local communities place on them. In this issue David Kaimowitz and Doug Sheil (henceforth ‘KS’) argue that conservation should have as its primary goal the maintenance of poor rural dwellers’ livelihoods, and they emphasize that such a goal need not be incompatible with the protectionist approach to the conservation of biodiversity. Their argument is based on the recognition that it is local actors that ultimately decide the fate of their local environments, even if the decisions they make fall within a wider political, social, and economic context, as is emphasized by Pankaj Sekhsaria (PS) in his perspective on Indian conservation. But whoare local people whose livelihoods conservation should be striving to support? Communities (and societies) constitute a broad range of people, often with different cultural and racial backgrounds, and certainly different livelihood strategies. The distribution of wealth, cultural recognition and status, knowledge, and aspirations confound definitions of community. Perceptions of environment vary, particularly across gender (Waltner-Toews et al. 2003). The heterogeneous mix that comprises ‘local people’ belies the representation by much conservation literature of tropical rural communities as coherent entities with similar aspirations and livelihood needs. In reality, social research has shown that peoples’ responses to environmental and social change differ among and within communities along racial, livelihood, and wealth categories (Brosius 1997). Communities have their own internal dynamics that may be cooperative or antagonistic, and that are affected by social and political environments at scales that transcend local or even regional boundaries. Pro-poor conservation is necessary, but once the realities of what constitute communities are appreciated, is also highly complex and challenging. Who in this complex society is responsible for environmental management? The capacity of the environment to deliver resources, services, and biodiversity depends on the collective decisions of all, but these may be heavily influenced by the ability of well-placed,