Conservation and governance

For many developing countries, natural resource management is still the single most important aspect of the lives, livelihoods, and survival of rural communities. Poor and marginalized people are usually directly dependent upon environmental services. Forests provide firewood, building materials, and a host of foods and medicines. Functional grasslands provide grazing for livestock. Streams and rivers provide water, fish, and irrigation. And wildlife provides food, clothing, and goods to trade. Natural resources also serve as an important economic buffer by allowing rural people to keep their capital—often livestock—for the longer-term production of wool, milk, and offspring, rather than slaughtering it for food. Given this reliance on natural resources, rural village or community-level governance structures are often built around the need to manage land, forests, water, grazing, hunting, and fishing, and to solve group resource use problems.

Peter Zahler of the Wildlife Conservation Society argues that local and traditional governance systems often struggle to deal with modern stresses – war, conflict, population growth, natural resource depletion, and external economic interests.

“Into this rural “governance gap” has stepped the conservation community.”