Merlijn van Weerd

Illegal logging in the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park, the Philippines

Illegal logging is a threat to biodiversity and rural livelihoods in the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park, the largest protected area in the Philippines. Every year between 20,000 and 35,000 cu. m wood is extracted from the park. The forestry service and municipal governments tolerate illegal logging in the protected area; government officials argue that banning an important livelihood activity of households along the forest frontier will aggravate rural poverty. However this reasoning underestimates the scale of timber extraction, and masks resource capture and collusive corruption. Illegal logging in fact forms an obstacle for sustainable rural development in and around the protected area by destroying ecosystems, distorting markets, and subverting the rule of law. Strengthening law enforcement and controlling corruption are prerequisites for sustainable forest management in and around protected areas in insular southeast Asia.

What Local People Think About Crocodiles: Challenging Environmental Policy Narratives in the Philippines

This article challenges several assumptions that have shaped environmental policy in the Philippines. Policy makers assume that people are antagonistic toward conserving crocodiles in the wild and think that the enforcement of environmental legislation in a context of widespread rural poverty is illegitimate and ineffective. They argue that these negative public attitudes can only be transformed by generating revenues for rural communities, for example, through crocodile ranching or ecotourism. Despite the evident failure to conserve crocodiles in the wild, this thinking continues to underpin policy and practice in the Philippines. A community-based conservation project in the northern Sierra Madre on Luzon puts this utilitarian logic in perspective. The project succeeded in transforming hostile attitudes toward crocodiles and mobilized broad societal support for the protection of the Philippine crocodile and its freshwater habitat. Cultural values, such as pride in the occurrence of this rare and iconic species, form an important incentive for people to support the preservation of the species in the wild. These experiences highlight the importance of moving beyond ideological positions in discussions on biodiversity conservation, and enable the design of integrative and innovative solutions to conserve wildlife in human-dominated landscapes.

'Why must we protect crocodiles?' Explaining the value of the Philippine crocodile to rural communities

What are valid arguments to protect the Philippine crocodile in the wild? And how are we to explain the normative foundations of biodiversity conservation to rural communities in the developing world? Conservationists mainly rely on economic values to justify in situ wildlife conservation. In this article, we argue that these utilitarian reasons are often based on inaccuracies and flawed assumptions. By focusing narrowly on economic incentives, conservationists risk undermining their credibility and obscuring other valid reasons to protect nature. Cultural and intrinsic values can also form a strong motivation for poor people in non-western societies to conserve biodiversity. In the northern Sierra Madre on Luzon, respect for nature, interest in wildlife ecology and pride in the occurrence and conservation of a rare and iconic species proved to be effective incentives to protect the Philippine crocodile.

Recognising land rights for conservation? tenure reforms in the Northern Sierra Madre, The Philippines

The legalisation of the customary land rights of rural communities is currently actively promoted as a strategy for conserving biodiversity. There is, however, little empirical information on the conservation outcomes of these tenure reforms. In this paper, we describe four conservation projects that specifically aimed to formalise land rights in the Philippines, a country widely seen as a model for the devolution of control over natural resources to rural communities. We demonstrate that these legalistic interventions are based on flawed assumptions, on: 1) the capacity of the state to enforce tenure; 2) the characteristics of customary land rights; and 3) the causal links between legal entitlements and sustainable natural resource management. As a result, these state-led tenure reforms actually aggravate tenure insecurity on the ground, and ultimately fail to improve natural resource management.