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PERSPECTIVES ON THE THIRD WORLD CONSERVATION CONGRESS

• A STATE OF THE UNION FOR THE PLANET
• IS IUCN A GOOD MODEL FOR SCB?
• RESPONSE TO RODRIGUEZ

A STATE OF THE UNION FOR THE PLANET

by Jim Tolisano

The third World Conservation Congress (WCC) was hosted by the World Conservation Union in Bangkok, Thailand from 16-22 November 2004. The congress offered an opportunity for governments, NGOs, corporations, academicians and researchers, and individual conservationists to report on achievements and trends in the conservation field. Participants could engage in hundreds of formal and informal presentations and dialogues that critically analyzed conservation work worldwide.

More than 5500 people registered for WCC, although fewer were actually in attendance. Representation was reasonably well distributed worldwide, although I was surprised at the limited participation from the United States. The U.S. government had a particularly dismal showing. Several U.S.-based international environmental NGOs had a strong presence, including the Wildlife Conservation Society, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. A few other U.S.-based NGOs were present, but their display materials were either weak or nonexistent. Conversely, the presence of NGOs and government departments from Italy, Spain, France, England, Holland, Sweden, and Germany was strong and dynamic. The World Bank, Asian Development Bank, GEF, FAO, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, European Union, and foreign assistance programs from France, Italy, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Japan were highly visible through well-organized display booths and formal presentations. The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) did not have a booth, nor were there any obvious presentations or forums that elaborated AID's environmental programs. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) also had no obvious presence. Either AID and the IDB missed a premier opportunity to inform the conservation community of their immediate and long-term environmental strategy, or they very clearly informed us of its priority and potential.

The dominant themes at WCC were the promise and practice of landscape or ecoregional planning; the importance of "bottom up," community-driven conservation projects; and the need to engage corporations and the business community in conservation actions. A significant percentage of the sessions emphasized business and biodiversity, and the increasingly evident corporate role in conservation. Most attendees accepted that the financial and institutional needs of global conservation are too great to be met fully by current government, multi-lateral, or foundation programs. There is an unquestionable role for corporations in conservation as providers of financial resources, technical strategy, and social responsibility. Yet very few of the sessions I attended offered good, concrete recommendations for engaging the corporate sector in ways that create an equitable source of revenue without significantly constraining conservation values. This is not to suggest that we can't achieve a healthy balance of corporate and conservation goals, but to indicate that few groups from either camp have found language informing us how to move this relationship forward. However, it is obvious that this will become a high priority for the international NGO community.

The continuing trend to design conservation projects that integrate conservation and development (ICDPs) was also a prominent discussion topic at WCC. Most people seem to agree that although the project design trend is moving away from site-specific ICDPs and towards broader regional conservation planning, improving rural livelihoods will remain a key component of all conservation agendas for a long time to come. However, few people took on the truly challenging question facing both ICDPs and the regional planning perspective: is it possible to create work and businesses in and around protected areas that will substantially increase local incomes without significantly degrading habitat values and ecosystem dynamics? Few data suggest that a lot of money can be generated and equitably distributed locally, be it in Montana or Malawi, by keeping landscapes wild and resilient. There were no strong examples at the WCC to suggest that we have come up with any strategies to the contrary, even in a world ready to trade carbon credits like baseball cards. Assisting and empowering rural people can manifest in improved health care, stronger legal standing, better social representation, and perhaps opportunities to slightly increase cash flow in previously cash-starved areas. However, this requires proponents of the ICDP agenda to more clearly articulate that their efforts ultimately may enhance a social wealth that doesn't always have much to do with making money, and this message does not appear to be fully ingrained into the policies of the bilateral and multilateral donors.

Alongside the discussions of ICDPs were presentations from NGOs, governments, and donors revitalizing the importance of protected areas in conservation strategies. There appeared to be reasonably strong consensus across all sectors that, as a species, we want to isolate at least parts of our planet to allow evolution to celebrate its potential in parks and reserves. However, although quite a few sessions dealt with planning and managing protected areas, no meaningful sessions offered good solutions to developing nations that must pay the high start-up and recurrent costs. It is painfully obvious that such nations have few resources available to support protected area design and management. Their external debt and internal social demands always will delegate protected areas to the bottom of any investment list. External bilateral and multilateral donors continue to begrudgingly offer funds for protected area planning, but rarely allow funding to cover recurrent costs. Too many free-market worshippers believe unrealistically that protected areas can generate significant income, and thus pay for themselves. Only rare cases offer evidence that this will ever happen on a scale that will allow us to protect the extent of areas necessary to achieve significant regional biodiversity conservation goals. Simultaneously, while it is clear that the demand and potential for sustaining and expanding protected areas worldwide is strongest from the more-developed nations, it is critical that this not become a form of eco-colonization. A possible solution raised sparingly at WCC is the allocation of public and private funds from donors and corporations to national trust funds managed by local NGOs and governments. The social and economic viability of this approach warrants more testing by donors and socially responsible corporations.

Many people commented that few displays, presentations, or forums addressed ethnic diversity and indigenous rights. The topic wasn't entirely overlooked, but neither did it have a high profile at WCC. However, this was a frequent discussion topic in informal hallway conversations, and I heard several indigenous participants making this point. Manolo Morales, of Ecolex in Ecuador, gave one of the few meaningful presentations of legal and policy actions that can be taken to improve indigenous representation and participation in biodiversity conservation projects. His presentation was well-attended, suggesting that people remain extremely concerned about this issue.

As usual, the issues embraced by the congress were complex and beyond ambitious, and responses from those who live the work of conservation were diverse and non-conclusive. There is clearly much that will and should continue to be debated, tested, and critiqued. However, there is little question that IUCN and all who participated are to be applauded for once again elevating the needs and requirements of biodiversity conservation to a level where people can see its importance and get inspired to be involved.

Jim Tolisano directs the Participatory Conservation program for Pro-Natura International, an NGO based in Brazil and France.

IS IUCN A GOOD MODEL FOR SCB?

by Jon Paul Rodríguez

Clearly, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) are two very different institutions. IUCN is more like a "federation" of organizations, grouping states, governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, and other affiliates--but all IUCN members are organizations. In contrast, the SCB membership is comprised of individuals, regardless of their institutional affiliation. IUCN provides a "space" for individual scientists and experts in its six global commissions (www.iucn.org), but these are networks of volunteers that assist and advice the Union, and are not explicitly involved in institutional governance.

When one begins to look at the two organizations in detail, however, similarities also arise. The mission of IUCN is "to influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable," while the mission of SCB is "to develop the scientific and technical means for the protection, maintenance, and restoration of life on Earth: species, ecosystems, and the processes that sustain them." Both IUCN and SCB see themselves as key players in assuring that society uses natural resources sustainably. Both rely on the best available knowledge. Both define themselves as organizations with a global reach. So, why is it that when one attends a World Conservation Congress (WCC; the Union's general assembly that meets every 3-4 years) it feels so much more like a true global conservation forum than when one attends an SCB annual meeting? Can we learn anything from IUCN and apply it to SCB? (Although I also think that IUCN could learn a few things from SCB and its annual meetings, I will not address those here!)

It might be tempting to say that the IUCN feels more like a global organization than SCB because it has been around longer (since 1948), and it has taken IUCN some time to achieve this. Although it might be partially true, it is hardly a sufficient explanation. I think the key is that IUCN genuinely faces the reality of being a global organization, recognizes that participation from the developing world must be fully subsidized by developed countries, and has acquired sufficient funding for those subsidies. This is seen not as a favor to developing countries, but an obligation of the organization. The benefits of a true global representation of delegates are perceived to be much larger than the costs of paying their way. Thus, diversity of experiences, perspectives, professional approaches, and institutional solutions are present at WCC regardless of where the congresses take place or how expensive it is to get to them.

In SCB, although internationalization has advanced significantly during the last few years, we are still far from achieving all of our objectives. The most frequently-mentioned limitation is that the majority of the membership is located in a handful of countries in which costs of membership and journals are least burdensome, and that diverting a substantial proportion of our current budget toward facilitating participation of members from other regions would be doing a disservice to our fundamental constituency. The problem is that if we really believe this we will never be able to change the status quo.

True internationalization will not occur if we wait for our membership to become more equitable globally. Although membership itself has become more affordable, members have extremely inequitable access to participation in SCB governance, and until this changes, members from poorer parts of the world will not identify themselves with the organization and its goals. For example, it is not realistic to expect that any member interested in running for a position on the Board of Governors should be prepared to pay his or her way to Board meetings (at present, subsidies are fully available only to Regional Section presidents).

In contrast to SCB, IUCN has internalized the costs of governance of a global organization, and therefore has greatly reduced the financial limitations to global participation. I believe that SCB can continue to make significant advances towards achieving true internationalization by examining mechanisms adopted by IUCN and other global conservation or academic institutions and considering how its own strategies might be revised. The fact that biological diversity is predominantly located precisely where our membership is proportionally weakest should be our principal motivation.

Jon Paul Rodríguez serves on SCB's Board of Governors and is Past President of the Austral and Neotropical America Section. He currently works with Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas and Provita, both in Caracas, Venezuela.

RESPONSE TO RODRIGUEZ

Jon Paul Rodríguez and I have been close collaborators in SCB's efforts to internationalize and I support his basic contention that SCB needs to seek financial support for members from developing countries if we are to be effective in our mission to conserve global biodiversity. It is less obvious to me that using such support to further increase developing country participation in SCB governance would be the best use of any new funds. For example, for the cost of bringing one person to the two annual meetings of the Board of Governors, one could cut the cost of membership in half for more than 100 students from developing countries. If you compare the current list of Governors and Editors (see the inside cover of Conservation Biology) to the list from a few years ago you will see that we have dramatically increased global participation in the leadership of our society and its flagship journal. SCB is fully committed to becoming, as our tagline says, "a global community of conservation professionals," but we need additional, externally obtained resources and it is not crystal clear what the optimal allocation of those resources would be. Where will the greater impact be found, with one more senior conservationist sitting among the leaders of SCB or with a hundred young conservationists gaining access to our publications?

Malcolm Hunter, Jr.
University of Maine, Orono
Past President, SCB

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