Biodiversity conservation versus population resettlement: Risks to nature and risks to people

Is the dilemma between biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction insoluble? This dilemma directly arises in park creation programs, when the intended park areas are inhabited by poor indigenous populations. The “solution” seems to be cast in either or terms, with a long entrenched bias against resident or mobile people in parks. Typically, the kind of intervention recommended and implemented is the forced displacement of these people. For CGIAR, it is imperative to confront this dilemma through integrated social and biological research apt to lead to socially responsible conservation policies and interventions. Solutions are needed for achieving “double sustainability” for both: peoples’ livelihood and biodiversity. The recent WSSD recommendation that 10% of the planet’s land area should be protected as national parks increases the urgency of joint social and biological research. In this light, the paper brings empirical evidence from 9 detailed park case-studies carried out in 6 countries of the Congo-basin ecosystem of Central Africa. The creation of national parks in the heart of the rainforest has involved forced population displacement. There is no ‘no-man's land’. In the 9 case studies reported, we found that the strategy to conserve biodiversity through national parks has displaced over 51,000 very poor park residents, transforming them into conservation-refugees, and has negatively affected additional 50-100,000 people as host populations. The fieldwork findings are analyzed through the conceptual lens of the Impoverishment Risks and Reconstruction (IRR) Model, which identifies eight major impoverishment risks within the displacement or resettlement process: landlessness; joblessness; homelessness; marginalization; increased morbidity/mortality; food insecurity; loss of access to common property resources; and social disarticulation. Research found that if parks achieve additional degrees of conservation, part of the cost is paid in the coin of additional impoverishment for the people violently uprooted from their habitat and not resettled with respect to the concept of “double sustainability”; in turn, the ecological impacts on parks and surrounding forests are a mixture of positive and negative effects, at least partly defeating the conservation purposes. Comparisons with research findings from other parts of the developing world on the conservation induced displacement of indigenous people reinforce the authors' argument. The authors argue that the correct understanding of the impoverishment risks to people is a sine qua non pre-requisite for avoiding them and for creatively researching alternative socially sustainable solutions. Forced displacement as a mainstream park creation strategy in developing countries is in profound conflict with poverty reduction, the central goal of CGIAR agrobiological research for conservation and development. The authors’ analysis of forced displacements found that such displacements cannot be counted upon as a genuine solution. Summing up decades of experiences with displacement as a mainstream approach, the authors argue that this strategy has exhausted its potential and its credibility, produced much damage, did not fulfill the expectations placed on it, and compromised the very cause of biodiversity and park/forest conservation by inflicting aggravated poverty on countless people. Therefore, the authors recommend a change in intervention policies: the displacement approach to conservation must be “de-mainstreamed”, in favor of joint management approaches. Informed by the theoretical framework of the Impoverishment Risk and Reconstruction (IRR) model and by the World Bank’s and OECD’s policy standards for involuntary resettlement, the paper argues for poverty reduction and social sustainability for the conservation-refugees, and for applying reconstructive strategies in order to secure displaced peoples’ livelihood and development, while protecting the biodiversity. Cernea & Schmidt-Soltau: Biodiversity conservation versus population resettlement 3