"If there are local people living within the area affected by of the conservation initiative or its so-called buffer zone, they should benefit from the initiative and the benefits should exceed the costs incurred by them."

Section 2 of Volume I of Beyond Fences stresses the necessity of integrating conservation with the meeting of local needs. In particular, sustainable conservation can and should create local employment and income. If there are local people living within the area affected by of the conservation initiative or its so-called buffer zone, they should benefit from the initiative and the benefits should exceed the costs incurred by them. In order to assure a positive economic and social participation, a number of aspects should be considered by the management of the initiative, from the design stage on, and especially the following.

a. List and examine all the work opportunities that can be created by the conservation initiative. You might think of employment and incomes generated through:

c. Estimate how many people will be or are affected by the conservation initiative in the immediate area or within the so-called buffer zone. What can the initiative do to assist local people to take advantage of new jobs? You might consider training, organizational support, credit facilities and awareness raising. What training would be necessary for the local population to be able to more effectively participate in the initiative through employment and income opportunities? What kind of training is of most immediate priority: vocational training (i.e., training related to specific jobs, training on the job), management training; and/or basic education? Should the initiative stimulate and support the organization of the local population so as to be able to use the financial resources returned to the local area to generate new employment and income opportunities? Could the initiative provide credit facilities to the local population so that they could invest in remunerative activities?

d. If some short-term objectives are difficult to realize by employing local workers, and thus require the project to depend on outsiders, identify short-term, medium-term and long-term strategies and programmes required to achieve the optimum income and employment objectives for the local population. What outside advice and support should be included in the project document and strategy for this purpose? Employment specialists, vocational trainers, rural economists and marketing specialists might facilitate the inclusion of employment and economic sustainability aspects into the initiative. Environmental Impact Assessments should include social impacts; in particular an estimate of the positive and negative employment and income opportunities of the initiative. EIA should also identify alternative approaches to provide employment and income opportunities for local people.

e. Find out how the project can hand over responsibility to the local population for an active involvement in realizing specific income and employment targets. Sections 1 and 3 of Volume I of Beyond Fences highlight mechanisms to promote employment and income considerations in a conservation initiative.

Box 19 Another view jobs versus livelihood?

Measures to combat poverty and hardship induced by a protected area scheme in a developing country usually focus on the creation of full or part time jobs in, for example, the tourism and crafts sector. Employment and wages thus become standard forms of compensation for lost livelihoods — the many activities which make up a living. The problem is that for most rural people, and particularly for the weak and vulnerable, employment may only be a subset or a component of livelihood. Informed by reductionist employment thinking, well-meaning job creation strategies substitute for other, more imaginative approaches which might seek to sustain local livelihoods by building on a multiplicity of activities and resources. Culturally specific ways of relating to the world and organizing economic life are thus displaced in favour of the more uniform industrial-urban development model of the North.

From: Ghimire, K. and M. Pimbert, Social Change and Conservation: Environmental Politics and Impacts of National Parks and Protected Areas, UNRISD, Geneva, 1996 (in press).

In order for decision-makers to assess the priority they will give to conservation, they need to have a firm indication of the contribution that biodiversity makes to their national economy.

To compete for the attention of government decision-makers, policies on biological diversity and natural resources need to demonstrate in economic terms the value of biodiversity to the country's social and economic development. Some have argued that biological resources are in one sense beyond value because they provide the biotic raw materials that underpin every major type of economic endeavour at its most fundamental level. But ample economic justification can be marshalled by those seeking to exploit biological resources, so that the same kinds of reasoning need to be used to support alternative uses of the resources. In order for decision-makers to assess the priority they will give to conservation, they need to have a firm indication of the contribution that biodiversity makes to their national economy.

It is important to note that "conservation" does not mean non-use, but rather wise use, which contributes to sustainable development. Conservation should therefore be seen as a form of economic development. Investments in conservation should be judged in economic terms, which requires a reliable and credible means of measuring the benefits of conserving biodiversity and the costs of losing natural assets.

Because of policy failures and property right failures, the market economy does not capture all of the values of biodiversity. When these resources are valued they are often not given appropriate prices in the marketplace. Also, to the extent that the environment and biological resources are public goods, individuals and industries can often gain benefits for their use without paying for them. This is known as the 'free rider' problem.

Another problem arises because the social benefits of conserving biological resources are often intangible, widely-spread, and not fully reflected in market prices. Thus the benefits of protecting natural areas are in practice seldom fully represented in cost-benefit analysis. In contrast, the benefits of exploiting the resources supported by natural areas are often easily measured. Hence, cost-benefit analyses usually underestimate the net benefits of conservation or, equivalently, overestimate the net benefits of the exploitation alternative.

Those who benefit from exploiting a forest, wetland, or coral reef seldom pay the full social and economic costs of their exploitation. Instead, these costs (to be paid either now or in the future) are transferred to society as a whole, or to individuals and institutions who had gained little benefit from the original exploitation. Such "external costs" are often accidental side-effects of development projects, so the loss is not recognized in either private or social cost-benefit analyses.

In addition, the species, ecosystems, and ecosystem services that are most over-exploited tend to be the ones with the weakest ownership. Many of these are open access or common property resources for which the traditional control mechanisms have failed. When ownership rights are weakly enforced, exploitation is allocated not to those who value the resource most, but rather to those who can pay the most for the exploitation rights or to those with the political power to exploit.

Finally, the interest rates or discount rates used by current economic analysis and the measures of national income tend to be high and thus encourage depletion of biological resources rather than their conservation.

Economic valuation tries to provide proxies to assigning values to biodiversity and biological resources by assessing the benefits of their conservation and the cost of their degradation, so that instruments can be devised to correct the failures described above and reflect real values in decision-making.

Economists have devised a variety of methods for assigning values to natural biological resources. This multiplicity of methods is to be expected, because the benefits derived from a biological resource may be measured for one purpose by methods that may not be appropriate for other objectives. Also, the ways to measure one resource may not be the same for others. The value of a forest in terms of timber, for example, would be measured in quite a different way from the value of the forest for tourism or watershed protection.

For governments to base decisions on allocating scarce resources on the basis of the best available information, a number of different methods are required to quantify the magnitude and value of the positive and negative impacts. In fact, decision-makers should determine total valuation, which requires a wide range of assessment methods. The major approaches are:

The major distinction is between direct values and indirect values of biological resources. Direct Values are concerned with the enjoyment or satisfaction received directly by consumers of biological resources. They can be relatively easily observed and measured, often by assigning prices to them. Indirect Values, which deal primarily with the functions of ecosystems (here called "environmental resources") do not normally appear in national accounting systems but may far outweigh direct values when they are calculated. Indirect values tend to reflect the value of biodiversity to society at large, rather than to individuals or corporate entities.

Direct Values can in turn be divided into consumptive use values and productive use values. Consumptive Use Values are the values placed on nature's products that are consumed directly, without passing through a market, such as recreation or (mostly in developing countries) food, construction material, medicinals, trade goods, and other. Consumptive use value can be assigned a price through such mechanisms as estimating market value if the product were sold on the market instead of being consumed. In Sarawak, Malaysia, for example, a detailed field study found that wild pigs harvested by hunters had a market value of some $100 million per year.

Productive Use Values are assigned to products which are commercially harvested, and are therefore often the only values of biological resources reflected in national income accounts. Estimates of such values are usually made at the production end (landed value, harvest value, farm-gate value, etc.) rather than at the retail end, where values are much higher.

The contribution of wild species and ecosystems to the economies of developing countries is usually far greater (in percentage GDP terms) than it is for industrialized countries. Timber from wild forests, for example, is the second leading foreign exchange earner for Indonesia (after petroleum) and, throughout the humid tropics, governments have based their economies on the harvest of wild trees. Non-wood forest products can also be of considerable value. Indonesia, for example, earned some $200 million in foreign exchange from non-wood forest products in 1982. However, as will be demonstrated by the discussion of indirect values below, the market price is not always an accurate representation of the true economic value of the resource, and does not deal effectively with questions of distribution and equity. It is also apparent that consumers may value resources in ways different from producers.

Direct values often derive from indirect values, because harvested species of plants and animals are supported by the goods and services provided by their environments. Species without consumptive or productive use values may play important roles in the ecosystem, supporting species that are valued for their productive or consumptive use. Indirect values can be divided into non-consumptive use values, option values and existence values.

Non-consumptive Use Values are usually generated by natural functions or services rather than goods. These provide value without being consumed, traded in the marketplace, or reflected in national income accounts. Still, efforts are being developed to evaluate economically the benefits provided by these resources. A non-consumptive use such as organized tourism based on biological resources (such as visits to a national park) can often provide a powerful economic justification for conserving biological resources, particularly when protected areas are a primary attraction for visitors to a country. In Kenya, for example, tourism is a major foreign exchange earner, and a large share of the tourism is based on Kenya's system of protected areas.

Option Values are concerned with the realities that the future is uncertain and extinction is forever. Some authors suggest that society "should prepare for unpredictable events, both biological and socio-economic. The best preparation in the context of wildlife use is to have a safety net of diversity — maintaining as many gene pools as possible, particularly within those wild species that are economically significant or are likely to be". Option values are a means of assigning values to risk aversion in the face of uncertainty.

Nobody can determine today which species will be most valuable tomorrow or how much genetic diversity in wild relatives of domestic plants will be necessary to support agriculture. One outstanding illustration of the possible magnitude involved was the discovery in 1979 of a new species of maize (called teosinte by the local people) on a small hillside in Mexico, which was in the midst of being cleared. The species was remarkable in being a perennial grass rather than an annual like other types of maize. Teosinte may prove to have a value of billions of dollars annually for its contribution to creating a perennial hybrid of maize.

It can often be shown that a development project will cause the irreversible destruction of some biological resources. An option would be to postpone the development project until the value of these resources is known. Uncertainty about the value of biological diversity will not be resolved by clear-cutting the forest or by constructing a hydroelectric dam, but these projects can still be undertaken at a later date. The value of being able to learn about future benefits that would be precluded by the project — "quasi option value" — is positive provided the information is solely time-dependent.

Existence Values lie at the core of our ethical desire to conserve. Many people, especially in the industrial nations, attach values to the existence of a species or habitat that they have no intention of ever visiting or using. They might hope that their descendants (or future generations in general) may derive some benefit from the existence of these species, or may just find satisfaction that the oceans hold whales, the Himalayas have snow leopards, and the Serengeti has wildebeest. Existence values reflect the sympathy, responsibility, and concern that some people may feel toward species and ecosystems. An accurate cost-benefit analysis of such values is clearly impossible, but the magnitude of these values is suggested by the sizeable voluntary contributions to conservation agencies by people and institutions who do not expect to visit or use the resource they are helping to conserve.

consumptive use values + productive use values = direct values

non-consumptive use values + option values + existence values =

direct values + indirect values = total economic value

McNeely, J. A., Economics and Biological Diversity: Developing and Using Economic Incentives to Conserve Biological Resources, IUCN, Gland (Switzerland), 1988.
Myrick Freeman III, A., The Measurement of Environmental and Resource Values: Theory and Methods, Resources for the Future, Washington D.C., 1993.
Pearce, D. and D. Moran, The Economic Value of Biodiversity, IUCN, Gland (Switzerland), 1994.
Perrings, C., Mäler, K. G. Folke, C. Holling and C.S. and B. O. Jansson, Biodiversity Loss: Economic and Ecological Issues, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1995.

Developing a comprehensive system of incentives and disincentives, and eliminating perverse incentives, requires a better understanding of biodiversity's total value.

To the extent that resource exploitation is governed by the perceived self-interest of various individuals or groups, behaviour affecting maintenance of biological diversity can best be changed by providing new approaches to conservation which alter people's perceptions of what behaviour is in their self-interest. Since self-interest today is defined by many in economic terms, conservation needs to be promoted through the means of economic incentives.

An incentive for conservation is any inducement which is specifically intended to incite or motivate governments, local people, or international organizations to conserve biological diversity. A disincentive is any inducement or mechanism designed to discourage depleting of biological diversity. Together, incentives and disincentives provide the 'carrot' and the 'stick' for motivating behaviour that will conserve biological resources. A perverse incentive, on the other hand, is one which induces behaviour which depletes biological diversity.

Direct incentives — either in cash or in kind — are applied to achieve specific objectives, such as improving management of a protected area. Indirect incentives do not require a special budget for biodiversity conservation, but rather apply fiscal, service, social, and natural resources policies to specific conservation problems.

Incentives are used to divert land, capital, and labour towards conserving biological resources, and to promote broader participation in work which will benefit these resources. They can smooth the uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of conserving biological resources. They can mitigate anticipated negative impacts on local people by regulations controlling exploitation and compensate people for any extraordinary losses suffered through such controls. They can also reward the local people who conserve biological resources at an economic cost higher than the economics benefits received.

To function effectively, incentives require some degree of regulation, enforcement, and monitoring. They must be used with considerable sensitivity if they are to attain their objectives, and must be able to adapt to changing conditions.

Incentives can be applied at the local, national and international levels. Some incentives are direct (cash or in-kind). Direct cash incentives to conserve biological diversity include, for example, a loan to a farmer to help cover the costs of introducing "integrated pest management" techniques, a subsidy to landowners to manage the land in a certain way (as with the support paid to some farmers in the European Union) or to refrain from changing the present land-use (as with designated Sites of Special Scientific Interest in the UK). Governments can also provide grants for landowners to restore threatened or damaged habitats, as with the countryside Stewardship Scheme in England and Wales.

In-kind direct incentives to conserve biological diversity might include granting to a local community access to a protected area for customary uses compatible with the area's conservation objectives, or providing seedlings to a local forest restoration project or technology transfer between countries. In South Africa, for example, a new national park was recently proclaimed with access rights to the park for local sheep ranchers. Such access was necessary to earn the support of the local community for creation of the park.

Other incentives to conserve biological diversity are indirect. Fiscal incentives include tax exemptions or deductions targeted at conserving particular habitat types such as wetlands. In Minnesota, for example, wetlands and natural prairie lands are exempt from land tax. Another fiscal measure could be a debt-for-nature swap. The Foundation for the Philippines Environment, for example, was set up with funding made available from a debt-for-nature swap between the US and Philippine governments. This Foundation now has an endowment to fund conservation programmes through local NGOs.

Service-oriented incentives to conserve biological diversity include public education or technical assistance programmes, such as agricultural, forestry or fisheries extension initiatives. Examples of social incentives, designed to improve quality of life, include land tenure reform, community institution building or access to family planning services. The well-known Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) in Zimbabwe is an example of a community conservation programme based on granting communal landowners sustainable use rights to wild resources.

In contrast, disincentives discourage undesirable behaviour. They are inducements or mechanisms designed to discourage the depletion of biological diversity. As such they are the complementary 'stick' to the 'carrot' offered by incentives. Taxes or other charges are typical delivery mechanisms for disincentives, motivating citizens or businesses to modify environmentally 'unfriendly' behaviour. Fiscal disincentives have often been used in the pollution field (for example through emission or effluent charges) but also are used to discourage any other type of environmental harm, including the loss of biological diversity. Taxes or other charges can, for example, be put on certain types of land uses. Many traditional cultures and communities have developed their own strong and particularly effective mechanisms of disincentives as well, including the use of public opinion and taboos.

Some incentives actually encourage biological diversity's depletion or create obstacles to its conservation. These can be called "perverse" incentives. For example, some countries still pay grants for land-clearance long after it has ceased to benefit the nation. Subsidies on the price of farm products have usually proved particularly damaging to biodiversity, by encouraging destruction of natural habitats (even on land marginally suited for agriculture) and replacement of variable, locally adapted varieties with modern standardized ones. Also, subsidies to fishermen to improve their vessels have often proved disastrous, only giving the fishermen the means to take far too much of the fish stock than can be produced each year, without putting in place suitable control mechanisms. As for species, bounties on killing predatory animals like wolves have greatly increased the demise of such animals and have at times been shown to be unnecessary.

Such incentives are very often instituted for perfectly valid political or social reasons, and can even be seen as positive incentives in other sectors, such as employment, agriculture, etc. But by externalizing environmental considerations, they contribute to the inadvertent loss of biological diversity. In these instances, the system has, in effect, failed to take an integrated approach to incentive and disincentive policies established on behalf of other sectors which have an impact on biodiversity. Through their policies and programmes, bilateral and multilateral development agencies have often created similar situations.

These perverse incentives not only directly cost governments large amounts of money, but they exact a further hidden indirect cost on national economies from the species' overexploitation or ecosystem degradation which they encourage. Therefore, any system of incentives and disincentives requires the identification of perverse incentives, and consideration of the ways and means to eliminate or minimize their negative impacts on biological diversity.

Developing a comprehensive system of incentives and disincentives, and eliminating perverse incentives, requires a better understanding of biodiversity's total value: the sum of consumptive and productive use values as well as its non-consumptive use, option and existence values (see concept file 4.25). The goal should be to identify the maximum benefit derived from the many direct and indirect uses of the components of biological diversity, both within protected areas and outside of them. This, in turn, will give policy-makers the additional information they need to identify the true costs and benefits of particular policy choices.

Anderson, T. L. and D. R. Leal, Free Market Environmentalism, Westview Press, Boulder (Colorado), 1991.
Clark, D. and D. Downes, What Price Biodiversity? Economic Incentives and Biodiversity Conservation in the United States, Center for International Environmental Law, Washington D.C., 1995.
Glowka, L., F. Burhenne-Guilmin and H. Synge, in collaboration with J. McNeely and L. Gündling, A Guide to the Convention on Biological Diversity, Environmental Policy and Law Paper No. 30, IUCN, Gland (Switzerland), 1994.
McNeely, J. A., Economics and Biological Diversity: Developing and Using Economic Incentives to Conserve Biological Resources, IUCN, Gland (Switzerland), 1988.
McNeely, J. A., "Economic incentives for conserving biodiversity: lessons from Africa", Ambio 22, 2/3: 144-150, 1993.
Panayotou, T., "Economic instruments for environmental management and sustainable development", paper prepared for UNEP's meeting on the Use and Application of Economic Policy Instruments for Environmental Management and Sustainable Development, UNEP Nairobi, February 23-24, 1994.
Swanson, T. M. (ed.), The Economics and Ecology of Biodiversity Decline: The Forces Driving Global Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995.

The essential difference between a process and a project approach is the degree of flexibility (both in approach and pre-established objectives) which enables the initiative to adapt to changing situations.

The effective management of natural resources involves processes of information exchange, the building of rapport and trust between the intervening agency and the various stakeholders, negotiation of different interests and local institution-building.

In late 1985 the Nepal-Australia Forestry Project began serious attempts to move from establishing plantation forests towards a new emphasis on forest management and utilization. A fundamental goal of the third phase of the project (which commenced in 1986) was the development and testing of socially viable local management systems.

The first substantial attempt to develop a community forestry management plan took place at Chaap al Danda forest, an area of about 100 ha of mixed plantation and natural forest near Chautara, about 40 km from Kathmandu. Chaap al Danda is on a ridge adjoining the main road from Kathmandu to Chautara and falls within the boundaries of three separate panchayats (local authority areas).

Although the underlying aim of the exercise was to implement forest management by local people, there was little understanding of what this really meant or how to go about it. The first step was a fairly conventional forest survey, including biomass and productivity estimates for each of the ecologically distinct parts of the forest. The second step was to call a large meeting of the "community". As the forest fell into three separate panchayats the meeting was called at a multi-panchayat level. Departmental and project staff recognized that forest "users" would not come from every ward of the three panchayats, but it was assumed that the users would be identified at the public meeting.

The meeting was attended by a number of local leaders and residents from villages scattered around the forest. A management committee was elected by the public meeting. The intended duties of this committee involved negotiation of the details of the management plan and administration of its provisions after approval. The management plan that was developed contained some technical information, including descriptions of various parts of the forest, biomass estimates and a schedule for pruning and limited stem cutting. The plan also contained a list of user households, listed by ward of residence. As the list of nominated users was quite large, the managing committee organized a harvesting schedule — users from specified wards were asked to come to cut and collect their share of firewood on specified days.

The first round of harvesting went well. Representatives of most nominated user households attended. Departmental and project staff were particularly pleased when committee members complained that too high a price had been set for each headload to be removed; they were told that they had set the price themselves at their meeting and they could change it if they wanted. The reaction was enthusiastic and departmental/project staff were satisfied that a sense of genuine community control had been reinforced. On subsequent harvesting days, however, things began to go wrong. The main problem was that people listed as users did not come to collect their share. In order to find out why this happened an informal survey was carried out. Staff visited each settlement around the forest to ascertain whether the residents knew about the plan, whether they agreed with it and what their wishes were with regard to the management of Chaap al Danda forest.

The result of this informal survey were salutary. It seemed that some people listed as users had never used the particular forest and made no claims to have use-rights. They had apparently been identified as users by ward leaders who felt an obligation to make a claim on behalf of their constituents. And, despite the claims by the organizing committee that all interested people had been informed of the harvesting schedule, many had apparently never even heard of the plan.

The attempt to develop local management was based on a number of assumptions, some explicit. These included the following assumptions:

The approach taken at Chaap al Danda looks very naive in retrospect. Yet, equally naive activities are tried again and again in development projects.

Underlying what happened at Chaap al Danda was a very simplistic and static view of the sociology of forest use. There was no understanding of the processes of extension, negotiation or consensus-building. In fact, the social element of community forestry was reduced to two basic steps — holding a public meeting and forming a committee. The heterogeneous nature of interests within the "community" of users and the importance of local political issues were ignored. It was also assumed that elected representatives would spread necessary information about the management proposal. In reality, in a highly hierarchical society, the control of information is a source of power.

At about the same time as management planning was taking place at Chaap al Danda, a similar exercise was taking place at Tukucha, just outside the Kathmandu Valley. Fortunately, the outcome at Chaap al Danda led to a recognition that something was missing from the formula and efforts at Tukucha were halted while some profound rethinking took place. Advice was sought from a number of people with experience in community development and a new approach was tried, centred around a training course for departmental and project staff.

The training course included a substantial field exercise which took place in Tukucha itself. Staff were encouraged to talk to villagers and to obtain a feel for their needs and interests. The technique of "focus group interviews" became central. This technique has two elements: recognition that information about a community can best be obtained by looking separately at groups of people with common interests (that is, "interest groups" and "stakeholder groups" as discussed elsewhere in Beyond Fences); and secondly, that the interaction among people with common interests, meeting in small informal groups, will often lead to a more rapid exchange of information than meeting separately with individuals. Informal communication and rapport building were included in the training programme to improve the ability of staff to conduct focus group interviews.

After this training exercise, efforts at developing a management plan at Tukucha recommenced. This time, however, emphasis was placed on informal visits (rather than a large-scale public meeting) and on obtaining a clear understanding of the diversity of local opinion through identifying various interest groups and holding discussions with them. A shift from informal visits and discussion to more formal meetings took place only after people had become informed of the issues and had time to discuss problems and possible solutions among themselves.

The process took many months but, by using this careful approach, mistakes like those made at Chaap al Danda were avoided. It was discovered that the forest, far from being a single forest as first perceived, was divided into separate sections with separate user groups. In one patch (bordering two areas with separate users) both groups claimed use-rights and disputed the claims of the other group. There were also disputes involving poorer people who initially did not want to see the "community" in control because they felt that their rights were more likely to be protected by the Forest Department. This last dispute was resolved by negotiation between parties. Departmental and project staff facilitated negotiations, but ultimately left settlement of disputes to local initiative.

The experiences at Chaap al Danda and Tukucha provide a clear illustration of the differences between a 'project' versus a 'process' approach and a number of important lessons can be learned from these experiences. First, the process of obtaining an agreement from a community of stakeholders requires enough time to allow people to discuss issues, negotiate disputes and develop the necessary level of consensus. Community consultation cannot be reduced to one (or a few) public meetings. Second, large meetings or formal surveys are unlikely to provide all the information necessary for developing management plans. Informal discussions are often more effective and have the additional advantage of enabling divergent interests to be considered.

Another crucial lesson is that initiatives that wish to assist community management of natural resources are themselves part of a learning process. Every attempt to work at the community level is a learning experience for the staff involved and time is required for reflection, reorientation and retraining in response to those experiences.

The cases also demonstrate that the effective management of natural resources involves processes of information exchange, the building of rapport and trust between the intervening agency and the various stakeholders, negotiation of different interests and local institution-building. All of these processes require time as well as a willingness and ability to adapt to changing circumstances. To reduce all of these processes to one or two public meetings and to committee formation is a recipe for failure. Meetings will occur, committees will be formed, agreements will be signed simply because villagers like to please officials (and happy officials tend to leave people alone!), but without institution-building and consensus-building, there will be no concrete outcomes in terms of forest management.

Monitoring the effects of interventions and reorienting the approach to address any adverse consequences is an essential aspect of any successful conservation initiative. A problem with taking a static view of the sociology of community forest management, for example, is that it is easy to overlook the fact that all interventions have the potential to affect local social systems — positively or negatively.

One of the most crucial avenues of influence is the potential to affect the local power structure. Community forestry is concerned with control of resources, i.e., it is a political intervention. Any move to transfer control of resources is likely to lead to attempts by some individuals to manipulate the situation to their own advantage. People with wealth and power can gain disproportionate benefits, and use a changing situation to entrench their own positions. Attempts to set up local arrangements for the management of a conservation initiative may fail because the interests of various groups are not considered. For example, in the case of Tukucha the concerns of the poorer people could have prevented any effective management plan from being conceived or implemented. It was only because a cautious process of intervention was adopted that these concerns were recognized and, by a gradual process of negotiation, dealt with.

The essential difference between a process and a project is the degree of flexibility, (both in approach and pre-established objectives), which enables the initiative to adapt to changing situations. Another substantial difference is the time-frame. For a process, the time-frame is driven more by the local requirements (communities, institutions, culture, seasonal activities, etc.) than by the intervening agency and its funders.

Gilmour, D. A. and R. J. Fisher, Villagers, Forests and Foresters: the Philosophy, Process and Practice of Community Forestry in Nepal, Sahayogi Press, Kathmandu (Nepal), 1991.
Lecomte, B. J., Project Aid: Limitations and Alternatives, Development Centre Studies of the OECD, Paris, 1986.