Browsing by Author "Vallino, Elena"

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Community Based Management of a Protected Area: The Case of GEPRENAF in Burkina Faso
(2009) Vallino, Elena
"The present work analyzes the GEPRENAF project (West Africa Community-based Natural Resource and Wildlife Management Pilot Project) dealing with a threatened ecosystem in southern Burkina Faso. The project, funded by the World Bank, established a Protected Area and entrusted its management with the local village association AGEREF. This is the first empirical case study ever conducted about the protected area. The work assesses the socio-economic impact of the project on the local population. A qualitative field study was conducted, including review of the project documents, and interviews with focus groups and key persons. The following findings emerged from the study. On the one hand, the income generated by tourism activities, safari hunting and the establishment of value chains for non timber forest products is still low and sporadic. The scarcity of land for food crops due to the creation of the protected area is still an important concern. From an economic point of view, the management of the protected area is not a credible alternative to the traditional exploitation of natural resources, such as agriculture and grazing. On the other hand, the establishment of the reserve and the appointment of AGEREF to manage the park have meant significant institutional empowerment of the local community, and this has been essential to channel additional financial resources for infrastructures and micro-projects. Recommendations are advanced for improving the social and economic benefits of the project."
The Dilemma of NGOs and Participatory Conservation
(2019) Aldashev, Gani; Vallino, Elena
"Participatory conservation projects imply direct involvement of local communities in natural conservation efforts, aiming at combining economic development with protecting the environment. NGOs engaged in both development and conservation massively implement such projects. Numerous field studies document mixed results of such interventions and the persistence of conservation-development tradeoff: better conservation comes at the expense of lowering the livelihoods of community members because they have to abstain from using the conservation area for hunting or agriculture. Economists argue that transferring property rights to relevant stakeholders would provide the right incentives for escaping this tradeoff. We build a simple model explaining why this policy might be insufficient. If the revenue from the conservation project is low and/or volatile, the community members may rationally reject conservation unless the NGO allocates a part of resources to sustaining community livelihoods (e.g. by agricultural extension). Hence, the NGO should deviate from its narrow mission to reach its broader objective. If the NGO is funded by strictly environmentally-oriented donors it may struggle to justify diverting a part of resources to agricultural extension, as such donors obtain little 'warm-glow' utility from giving to the NGO that substantially engages in non-core mission activities. Thus, the NGO faces a 'size versus efficiency' dilemma: poorly conserving a larger area (with non-cooperating local communities but happier donors) or conserving well a smaller area (with cooperation by local communities but keeping donors unsatisfied)."
The Tragedy of the Park: An Agent-based Model of Endogenous and Exogenous Institutions for Forest Management
(2014) Vallino, Elena
"Many scholars of common-pool resources have found that institutions might solve the tragedy of the commons. I address a particular situation of natural resource management: that of a protected area. In this situation, interests differ. Local rural inhabitants care about the quality of their environment but also need to exploit the resources for livelihood reasons. An external entity such as the State, a donor, an NGO, or some combination thereof decides that there is a need for nature conservation in that area. Because of some evidence of failure for a strictly top-down conservationist approach, the external entity decides to apply the concept of participatory conservation: the local inhabitants become stakeholders in the management of the area and become collectively responsible for conservation, with rights to exploit the resources up to some degree. I argue that project designers try to find a solution to nature conservation through the creation of a situation of a commons: creating a community that has rights and duties toward a particular natural area that is endowed with some resources. Many scholars rely mostly on institutions that are endogenously created within the users’ community to avoid the tragedy of the commons. However, what happens if institutions are imposed? In participatory conservation initiatives, the community has collective rights over the resources, and in this sense, the issue of endogenous rules for the commons management is relevant. However, the level to which the community should exploit the resource is usually imposed by the external project designers. Using agent-based simulations, I develop a theoretical model to look at the consequences of an imposed institution on the state of a forest and on the users’ profit, taking into account the possibilities of violating the imposed rules and facing enforcement. I compare the consequences of this imposed institution with those deriving from an endogenously created institution. I also analyze the interaction between the different kinds of institutions and the individual perceptions of each agent. Many results of the model confirm the quantitative and qualitative findings of the literature: the presence of institutions and enforcement improve the management of the resource with respect to an open-access situation, with different degree of success depending on the kind of institution in place. The two main counterintuitive findings are the following. First, an exogenous institution imposed by external agents may crowd out agents’ intrinsic environmental motivations. Second, when an imposed exogenous institution is in place, the most effective rule is one allowing a sufficient degree of access to resources for the agents, provided that adequate rule enforcement is implemented."