Social aspects

An environmental flow is the water regime provided within a river, wetland or coastal zone to maintain ecosystems and their benefits where there are competing water uses and where flows are regulated. Pioneering efforts in South Africa, Australia and the United States have shown that the process to establish them poses great challenges.

The mountainous region of Chitral, which recently became the first district in Pakistan to have a conservation strategy, is renowned for its rugged landscape and unique culture. What is perhaps less well known is that the area possesses a rich tradition of customary law and indigenous statecraft. This heritage, spanning a period of nearly 700 years, encompasses a wide range of subjects from defence and civil administration to land tenure systems and natural resource management.

We live in a world of rapid global change : biophysical, socio-economic and institutional. This book examines the issues and options for protected area management to ensure that we continue to protect the Earth's most valuable ecosystems in the face of these unprecedented changes.

At the heart of ‘co-management’ of natural resources is a process of collective understanding and action by local communities and other social actors. The process brings about negotiated agreements on management roles, rights, and responsibilities, making explicit the conditions and institutions of sound decentralised governance. De facto, co-management is about sharing power.

Equitable distribution of the costs and benefits associated with conservation is a key issue in natural resource management. Addressing the underlying social, economic and cultural factors shaping social differentiation within and among communities will help reverse social inequities and will also promote more sustainable conservation.

There is increasing recognition of the value that local, indigenous and mobile communities can bring to the process of conserving biodiversity, and of the need for a range of conservation types from strict protection to multiple sustainable use. Such a paradigm shift is reflected in the outcomes of two recent global events: the Vth IUCN World Parks Congress (Durban, September 2003) and the 7th Conference of Parties of the Convention of Biological Diversity (Kuala Lumpur, February 2004).

This publication presents the proceedings of the National Symposium on Wetland Conservation and Management held in 2003 in Colombo. An Introduction to Wetland Conservation in Sri Lanka is followed by ten papers on various themes on wetlands presented by eminent scientists along with the recommendations arising from the symposium.

Collection of papers drawing on insight from over 50 case studies and synthesising them into lessons to guide park management in transitional economies where the challenges of poverty and governance can be severe. The central message is that parks are common property regimes that should serve society. It analyses and sheds light on the crucial questions arising from this perspective.

In West Africa, desertification threatens the living conditions of over 250 million people. The results of projects to combat desertification undertaken over the last 40 years or so have been mixed. One reason for this is probably that technical or technological approaches have taken precedence over the sociological approach.