The dilemma of NGOs and participatory conservation

Abstract

Participatory conservation projects imply direct involvement of local communities in natural conservation efforts, aiming at combining economic development with protecting the environment. NGOs engaged in both development and conservation massively implement such projects. Numerous field studies document mixed results of such interventions and the persistence of conservationdevelopment tradeoff: better conservation comes at the expense of lowering the livelihoods of community members because they have to abstain from using the conservation area for hunting or agriculture. Economists argue that transferring property rights to relevant stakeholders would provide the right incentives for escaping this tradeoff. We build a simple model explaining why this policy might be insufficient. If the revenue from the conservation project is low and/or volatile, the community members may rationally reject conservation unless the NGO allocates a part of resources to sustaining community livelihoods (e.g. by agricultural extension). Hence, the NGO should deviate from its narrow mission to reach its broader objective. If the NGO is funded by strictly environmentally-oriented donors it may struggle to justify diverting a part of resources to agricultural extension, as such donors obtain little ''warm-glow" utility from giving to the NGO that substantially engages in non-core mission activities. Thus, the NGO faces a ''size versus efficiency" dilemma: poorly conserving a larger area (with non-cooperating local communities but happier donors) or conserving well a smaller area (with cooperation by local communities but keeping donors unsatisfied).

Mapping Multi Stakeholder Roles on Fire Management in Conservation Areas of Kuningan Regency

“…The category of this actor had indirect relationships with fire danger management policy makers (Nugroho, 2013), but it is concerned with any decisions relevant to the issue. As Aldashev & Vallino (2019) mentioned, participatory conservation was a powerful idea to built in national and international development initiatives, actors believed that node#1 and node#5 were significant persons to be related to as managers authorities. The relative balance of power between the nodes was crucial to ensuring good governance (Purnomo et al, 2018).…”

Confronting Complex Accountability in Conservation With Communities

“…NGOs rely on limited funds from donors and must compete with other NGOs for that funding (Prakash and Gugerty, 2010;Schmitz et al, 2010), making donor goodwill -and especially the goodwill of large funders, including intergovernmental organizations such as the Word Bank, national development agencies such as USAID, and private foundations -necessary for organizational survival. Perhaps unsurprisingly, conservation NGOs have been shown to bound and focus work in conservation and development in response to large donors' preferences (e.g., Bebbington, 2005;Benson, 2012;Aldashev and Vallino, 2019). The need to maintain funder goodwill, combined with funder preferences and reinforced by funders' administrative requirements (including those designed to enhance accountability), pressure conservation organizations to prioritize upward accountability to donors (Steffek and Hahn, 2010).…”

“…Weak governments lead to decreased accountability of NGOs to the state, which may complicate accountability to local communities by obscuring and complicating both the objects and the subjects of accountability. Related issues vary from a state's inability to deliver services (Markham and Fonjong, 2016), and local community expectations that NGOs will fill the gap (Benson, 2012;Aldashev and Vallino, 2019), to a lack of transparency in which power structures the NGO should be accountable to (e.g., tribal rulers set the terms of engagement in addition to the formal government) (Markham and Fonjong, 2016). Accountability tensions in conservation projects might also arise from conflicting priorities between national and or local-level policy goals and needs.…”

Samaritan Bundles: Fundraising Competition and Inefficient Clustering in NGO Projects

“…Besley and Ghatak (2001) Yildirim (2016) analyse how the adverse selection into NGO sector depends on the sector size and the donors' information costs about NGO quality. Aldashev and Vallino (2019) show that the concerns about losing donors might induce environmental NGOs to allocate their resources sub-optimally. Our paper contributes to this literature by providing a simple but ‡exible model of NGO choice of issues to focus on, which can encompass a rich set of choices that NGOs competing for donations undertake in real-life contexts.…”

“…First, given that output levels are the same across NGOs in the clustering and in the specialisation con…gurations, full coordination on both fundraising and issue choice will generate the same equilibrium pattern as under fundraising coordination and uncoordinated issue choice. 6 Second, in both cases, issue clustering (AA or BB) will occur if and only if Q CF Q SF , namely for…”