Biodiversity in Locally Managed Lands

Abstract

Decentralizing natural resource management to local people, especially in tropical countries, has become a trend. We review recent evidence for the impacts of decentralization on the biodiversity values of forests and forested landscapes, which encompass most of the biodiversity of the tropics. Few studies document the impact of decentralized management on biodiversity. We conclude that there may be situations where local management is a good option for biodiversity but there are also situations where this is not the case. We advocate increased research to document the impact of local management on biodiversity. We also argue that locally managed forests should be seen as components of landscapes where governance arrangements favor the achievement of a balance between the local livelihood values and the global public goods values of forests.

The Critical Nexus and Implications of Smallholder Tobacco Production as a Livelihood Strategy to Forest Landscapes in Zimbabwe

“…The selective cutting down of indigenous trees for tobacco production is a case in point here. This is characterized by an alteration of the species composition, even leading to biodiversity loss which is seen as a pervasive global environmental threat [15,16,45]. This difficult situation also results from the inherent changes of the ecosystems and the shifting human relations driven by the prevailing socioeconomic fundamentals and systems of rules [42].…”

“…This difficult situation also results from the inherent changes of the ecosystems and the shifting human relations driven by the prevailing socioeconomic fundamentals and systems of rules [42]. Now there is a realization that biodiversity around the world exists juxtaposed to human territories and hence the tension needs to be reduced by solutions implemented across the landscape and stakeholders [32,45]. So, interventions must be grounded on local contexts [45] as the local people derive some positive returns while simultaneously being motivated to increasing their conservation efforts [37,46].…”

“…Now there is a realization that biodiversity around the world exists juxtaposed to human territories and hence the tension needs to be reduced by solutions implemented across the landscape and stakeholders [32,45]. So, interventions must be grounded on local contexts [45] as the local people derive some positive returns while simultaneously being motivated to increasing their conservation efforts [37,46]. Exclusive conservation policy interventions run the risk of putting the livelihoods of local people in danger [28,29].…”

“…A study involving a common pool resource demonstrated that the users will be drawn to manage their resource prudently when they are inevitably faced with an inherent sudden change in the rate of regeneration of the resource [42,47]. Community management of forest resources has mixed results [32,45]. There is dearth of proof to assert that narratives on the international policy arena that community management of forests is more appropriate for biodiversity conservation than in public protected areas [32,45].…”

“…Community management of forest resources has mixed results [32,45]. There is dearth of proof to assert that narratives on the international policy arena that community management of forests is more appropriate for biodiversity conservation than in public protected areas [32,45]. This is so because those resources may be mainly controlled by local elites who could be equally dishonest like their counterparts in higher levels of government [26,32,37].…”