What is the social cost of conservation in poor countries?

Pamela McElwee from Arizona State University recently published an important study on the social costs of protected areas looking at the case of the Ke Go nature reserve in Vietnam. She wrote an excellent research summary for her personal blog, which she has graciously granted us permission to re-post here.

McElwee's research interests focus on a social science approach to biodiversity and climate change issues. Her blog gives insightful reviews and opinions on new academic work in this area. She is part of a small but growing number of academics who are blogging to share their expertise on a more personal level.

I have a new article up in online first for Environmental Management on the question of the social costs of conservation: “Resource Use Among Rural Agricultural Households Near Protected Areas in Vietnam: The Social Costs of Conservation and Implications for Enforcement.” The article asks the question: when protected areas are constructed or environmental policies enforced, who bears the costs of these actions? There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the eviction of people from protected areas (i.e. see Mark Downie’s book Conservation Refugees) but what about people who aren’t evicted, but who are also affected by restrictions on their resource use?

I used household survey data from Vietnam to look at three questions:

1) Who in communities around a protected area were likely to be worst hit if they could no longer use park resources as a result of increased enforcement actions

2) What was the likely economic costs in terms of lost income if parks were closed to resource use, and

3) What might be some potential income substitutions for this lost income? The latter question was specifically aimed to see what we can learn about household income streams and alternative livelihoods to determine how conservation interventions might be designed.

The answers to my three questions were:

1) About 15% of the population surveyed around the park got more than 50% of their income from naturally collected resources (fuelwood, timber, fruits, etc) and thus these people would be most effected, but overall 57% of people got at least some income from the protected forest. Given that 40,000 people lived in the buffer zone of the park I was studying, that is a lot of people who would experience loss of income.

2) I estimated the total economic cost of the park to local people to be between half a million to almost a million USD per year in terms of lost income. The actual management budget of the park (i.e. rangers, guard stations, etc) was at maximum around $170,000/yr, and no money for loss of income was given to affected households.

3) Conservation interventions need to focus on substituting one type of income (forest income) with something similar (i.e. no capital expenses needed, low eduction/labor requirements, and no land tenure requirements). Agriculture does not fit the bill on any of these fronts: it requires capital for investment (fertilizers, seeds, plows), has high labor requirements during peak seasons of the year (especially for wet rice agriculture), and it requires the household to own land on which to plant crops. A better substitute for forest income was low-skill wage labor, which does not require capital or land, although it does take labor effort throughout the year. Unfortunately, few conservation project focus on making jobs; most invest in small-scale livelihood efforts like new crops in gardens or bee keeping. My study implies that these are a not very useful investment for lost forest income, and thus may have limited conservation impacts.

--by Pamela McElwee, re-posted from her personal blog

McElwee, P. (2009). Resource Use Among Rural Agricultural Households Near Protected Areas in Vietnam: The Social Costs of Conservation and Implications for Enforcement Environmental Management DOI: 10.1007/s00267-009-9394-5