Project

CONNECT: Transdisciplinary Research to Connect Conservation and Development through Basic Income Support

Global biodiversity is imperiled, with growing concerns that we are in the midst of a sixth extinction crisis. Conventional efforts to conserve biodiversity within protected areas (PAs) have proven unable to meet this challenge, while also often alienating local residents, leading to calls for transformative change. At the same time, conservation commonly exacerbates human-wildlife conflict (HWC) between local residents and protected animals, while current efforts to address this (e.g., via compensation schemes for livelihood losses) have proven largely ineffective. One prominent response to these problems has been conservation organizations’ promotion of market-based instruments (MBIs) intended to address poverty alleviation alongside conservation goals. These include payments for environmental services (PES) programmes (which incentivize conservation by paying resource users to conserve nature rather than convert their land to more destructive uses), more than 500 of which are currently operative worldwide. Yet mounting evidence suggests that most MBIs have been ineffective in achieving their aims, leading to growing demands for change. To address these issues, we will develop and test an innovative funding mechanism we call ‘conservation basic income’ (CBI).

This project builds on a substantial body of research demonstrating that cash transfer programs (CTPs) introduced in many low-income societies have proven effective for poverty reduction and enhancing human wellbeing (World Bank 2018). At the same time, PES programmes have been introduced in many of the same contexts to support environmental protection. Both CTPs and PES generally demand behavioral change of programme recipients via ‘conditionality’. Yet the necessity of such requirements has been questioned by proponents of ‘universal basic income’ (UBI), who advocate provision of an unconditional payment covering the basic needs of everyone within a given social unit. However, neither UBI proposals nor CTPs usually address environmental protection alongside poverty alleviation. Others, meanwhile, have questioned whether unconditional payments can achieve conservation gains in the absence of behavioral change requirements. Empirical evidence is mixed concerning the environmental impacts of existing unconditional CTPs not explicitly linked to conservation aims, with some programmes indicating positive impacts and others the reverse. Yet research suggests that unconditional programmes can often achieve gains similar to those from conditional programmes. Our project builds on all this experience to introduce and test a composite instrument providing unconditional income support for community members living in or near important conservation areas to test the extent to which such a mechanism has potential to redress rural poverty and biodiversity loss simultaneously.

Research Focus: Rwanda’s Biodiversity Hotspots

The focus of this research will be the Great Lakes region in Eastern Africa, an important global biodiversity hotspot. Within this region we focus specifically on two national parks Rwanda, one of the continent’s most-densely populated countries. Nyungwe National Park (NNP) in the southwest will be our main research site, supported by a second case study focused on Volcanoes National Park (VNP) in the northwest. The project entails a partnership between researchers at WUR and the University of Rwanda and the civil society organization (CSO) 100WEEKS, with support from several other local partners, including African Parks a South-Africa based NGO that manages NNP on behalf of the Government of Rwanda. 100WEEKS is a Netherlands-based NGO that provides unconditional cash transfers to women in low-income communities in Rwanda, Uganda, Ghana and Ivory Coast. For nearly two years, 100WEEKS has implemented such a programme near Volcanoes National Park and now plans to implement one near NNP, in conjunction with African Parks.

An Innovative, Transdisciplinary Approach

Our project complements the interventions with robust transdisciplinary investigation of their process and outcomes. Our approach is not only unique from conceptual and practical socio-economic perspectives, but also because it integrates this with research from qualitative (sociological) and quantitative (economic and ecological) approaches to study biodiversity protection and mitigation of human-wildlife conflict from multiple perspectives simultaneously. Having multiple local PhD students to conduct integrated research around the same setting provides an unprecedent case to develop sustainable conservation impacts, leading to understanding with fundamental implications for global conservation efforts.

The Team

We have hired six Rwandan PhD candidates to develop and conduct the research and are fundraising for the CBI intervenion.