Caroline Upton

Are poverty and protected area establishment linked at a national scale

The debate about poverty and conservation draws mainly on local case studies, particularly of the impacts of protected areas. Although it is clear that local and contingent variables have important effects on the social and economic impacts of protected area establish- ment, it is not known whether there is a general re- lationship between national wealth and the area, number and type of protected area designated. Here we conduct such an analysis. Our results suggest that wealthy countries have a larger number of protected areas of smaller size than poorer countries. However, we find few significant relationships between indicators of poverty and the extent of protected areas at a national scale. Our analysis therefore confirms that relationships between poverty and conservation action are dynamic and locally specific. This conclusion has implications for opposing positions within the debate on poverty and conservation. Critics of conservation who build upon local case studies to argue that protected areas make a significant contribution to poverty risk exaggerating the scale of the problem. However, conservation advo- cates also need to temper their enthusiasm. Outcomes in which both poverty alleviation and conservation goals are achieved may be possible in specific circumstances but clear choices will often need to be made between conservation and livelihood goals.

Holding the Future Together: Towards a Theorisation of the Spaces and Times of Transition:

Social scientists often use the notion of ‘transition’ to denote diverse trajectories of change in different types of bodies: from individuals, to communities, to nation-states. Yet little work has theorised how transition might occur across, between, or beyond these bodies. The aim of this paper is to sketch out a multiple, synthetic, and generative (but by no means universal) theory of transition. Primarily drawing on the British context, we explore and exemplify two contentions. Firstly, that the notion of transition is increasingly being deployed to frame and combine discourses in terms of community development, responses to environmental change, and the individual lifecourse. Specifically framed as ‘transition’, such discourses are gaining increasing purchase in imagining futures that reconfigure, but do not transform, assumed neoliberal futures. Our second contention is that these discourses and policies must try to ‘hold the future together’ in one or more senses. They must wrestle with a tension between imminent threats (climate change, economic nonproductivity) which weigh heavily on the present and its possible futures, and the precarious act of redirecting those futures in ways that might better hold together diverse social groups, communities, and places.

Lake Naivasha, Kenya: Ecology, Society and Future

Abstract We examine the degradation of the natural capital and ecosystem services of an important tropical lake, Kenyas Lake Naivasha, in the context of human activities and exploitation since the mid-20th century. These factors have culminated in the recent emergence of innovative governance arrangements with potential contributions to the future sustainability of the lake ecosystem. Lake Naivasha maintains high ecological interest and biodiversity value despite its food web being controlled, at three trophic levels, by alien species for the past 40 years. The lake now has very high economic value, being the centre of Kenyas floricultural industry, itself the top foreign exchange earner for the country. It became internationally-renowned in 1999 as one of the first wetland sites worldwide to be nominated by the government for Ramsar status as a result of local action, guided by the Lake Naivasha Riparian Association (LNRA). This led, in 2004, to gazettement by the Kenyan Government for the management of the lake by a Committee under LNRA guidance. By 2010, however, progress towards sustainable management was limited, not least because the lake water had continued to be over-exploited for irrigation, geothermal power exploration and domestic supplies outside the catchment. A prolonged drought in Kenya in 2009–10, in conjunction with this ongoing over-exploitation, caused the lake level to recede to the lowest since the late 1940s and brought the ecological degradation to global attention. Arguably, this new prominence catalysed the political interventions which now offer new hope of progress towards a sustainable lake basin. We examine the ecological changes over the past 40 years and the reasons why new management regimes instituted over the past 10 years have to date been unable to halt ecological degradation of the lake and its environs. We outline a future trajectory that links new governance initiatives with a wider network of stakeholders which, together with external interventions that have been initiated in 2011, may well help to restore the ecosystems health.

Turning the Tide: How Blue Carbon and Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) Might Help Save Mangrove Forests

In this review paper, we aim to describe the potential for, and the key challenges to, applying PES projects to mangroves. By adopting a “carbocentric approach,” we show that mangrove forests are strong candidates for PES projects. They are particularly well suited to the generation of carbon credits because of their unrivaled potential as carbon sinks, their resistance and resilience to natural hazards, and their extensive provision of Ecosystem Services other than carbon sequestration, primarily nursery areas for fish, water purification and coastal protection, to the benefit of local communities as well as to the global population. The voluntary carbon market provides opportunities for the development of appropriate protocols and good practice case studies for mangroves at a small scale, and these may influence larger compliance schemes in the future. Mangrove habitats are mostly located in developing countries on communally or state-owned land. This means that issues of national and local governance, land ownership and management, and environmental justice are the main challenges that require careful planning at the early stages of mangrove PES projects to ensure successful outcomes and equitable benefit sharing within local communities.

Managing the natural capital of papyrus within riparian zones of Lake Victoria, Kenya

The harvesting of natural products such as papyrus (Cyperus papyrus L.), whether for subsistence value or for the production of commodities intended for sale at local markets, contributes to the well-being of riparian peoples around Lake Victoria, Kenya. Serious losses of papyrus wetlands across East Africa have been reported, most of which are attributed to increasing anthropogenic stressors. Recent studies have called for restoration of these wetlands, emphasizing the need for sustainable harvesting strategies to be put in place, although few have provided suggestions as to how this might happen in practical terms and, crucially, with the consent and active participation of local communities as key stakeholders. Here we explore the socioeconomic characteristics of livelihoods based on papyrus, presenting data generated from surveys, interviews and group discussions collected at multiple sites within the Nyando river basin, Kenya. Conceptualizing papyrus stands as living stocks of natural capital, we then outline our proposal for maintaining the provisioning services of this species, without compromising the critical ecohydrological functions of these swamps as land–water buffer zones. Finally we suggest how this approach might be adapted for wider dissemination around Lake Victoria and beyond, motivated by what we believe to be the first reported case of successful papyrus restoration by a local community.

Managing Mongolia's Commons: Land Reforms, Social Contexts, and Institutional Change

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, postsocialist rural contexts have afforded commons scholars particularly fertile ground for examination of institutional change and evolution under new modes of governance. In Mongolia, as elsewhere, such transformations have been characterized by the erosion of state control and de facto or de jure devolution of land and resource rights. Particularly since 2000, policy and practice in Mongolia have reflected state and donor concerns with the formation of herders’ groups and the implementation of group tenure solutions in pursuit of environmental sustainability. Drawing on data sets from the Gobi region, this article examines the nature, impact and limitations of recent state-, donor-, and community-led tenure reforms and social innovations with respect to land rights and practice, including with regard to mining-related land alienation. The article provides a critical analysis of recent, complex institutional innovations in Mongolia and their role in shaping contemporary commons management.

From Shiny Shoes to Muddy Reality: Understanding How Meso-State Actors Negotiate the Implementation Gap in Participatory Forest Management

ABSTRACT Recent research on participatory forest management (PFM) in the global south has highlighted the existence of a widespread “implementation gap” between the ambitious intent enshrined in legislation and the often partial, disappointing rollout of devolved forest governance on the ground. Here, through an ethnographic case study of forest officers (FOs) in Kenya, we draw on a framework of critical institutionalism to examine how key meso-level actors, or “interface bureaucrats,” negotiate and challenge this implementation gap in everyday forest governance. We go beyond consideration of institutional bricolage in isolation or as an aggregate category, to analyze how bricolage as aggregation, alteration, and/or articulation is variously driven, shaped, and constrained by FOs’ multiple accountabilities and agency. Our analysis highlights the locally specific, contingent, and mutually reinforcing nature of accountability, agency and bricolage, and their explanatory power in relation to the performance and nature of “actually existing” PFM.

Introduction: focus on Mongolia

As a country once somewhat peripheral to global press attention, even following the demise of the Soviet Union and its increasing openness to the West, Mongolia has come to wider prominence in recent years, albeit for what may be seen as all the wrong reasons. In the immediate aftermath of Mongolia’s disastrous winter of 2009/10, reports from the New York Times highlight how its nomadic pastoralists have been compelled to reap a ‘harvest of carcasses’, as some 17–20% of the national herd have perished (Jacobs 2010). This latest dzud (natural or winter disaster) has resulted in the widespread impoverishment and destitution of over 30,000 herding families, of whom some 9000 lost all their livestock, with migration of over 20,000 herders to the capital, Ulaanbaatar, in search of alternative livelihoods widely predicted (UN Mongolia Country Team 2010). For some who remain in Mongolia’s extensive grasslands, a United Nations-funded cash-for-work programme, which pays herders for the collection and burial of their dead livestock, is one of the scarce, if somewhat macabre, remaining sources of income. The sustainability of the traditional pastoral sector, in debate since the demise of the Sovietinspired negdel (collectives) in the early 1990s and especially in the new century, has once again become a critical issue. Mongolia’s vulnerability to climate change, high rates of warming and climatic variability serve to compound these challenges, as do environmental degradation and growing poverty. According to the UN Mongolia Country Team (2010, p. 37) ‘drastic policy reform in the livestock sector’ is needed. For a country wherein some 35% of the population have continued to rely primarily on mobile pastoralism as their core livelihood strategy, and where nomadism forms an important dimension of cultural identity, the implications of these recent developments are profound, if as yet uncertain, given the very recent nature of dzud events. Politically, recent years have proved equally turbulent. In 2008 Mongolia was again in the global media spotlight, with the death of five people in post-election riots in the country’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, highlighted in global news reports as the country’s ‘worst violence in decades’ (Branigan 2008). This eruption of violence, sparked by Democratic Party (DP) supporters’ accusations of election stealing by the victorious Mongolian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party (MPRP), resulted in the government declaring a state of emergency for the first time in Mongolia’s history. It also provided an unwelcome contrast to the country’s relatively peaceful transition to democracy almost two decades earlier and its subsequent status as ‘a rare example of democracy in Central Asia’ (Rossabi 2005, Sneath 2010, this issue). The initial response of the incumbent Mongolian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party (MPRP) government, namely the arrest of more than 700 people and the subsequent sentencing of some 250 of these to up to seven years in prison, further eroded these democratic credentials and has led Mongolian NGOs to accuse the government of human rights abuses (Bulag 2009). Despite the short duration of the state of emergency and its subsequent peaceful resolution, Bulag (2009, p. 129)

Review of “Economic Spaces of Pastoral Production and Commodity Systems: Markets and Livelihoods” edited by Jorg Gertel and Richard Le Heron

Gertel, Jorg and Le Heron, Richard (eds). Economic Spaces of Pastoral Production and Commodity Systems: Markets and Livelihoods. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited; 2011. 345 pages, ISBN 978-1-4094-2531-1 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4094-2532-8 (e-book).Book detailsGertel, Jorg and Le Heron, Richard (eds). Economic Spaces of Pastoral Production and Commodity Systems: Markets and Livelihoods. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited; 2011. 345 pages, ISBN 978-1-4094-2531-1 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4094-2532-8 (e-book).