Posted on June, 06 2011

1. Why is it important to understand the social dimensions of conservation?

Conservation is about social change and WWF’s work is largely about ensuring that individual behaviour, policies and social institutions can support a more sustainable and equitable use of natural resources.

The health and sustainability of ecosystems is closely linked to practices and systems developed by people directly and indirectly dependent on the diversity of ecosystem services.

People are the cause of much environmental degradation, but people are also part of the solution. Social aspects are inevitably interconnected with conservation efforts.

In many of the priority areas where we work, biodiversity hotspots exist alongside high levels of poverty and poor governance. Poor and marginal people are typically the losers in the competition for scarce resources, and are most vulnerable to environmental disasters and environmentally-related conflicts.

A strong social development perspective will help reduce social and transactions costs that big conservation interventions can experience, and secure the legitimacy of our agenda among several constituencies.

2. What has WWF done to mainstream social principles and concerns in conservation?

WWF has already taken several and important steps to socio-economic, governance and policy aspects to help WWF deliver on its mission to conserve, sustain and share equitably the natural resources of the planet, including the adoption of several social policies:

1. the revised WWF Statement of Principles on Indigenous Peoples and Conservation (2007);
2. the Conservation and Human Rights Framework of the joint Conservation Initiative on Human Rights (2010)
3. the Poverty and Conservation Policy (May 2009)

The Social Development for Conservation team and regional networks are mandated to draft and mainstream the social policies. Rapid and complex socio-economic developments, and related environmental consequences, are increasingly affecting our conservation work.

This presents WWF with many, new challenges, not least new policies and regulations to drive growth in sustainable ways. WWF is aware that social dimensions of conservation like poverty, equity, governance and human rights need to be appropriately addressed and solutions integrated into our work to sustain real transformational change at all levels.

This is also particularly important in the context of achieving our goal to live within the ecological limits of our planet and share resources equitably for the well-being of all.

However, we also need to be able to say that our interventions do in fact contribute to increased prosperity, and in what ways they do make a difference, especially in the communities that most depend on the natural resources and natural assets for their livelihoods. Measuring impacts means measuring real changes experienced by the communities, and how sustainable these changes are.

3. How is WWF doing in terms of measuring the social impacts of conservation today?

There is increasing attention within WWF to measure our impact.

This can be seen in our work on Standards, the Measures programme led and coordinated by WWF-US, and the work pioneered by national and program offices around the network to monitor the poverty-environment linkages; all these show commitment to improving our performance and sistematicity.

There is a lot of ground to make up for. As pointed out several times, (Agrawal and Redford, 2006), measurement efforts have often focused on process rather than change, on short-term results, and on project activities rather than outcome and impact.

Moreover, in some cases the lack of baseline data has complicated issues of attribution of the kind and level of social impacts produced by the project or programme.

The recent WWF workshop Measuring Social Impacts of Conservation in the Coral Triangle in Bali (March 2011) is one example of effective shared learning among WWF offices with regard to monitoring social impacts in their respective landscapes like Palawan (Philippines) and Solor Alor (Indonesia).

An important realization is the importance to conduct social analysis and understand social conditions and dynamics in order to develop an effective framework for monitoring change. For example, please refer to the WWF manual Livelihoods and Good Governance Change Monitoring by the WWF-Nepal Terai Arc Landscape Program.

4. What are the major benefits of investing more resources into applying monitoring frameworks to measure the social impacts of conservation interventions?

The ability to effectively measure the outcome and social impacts of our conservation interventions can help us with:

1. Adaptive management, that is, improving what we are doing and setting the process on a better course if needed.
2. Strengthen our accountability record with civil society, government and community partners, donors, and business partners.
3. Reinforce our legitimacy as a conservation organization that is effective in delivering on biodiversity and social targets.
4. Improve transparency level regarding our actions and delivery in conservation.

The monitoring efforts in both Palawan in the Philippines and in the Solor-Alor area in eastern Indonesia are good examples of monitoring social impacts beyond income generation.

Often, quantitative measures of economic returns become the focus, however this is not enough to give a sense of empowerment, governance, and ultimately sustainability.

Enabling conditions and an inclusive concept of “prosperity” including institutional building, participation, partnerships, market links, governance models of natural capital also need to be considered in order to give a more integrated picture of ‘impact,’ change in the livelihoods of coastal communities based on sustainable use of natural resources and business practices.

What dimensions are important to measure does not only depend on the project targets, but more importantly on the understanding of the causal linkages between ecosystems and socio-economic conditions.

For example, there are promising signs that practices in tuna fisheries can be built on stronger, larger scale and more economically rewarding grounds for local fisher-folks when investing in local resources and communities, and targeting quality products to feed sustainable markets.