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An Assessment of Livelihood Security in International Community-based Wildlife Conservation Projects

Strategies for human livelihood security and wildlife conservation often conflict, especially in rural and impoverished areas where wildlife and their habitats are important sources of livelihood. Community-based conservation approaches to wildlife conservation seek to remedy this conflict. Still, problems persist and alternative forms of livelihood are often not generated or accounted for in community-based projects. Therefore, it is important to understand the extent to which and specific ways livelihood security are incorporated into community-based wildlife conservation projects.
This thesis uses qualitative methods to examine the extent to which livelihood security is incorporated into community-based wildlife conservation projects. Specifically, I assess whether and how well various subcomponents of livelihood security, which I identify as income, non-monetized benefits and access rights, representative participatory management, and food security, are incorporated into projects from developing regions around the world.
My content analysis and rating of the quality of evidence of 27 published case studies revealed that various subcomponents of livelihood security are often incorporated into community-based wildlife conservation projects, though the subcomponents are often only weakly or moderately incorporated and sometimes are not incorporated at all. Among the four subcomponents of livelihood security, representative participatory management is incorporated into the projects to the greatest extent and food security is incorporated the least. Although case studies might mention livelihood security, in one-quarter of such instances, no evidence was provided that a particular subcomponent was actually incorporated into the project. Still, livelihood security was found to be incorporated to a moderate or strong extent in slightly more than one-third of instances. Recommendations to better incorporate livelihood security into wildlife conservation projects are provided for project facilitators, including non-governmental organizations, funders, and government agencies.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:MONTANA/oai:etd.lib.umt.edu:etd-01162013-114202
Date13 February 2013
CreatorsPerez-Watkins, Monica Antonia
ContributorsRobin Saha, Len Broberg, Steve Siebert
PublisherThe University of Montana
Source SetsUniversity of Montana Missoula
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-01162013-114202/
Rightsrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Montana or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

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