Integrating development with conservation: A means to a conservation end, or a mean end to conservation?
Section snippets
Three options for integrating development into conservation
The “new conservation debate” (Miller et al., this volume) over the ethics and effectiveness of integrating conservation and development is so thorny because it conflates two potentially irreconcilable and opposing truths. On one hand, strict conservation requires eliminating or at least dramatically minimizing human use of natural systems. On the other, conservation is almost exclusively a human endeavor that ultimately requires getting resource users to support conservation aims, thus forcing
Why a mix of conservation and development ends is ineffective
Option #1 above involves having a mix of conservation and development goals for a project. Although this compromise is attractive in theory, it is often dangerous in practice. As a simple analogy, imagine that you are sailing your “project boat” towards the islands of conservation and development. If the two islands are in the same location relative to your current position (Fig. 2.1), or are at least in the same direction relative to your current position (Fig. 2.2), then charting your course
Conservation organizations should have strict conservation goals…
Having rejected Option #1, the question becomes should conservation organizations support development only as a means to conservation (Option #2), or as an end in and of itself (Option #3)? Answering this question first requires understanding where a project’s goals come from.
The Conservation Measures Partnership, an association of many leading conservation organizations and agencies, has developed the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation (CMP, 2007), a set of best practices for
… Or projects should explicitly link conservation and development ends
Although conservation organizations need to use the financial and other resources that society provides toward strict conservation ends, these resources are currently woefully short of the true resources needed to achieve our desired ends. In addition, although Fig. 1 places human welfare needs in a different dimension from the natural world’s welfare needs, over the long-term humans are part of the natural world and our respective fates are inextricably woven together.
To tackle this problem in
One immediate practical application of these options
One immediate and practical application of the issues discussed in this paper is in the development of Miradi Software (2010) which is being used to help implement the Conservation Measures Partnership’s Open Standards, and to create the results chain diagrams shown in this paper. When the Miradi development team initially designed the software, we only allowed conservation targets/goals in models of conservation projects. After receiving many user requests to add the ability to show human
Conclusions
At the start of this essay, I proposed three options for conservation project teams seeking to integrate development into their work.
Option #1. Have an integrated mix of conservation and development ends.
Option #2. Use development means in service of strict conservation ends.
Option #3. Explicitly link the project’s conservation ends to broader development ends.
Although Option #1 seems like the obvious compromise, I hope it is now clear why it is actually the worst choice, at least in its purest
Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was initially presented at a special symposium the Society for Conservation Biology meeting in 2008 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA. I thank B. Minteer and T. Miller for putting this symposium and special section together and E. Fleishman, J. Segre, C. Stem, V. Swaminathan, and two anonymous reviewers for comments and feedback on various drafts of this essay.
Glossary
These terms are adapted from definitions in the Conservation Measures Partnership’s Open Standards (CMP, 2007).
- Conceptual model
- A diagram that shows the current status of the system.
- Conservation practitioners
- Individuals that implement or otherwise support conservation projects.
- Direct threat
- The proximate human activities or processes that have caused, are causing, or may cause the destruction, degradation, and/or impairment of biodiversity targets.
- Goal
- A formal statement detailing a desired end or impact of a project, often associated with a long-term date. Goals are usually attached to focal targets.
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