Collaboration in the Environmental Field
Reflections on Community-Based Conservation
by Jim Igoe
During the 1990s, the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources proclaimed that the protection of biodiversity was inextricably linked to the protection of cultural diversity. Among other things, this resulted in the rapid proliferation of community-based conservation programs, in which indigenous communities would become partners with western conservationists in protecting the environment through collaborative processes. In this spirit, I started Bridge for Indigenous Development and Grassroots Empowerment to build bridges between: indigenous environmental knowledge and western science, the rhetoric of collaborative management and the practice of actual interventions, bureaucracies and indigenous groups, and indigenous communities already engaged in collaborative conservation and those trying to.
As I embark on an effort to develop a model of successful collaboration, it is important to ask first, "what exactly do we mean by success?" I believe the concept of success is often used to cover up inequalities and other complexities of community-based conservation. In my experience, there are some fundamental obstacles to effective collaboration in the context of community-based conservation for indigenous peoples.
Power. Who has the power to define a successful outcome? The 'successful' outcomes I have seen are almost always defined very narrowly according to western conservation agendas. For example, people living in proximity to national parks are asked to 'collaborate' by agreeing to land easements in wildlife migration corridors or to refrain from hunting chimpanzees even though they occasionally attack and kill human children. Local people who raise objections are seen as not valuing biodiversity as they should.
There is a lot of inertia in the status-quo. Challenging these fundamental assumptions requires raising the possibility that other ideas of success might be equally valid. This is a proposition that is usually not well received by those with power. Many Western conservationists see people as despoilers (an odd position since they themselves are people) and fear that collaborative conservation will automatically lead to environmental destruction. Others, including some indigenous politicians, are threatened by the redistribution of wealth implied by collaboration. If a situation persists, even if it is apparently a failure, someone's interests are probably being served. Plus, disempowered people are often disinclined to take the risk of rocking the boat on controversial issues.
Local people are often suspicious of conservation. Since many indigenous communities have had their land and other natural resources taken away in the name of conservation, it is not surprising that they are often highly suspicious of anything called conservation. Their suspicions are strengthened if the agendas of community-based conservation appear indistinguishable from those of the old fashioned conservation it is claiming to replace. Consequently, local people frequently register a vote of no confidence by refusing to collaborate. This problem can be compounded by indigenous elites who encourage such suspicions in order to protect their interests - or because they genuinely believe that community-based conservation would be bad for their people.
Democracy and bureaucracy make a mismatched pair of socks. Another major obstacle to genuine collaboration is the bureaucratic pressure to cut corners on collaboration in order to produce quick, tangible results. When an organization receives money to do community-based conservation, the funds are for specific activities, with tangible outcomes, which must be completed within a specific period of time. Democracy, unfortunately, does not work this way. To begin with, local people may not be interested in the funded activities. In addition, collaborative processes are cumbersome, take a long time, and are likely to produce few tangible outcomes.
A difficult Catch 22. It is exceedingly difficult to raise money for collaborative conservation without community support. It is exceedingly difficult to get community support for collaborative conservation unless there is some money involved.
I suppose it's logical to conclude that with all these obstacles, collaborative conservation is not worth the effort. To quote Walter Murpree, founder of community-based conservation in Africa, "Community-based conservation has, to date, not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and rarely tried." Murpree's statement is consistent with my own experiences. I have never participated in a successful collaboration, nor heard of one that wasn't somehow spun according to narrow conservationist agendas, and even these are rare.
Yet I fundamentally believe that positive change depends on bringing together diverse groups of people to solve problems. Since I view this approach as eminently preferable to traditional conservation methods, I continue to pursue the collaboration will-o-the-wisp in spite of all the challenges I know it faces.
Jim Igoe, ELP Fellow 2003-2004, is an assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Colorado at Denver, where he studies the relationships between national parks and indigenous communities around the world. | 
