The opportunity costs of biodiversity conservation in Kenya

Norton‐Griffiths, M.; Southey, Clive

doi:10.1016/0921-8009(94)00041-s

Cited by 166 publications

(84 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Foremost among these is land conversion to agriculture (ref. 40 and M.T. and K.H., unpublished work), especially the expansion of broad-scale mechanized farming, which is controlled by agro-climatic potential and economic factors, such as cereal and input prices, access to the market, and transportation costs (16).…”

Section: Conceptual Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-term changes in Serengeti-Mara wildebeest and land cover: Pastoralism, population, or policies?

Homewood

Lambin

Coast

et al. 2001

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

211

194

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Declines in habitat and wildlife in semiarid African savannas are widely reported and commonly attributed to agropastoral population growth, livestock impacts, and subsistence cultivation. However, extreme annual and shorter-term variability of rainfall, primary production, vegetation, and populations of grazers make directional trends and causal chains hard to establish in these ecosystems. Here two decades of changes in land cover and wildebeest in the Serengeti-Mara region of East Africa are analyzed in terms of potential drivers (rainfall, human and livestock population growth, socio-economic trends, land tenure, agricultural policies, and markets). The natural experiment research design controls for confounding variables, and our conceptual model and statistical approach integrate natural and social sciences data. The Kenyan part of the ecosystem shows rapid land-cover change and drastic decline for a wide range of wildlife species, but these changes are absent on the Tanzanian side. Temporal climate trends, human population density and growth rates, uptake of small-holder agriculture, and livestock population trends do not differ between the Kenyan and Tanzanian parts of the ecosystem and cannot account for observed changes. Differences in private versus state͞communal land tenure, agricultural policy, and market conditions suggest, and spatial correlations confirm, that the major changes in land cover and dominant grazer species numbers are driven primarily by private landowners responding to market opportunities for mechanized agriculture, less by agropastoral population growth, cattle numbers, or small-holder land use.T he extent to which conservation areas can successfully coexist with local users in developing countries is hotly debated, as are the conditions for environmental, social, and economic sustainability of any such coexistence (refs. 1-5 and 44). In East African savannas, habitat loss and wildlife decline are widely perceived and generally attributed to rapid population growth and the spread of subsistence cultivation. Directional trends and causal chains are hard to establish in semiarid lands, however, because rainfall, primary production, grazer populations, and vegetation formations show major unpredictable fluctuations between seasons and years. The 100,000-km 2 Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem (SME) serves as a natural experiment allowing analysis of the long-term outcomes of different policies for conservation on the one hand and community development on the other. The SME comprises contrasting land-use zones with different tenure arrangements, ranging from state-controlled ''fortress'' conservation areas to private and nonprivate tracts with multiple land uses, some with community-based conservation initiatives, superimposed on a rangeland where ecological, microeconomic, and ethnic continuities make it possible to control for many confounding variables. The SME is bisected by the Kenya͞Tanzania border, allowing comparative analysis of the implications of contrasting economic, political, and...

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Section: Conceptual Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-term changes in Serengeti-Mara wildebeest and land cover: Pastoralism, population, or policies?

Homewood

Lambin

Coast

et al. 2001

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

211

194

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“…In addition to the literature retrospectively assessing the environmental impacts of protected areas, there are several studies that prospectively estimate the costs and benefits of protected areas (Azzoni and Isai 1994, Norton-Griffiths and Southey 1995, Shyamsundar and Kramer 1996, Ferraro 2002. Related studies seek to estimate local economic benefits from sustainable forestry schemes or flows of non-timber forest products (see review by Sunderlin et al 2005).…”

Section: Empirical Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

Conservation and development: Evidence from Thai protected areas

Sims

2010

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management

236

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“…The causes of this crisis include the high economic costs of 'fences and fines' approaches to conservation (LeaderWilliams & Albon, 1988), the low economic returns from protected areas compared with alternative humansettled land uses (Norton-Griffiths & Southey, 1995), and the strength of political voices claiming that the exclusion of local people from parks is variously unfair, unreasonable and/or illegal (Neumann, 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

If community conservation is the answer in Africa, what is the question?

Adams¹,

Hulme²

2001

ORX

154

111

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Proponents of community conservation present it as a means of reconciling conservation and development objectives by ensuring that the interests of local people are taken into account in making trade-offs. Conservation critics see it as a challenge to the state-led, scientific management that is necessary to guarantee the preservation of biodiversity. In this paper, we argue that community conservation is not one thing but many. It is evolving both as a concept and as a practice that must be built on. It is not a project or policy 'choice' that can be simply accepted or rejected. The key questions about community conservation are who should set the objectives for conservation policy on the ground and how should trade-offs between the diverse objectives of different interests be negotiated.

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The opportunity costs of biodiversity conservation in Kenya

Cited by 166 publications

References 12 publications

Long-term changes in Serengeti-Mara wildebeest and land cover: Pastoralism, population, or policies?

Long-term changes in Serengeti-Mara wildebeest and land cover: Pastoralism, population, or policies?

Conservation and development: Evidence from Thai protected areas

If community conservation is the answer in Africa, what is the question?

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