Conceptual Overview

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Introduction

The need to make trade-offs among human livelihoods, biodiversity, and ecosystem services are the rule rather than the exception. This implies that informed choices must be made to achieve the best possible outcomes. The term “trade-off” used here does not describe a binary system of winners and losers, but management choices that intentionally or otherwise change the diversity, functioning and services provided by ecosystems over space and time.  Trade-offs are made as a result of the interests, actions and ideas between different stakeholders or users, and between different geographic and social scales.  Trade-offs exist among different interests and priorities, particularly among economic development, social welfare and conservation goals.  Trade-offs also exist between long-term and short-term time horizons, where typically biodiversity conservation as a long-term objective (such as in national park creation) is traded off against short-term economic benefits (such as conversion to agricultural land).  The spatial and temporal scales over which conservation and development benefits are realized – as an outcome of the trade-offs – are rarely commensurate with the scales over which costs are borne. In particular, the benefits may derive regionally or globally while costs are borne locally and costs may be imposed today while benefits are deferred to the future. Other situations may also hold true. For example, increased local genetic and species diversity in agricultural systems often leads to better control of pests and diseases, but the consequent incentive for local protection of biodiversity may not link to any important global values.  Moreover, the current mechanisms (market or otherwise) for redistributing costs and benefits in space and in time are often inadequate where they exist at all. 

Win-win scenarios, where both natural resources are conserved and human well-being is improved in specific places over time, have been difficult to realize.  Compromise, contestation and even conflict are more often the norm.  Although biodiversity conservation might be accomplished with no or minimal impact on human well-being or improvements on development at negligible cost to biodiversity, the challenge for conservationists is to explicitly acknowledge the need to share risks and costs and to find a balance between improving livelihoods and biodiversity conservation.  Important issues include how to negotiate these trade-offs, what level of biodiversity loss is acceptable, how human costs might be mitigated and who takes part in the decision-making process.  While conservation cannot ignore the needs of human beings, development that runs roughshod over the environment will eventually be unsustainable (or collapse).

Addressing conservation and development trade-offs are difficult because the relationship* between people and nature is so strongly influenced by where they are raised, how they are educated, their life experiences and the survival conditions and options they have faced.  Though not necessarily fixed over time in the face of catalytic events, evolving normative frameworks, or other factors, these different beliefs exert a strong influence on behavior. Moreover, they are often contested and typically underlie difficulties in integrating conservation and development aims.  In addition, lack of conceptual clarity about terms such as “biodiversity” and “poverty” inhibits systematic analysis.  Shaky assumptions based on piecemeal evidence obscure legitimate differences in preferences and limit the effectiveness of policy and programmatic interventions.  We need to better understand how groups with different values, points-of-view and backgrounds formulate their approaches to conservation and development challenges and how this, in turn, affects responses. 

In an effort to address these issues, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation have supported the development of an interdisciplinary research initiative called Advancing Conservation in a Social Context (ACSC).  The ACSC research initiative is designed as a five year project.  In order to reach the overall goal of improving the ability of key actors to identify, analyze, and negotiate future conservation and development trade-offs, the initiative will take place in two phases.  During the three-year first phase of the project, the ACSC initiative will undertake a program of formative research to increase understanding and the applicability of knowledge about trade-offs by key actors.  This approach will be grounded in a comparative analysis of three case study countries – Vietnam, Tanzania and Peru – that is designed to build knowledge that contributes to addressing such trade-off issues within those countries and more broadly in other country contexts and the international arena.  The two-year second phase of the project seeks to accelerate the pace at which the findings from the research is adopted, adapted and implemented by practitioners.  The strategy for this process of investigation and diffusion will be to engage a range of institutions and organizations, including multi- and bilateral development agencies and banks, government departments, conservation and development NGOs, community-based organizations, the private sector, academic institutions, and foundations and other donors, in order to learn from their experiences – both the positive and negative lessons – and work with them to enhance collective understanding of and ability to address possible trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and human well-being. 

The ACSC Research Initiative is organized around three functional units: 1) A host institution providing a fertile intellectual milieu and financial and administrative oversight to the initiative – the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University; 2) An implementation team, led by a principal investigator with technical support and research coordination in the three case study countries, working under the host institution but fully responsible for implementation of the initiative. Case study country research will be hosted by local institutions with extensive experience in the conservation and development fields in each country (e.g., in Vietman – the Centre for Natural Resources and Environmental Studies at the Vietnam National University, Hanoi; in Tanzania – Sokoine University of Agriculture, Department of Wildlife Management, Morogoro; and in Peru – Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental, Lima; and 3) An advisory committee made up of selected experts in the field of conservation and development providing technical input and rigor during the research phase.