Arielle Levine

Engage key social concepts for sustainability

Social indicators, both mature and emerging, are underused With humans altering climate processes, biogeochemical cycles, and ecosystem functions (1), governments and societies confront the challenge of shaping a sustainable future for people and nature. Policies and practices to address these challenges must draw on social sciences, along with natural sciences and engineering (2). Although various social science approaches can enable and assess progress toward sustainability, debate about such concrete engagement is outpacing actual use. To catalyze uptake, we identify seven key social concepts that are largely absent from many efforts to pursue sustainability goals. We present existing and emerging well-tested indicators and propose priority areas for conceptual and methodological development.

Convergence or Convenience? International Conservation NGOs and Development Assistance in Tanzania

Abstract International conservation NGOs and development agencies have historically operated independently of one another. Recently, their agendas have converged to consider both environmental and human needs, with an emerging focus on private sector involvement in conservation. New funding from international finance institutions has become available for NGO initiatives, and today there is little difference between the environmental strategies of international development agencies and those of the major conservation NGOs operating in Tanzania. While this is due in part to independent shifts in both sectors, NGOs may also be serving to carry out and legitimate the neoliberal policies of development institutions.

A framework for evaluating and designing citizen science programs for natural resources monitoring.

We present a framework of resource characteristics critical to the design and assessment of citizen science programs that monitor natural resources. To develop the framework we reviewed 52 citizen science programs that monitored a wide range of resources and provided insights into what resource characteristics are most conducive to developing citizen science programs and how resource characteristics may constrain the use or growth of these programs. We focused on 4 types of resource characteristics: biophysical and geographical, management and monitoring, public awareness and knowledge, and social and cultural characteristics. We applied the framework to 2 programs, the Tucson (U.S.A.) Bird Count and the Maui (U.S.A.) Great Whale Count. We found that resource characteristics such as accessibility, diverse institutional involvement in resource management, and social or cultural importance of the resource affected program endurance and success. However, the relative influence of each characteristic was in turn affected by goals of the citizen science programs. Although the goals of public engagement and education sometimes complimented the goal of collecting reliable data, in many cases trade-offs must be made between these 2 goals. Program goals and priorities ultimately dictate the design of citizen science programs, but for a program to endure and successfully meet its goals, program managers must consider the diverse ways that the nature of the resource being monitored influences public participation in monitoring.

Local responses to marine conservation in Zanzibar, Tanzania

While terrestrial parks and reserves have existed in Tanzania since colonial times, marine protected areas are a much newer endeavor in natural resource conservation. As the importance of marine conservation came to the international forefront in the 1990s, Tanzania experienced a rapid establishment and expansion of marine parks and protected areas. These efforts were indeed crucial to protecting the country’s marine resource base, but they also had significant implications for the lives and fishing patterns of local artisanal fishermen. Terrestrial protected areas in Tanzania have historically been riddled with conflict and local contestation, bringing about numerous debates on the best ways to involve rural residents in conservation planning efforts to establish new “community-based conservation” programs. However, because marine protected areas do not have the same history as terrestrial conservation in Tanzania, marine conservation programs present a new opportunity to pilot innovative techniques to involve local communities in protecting and managing their natural resources. The islands of Zanzibar are home to four community-oriented marine protected areas, each of which is sponsored by an external agency, and each of which involves some form of local community component. However, a number of issues arise when working at the community level, requiring nuanced attention to a variety of local factors. The Menai Bay program in southern Zanzibar provides an excellent example of the complexity of factors involved, which can result in dramatically different village-level responses to a single program. These factors include, but are not limited to, differences in geography and infrastructure, the potential for tourism development and alternative sources of income, pre-existing community structures within each village, and the relationship of conservation program managers to the Zanzibari government. While these factors are complex and difficult to predict, it is essential that conservation programs take them into account when trying to establish community-based marine conservation programs that will be sustainable in the long-term.

Ecosystem monitoring for ecosystem‐based management: using a polycentric approach to balance information trade‐offs

Ecosystem monitoring for ecosystem-based management: using a polycentric approach to balance information trade-offs Adel Heenan*, Kelvin Gorospe, Ivor Williams, Arielle Levine, Paulo Maurin, Marc Nadon, Thomas Oliver, John Rooney, Molly Timmers, Supin Wongbusarakum and Russell Brainard Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, University of Hawai’i, M anoa, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA; NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, Honolulu, HI 96818, USA; Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA; and NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program (The Baldwin Group Inc.), Silver Spring, MD 20910, USA

WILDLIFE, MARKETS, STATES, AND COMMUNITIES IN AFRICA: LOOKING BEYOND THE INVISIBLE HAND

The idea that if wildlife is to have a sustainable, long-term future in Africa then it needs to pay its own way has become a central tenet of communal approaches to natural resource management. Often called community-based conservation (CBC), community based natural resource management (CBNRM), or some other acronymic variation on this theme, these approaches have emerged as a new orthodoxy of African conservation. Their ascent to this status can be marked by the appearance in 2001 of a widely cited book firmly linking the future of African wildlife to the future of African livelihoods. Subjecting the management of wildlife to the discipline of the market is, however, an audacious and controversial proposition, whether in Africa or elsewhere. This has not stopped the majority of community-based techniques of conservation in Africa from using this mechanism as the primary means

The development and unraveling of marine resource co-management in the Pemba Channel, Zanzibar: institutions, governance, and the politics of scale

AbstractMarine resource management programs face conflicting mandates: to scale-up marine conservation efforts to cover larger areas and meet national and international conservation targets, while simultaneously to downscale and decentralize management authority to resource users and local communities. These conflicting goals create tensions in marine resource management. This paper explores these tensions by presenting and evaluating the outcomes of a fisheries co-management program on the island of Pemba, Tanzania, where institutions and scale were configured and reconfigured under externally funded programs to improve marine conservation through co-management. The initial institutional arrangements for co-management supported a functioning system to protect marine resources, ensure fishermen’s access, and distribute tourism revenues. However, a subsequent push to scale-up marine management reconfigured institutional arrangements and power in a more hierarchical and potentially weaker system. With the expansion of the co-management program, protected area coverage, financial resources, and the number of community organizations created for fisheries co-management expanded tremendously; however, community participation in marine management decreased, and the fishermen’s association previously involved in co-management dissolved. Several factors contributed to this outcome: inadequate time to solidify co-management institutions and arrangements, diverse resource users inexperienced with local management, a sudden and substantial new source of funding, and political pressures to restructure marine management. Rather than focusing primarily on expanding coverage and devolving authority, it is important to adapt co-management arrangements to the local contexts in which they operate.

Evaluating indicators of human well-being for ecosystem-based management

ABSTRACT Introduction: Interrelated social and ecological challenges demand an understanding of how environmental change and management decisions affect human well-being. This paper outlines a framework for measuring human well-being for ecosystem-based management (EBM). We present a prototype that can be adapted and developed for various scales and contexts. Scientists and managers use indicators to assess status and trends in integrated ecosystem assessments (IEAs). To improve the social science rigor and success of EBM, we developed a systematic and transparent approach for evaluating indicators of human well-being for an IEA. Methods: Our process is based on a comprehensive conceptualization of human well-being, a scalable analysis of management priorities, and a set of indicator screening criteria tailored to the needs of EBM. We tested our approach by evaluating more than 2000 existing social indicators related to ocean and coastal management of the US West Coast. We focused on two foundational attributes of human well-being: resource access and self-determination. Outcomes and Discussion: Our results suggest that existing indicators and data are limited in their ability to reflect linkages between environmental change and human well-being, and extremely limited in their ability to assess social equity and justice. We reveal a critical need for new social indicators tailored to answer environmental questions and new data that are disaggregated by social variables to measure equity. In both, we stress the importance of collaborating with the people whose well-being is to be assessed. Conclusion: Our framework is designed to encourage governments and communities to carefully assess the complex tradeoffs inherent in environmental decision-making.

Opportunities and obstacles for rangeland conservation in San Diego County, California, USA

Working landscapes such as rangelands are increasingly recognized as having high conservation value, providing a variety of ecosystem services, including food, fiber, habitat, recreation, open space, carbon storage, and water, in addition to a broad range of social benefits. However, conversion of rangelands to other land uses has been prevalent throughout the western United States, leading to greater attention in the conservation community to the importance of collaborating with private landowners. The level of interest in collaborative conservation among private landowners and the types of conservation programs they choose to participate in depend on the social, economic, and environmental context. We used GIS analysis and interviews with ranchers to evaluate rangeland conversion and participation in conservation programs among ranchers in San Diego County, California, USA, which is part of a biodiversity hotspot with high plant species richness and a large number of endemic and rare species. We found that 21,210 ha (3.1%) of rangelands were converted to other uses over the past 25 years, primarily for urbanization, while the area of public rangeland increased by 9%. Interviews revealed that ranchers in San Diego County have had limited involvement with most conservation programs, and a critical factor for nonparticipation was providing programs access to private land, along with other issues related to trust and social values. Among ranchers who had participated in conservation programs, the payment level and the agency or organization administering the program were key factors. Our results provide insight into factors influencing whether and when ranchers are likely to participate in conservation initiatives and illustrate that private and public land conservation are strongly linked and would be more effective if the two strategies were better integrated.

Wildlife Conservation and Protected Areas: Darwin, Marx, and Modern Science in the Search for Patterns That Connect

The recent appearance in print of the first and so far only comprehensive and critical assessment of the global proliferation of protected areas and, more importantly and more usefully, of their meaning and significance in the modern world, is a publishing event this journal cannot possibly fail to notice. Even though this contribution to the literature on wildlife and protected areas sidesteps marine protected areas, and focuses instead, as do so many other analyses of protected areas, on the national parks and game reserves and other sorts of terrestrially demarcated units the world has long depended upon for wildlife and habitat conservation, the appearance of this work, it seems to us, is a landmark event. Context is always critical in our view, and in this case the context is one of substantial intellectual ferment. The publication of this first broad global overview of the origins, purposes, and limitations of protected areas, a work that overall is admirably ambitious and audacious, occurs in an environment in which two other important new titles have also recently made an appearance,