Poverty, Development, And Biodiversity Conservation: Shooting in the Dark?

Copyright: The contents of this paper are solely the property of the authors, and cannot be reproduced without the permission of the authors. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is dedicated to saving wildlife and wildlands, to assure a future for threatened species like elephants, tigers, sharks, macaws, or lynx. That mission is achieved through a conservation program that protects some 50 living landscapes around the world, manages more than 590 field projects in 53 countries, and supports the nations largest system of living institutions—the Bronx Zoo, the New York Aquarium, and the Wildlife Centers in Central Park, Queens and Prospect Park. We are developing and maintaining pioneering environmental education programs that reach more than three million people in the New York metropolitan area as well as in all 50 United States and on six continents. We are working to make future generations inheritors, not just survivors. The WCS Working Paper Series, produced through the WCS Institute, is designed to share with the conservation and development communities in a timely fashion information from the various settings where WCS works. These Papers address issues that are of immediate importance to helping conserve wildlife and wildlands either through offering new data or analyses relevant to specific conservation settings, or through offering new methods, approaches, or perspectives on rapidly evolving conservation issues. For a list of WCS Working Papers, please see the end of this publication. ABSTRACT Poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation are basic social goals and part of the policy agenda of postcolonial states and international agencies. It is not surprising therefore that a large number of programmatic interventions have aimed to achieve the two goals at the same time. These interventions are funded by governments, conservation NGOs, bilateral and multilateral donor agencies, and private sector organizations. In this paper, we first examine the conceptual discussion around poverty and biodiversity, and then analyze three such interventions: community-based wildlife management, extractive reserves, and ecotourism. Our discussion shows that the literature on these programmatic interventions depends on relatively simplified understandings of poverty and biodiversity in stark contrast to the theoretical literature on the two concepts. Further, writings on programmatic interventions tend to operationalize poverty and biodiversity in distinct and quite different ways. Our analysis focuses on peer-reviewed writings and finds that 34 of the 37 identified studies share two common features: a focus on processes and outcomes in a single case and single time period, …