Local participation in vicuña management

Abstract

Vicuña management projects and programmes developed in the Andes follow the logic of the community-based conservation (CBC) paradigm (Robinson and Redford, 1991; Western and Wright, 1994; Hulme and Murphree, 2001). This paradigm emerged, in the past two decades, as a strategy to link conservation and community development through local participation and sustainable use. In the case of community-based conservation of vicuña, the assumption is that commercial utilisation of vicuña fibre, obtained from live-shorn animals will generate sufficient benefits to outweigh the burden of conservation and contribute to community development, thus encouraging local people to become partners in conservation. Despite the rapid popularity of vicuña management projects and programmes, developed in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru, the generation and distribution of benefits to local people has, so far, been limited (Lichtenstein et al., 2002; Lichtenstein and Vilá, 2003; Lichtenstein and Renaudeau dArc, 2005a; Renaudeau dArc, 2005). This chapter addresses the key limitations of the CBC paradigm for vicuña management in the Andes. In exploring this, the chapter re-examines three cornerstones on which this paradigm is based, by comparing the myths and rhetoric with existing practice. One fundamental assumption of the CBC is that a distinct community, defined as a group of people or social unit with clear defined boundaries, can be identified. This simplification of the term community forms part of an important and debated issue in CBC (Anderson, 1991; Murombedzi, 1991; Agrawal, 2001; Agrawal and Gibson, 1999; Guijt and Shah, 1999). In the vast majority of community- based wildlife management projects, what appears to be a community in terms of size and location may be deeply divided in terms of sociocultural values and control over different kinds of land and natural resources (IIED, 1994; Songorwa, 1999; Mazzucchelli and Ortiz von Halle, 2000). In the case of vicuña management, the Andean community is named as the main beneficiary of vicuña use, but there is no clear definition of what and who the community is. Based on a critical review of this taken-for-granted concept, the question " What is an Andean community today?" will be addressed. The second important cornerstone of CBC relates to making communities interested in participating in wildlife management projects. Social and economic incentives are used to encourage community members to participate in the conservation programmes (Milner-Gulland and Mace, 1998). Participatory approaches form part of a fundamental shift in development thinking (Chambers, 1983; Oakley, 1991; Chambers, 1993) , and participation constitutes a new paradigm of development (Chambers, 1997) , embodied in the CBC concept. However, there is also a more recent critique of participation approaches that asks if participation is intrinsically a good thing (especially for the participants); if the focus on getting the techniques right is the principal way of ensuring the success of such approaches (Cooke and Kothari, 2001). The second section addresses the question "What does local participation in Vicuña Management Programmes mean?". The third core assumption in CBC is that deriving benefits (mainly economic) from wildlife management will result in meaningful benefits to local people and positive attitudes towards conservation, and that this relationship is mutually reinforcing (Ashley, 1998; Salafsky and Wollenberg, 2000). Although economic benefits encourage participation in CBC projects (IIED, 1994; Little, 1994) , they do not always imply supportive collaboration (Olson, 1965; Cleaver, 2000). For example, the vast majority of African cases indicates that the traditional economic benefits, generated by CBC, are not at a scale that would adequately compensate local residents for the aggregate direct costs and opportunity costs caused by conservation (Hulme and Murphree, 2001). The chapter assesses the impact of participating in vicuña management on changing peoples attitudes towards vicuña conservation. This is a key issue considering that the main goal of all the programmes is conservation.