Just Conservation

Initiatives for nature conservation often involve conflicts between human livelihoods and the restriction of people or activities from protected areas, reserves or national parks. The main argument of this book is that socially just conservation of nature is better for both human wellbeing and environmental sustainability. Whilst there is a history of proclaiming this to be true, there has been no previous book which presents detailed evidence to validate it. The author's starting point is that a justice analysis is a genuinely useful exercise that adds value to our understanding of contested environmental issues, and corresponding insights about how we can strive to do things better. To treat each other well is an end in itself, and a justice analysis can help us towards this end. But justice also has instrumental value: it is a means to more effectively achieve environmental outcomes. The author describes a framework of justice for which there is an emerging consensus: justice as distribution, procedure and recognition. This framework is then applied to specific approaches and case studies. The book reviews justice dimensions of a range of approaches to conservation based on concepts including Access and Benefit Sharing, Payments for Ecosystem Services and Rights-Based Approaches. Detailed case studies are drawn from East Africa, as well as China, Latin America and North America, characterised by tensions and competing claims between biodiversity conservation, poverty alleviation and the rights of indigenous people to self-determination.