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"Integrated approaches are gaining in importance as a means to address the increasing pressures and demands of society on land, water and biological resources and the continuing degradation of ecosystems. Their aim is often to promote sustainable and productive land-use systems and to protect critical resources and ecosystems by balancing land, water and other resource uses, providing a basis for participatory decision-making and conflict resolution among stakeholders, and creating an enabling political, social and economic environment. Integrated strategies are increasingly associated with multi-stakeholder processes and with decentralisation and they may include actors and institutions from government, civil society and the private sector. They have taken a variety of forms, including Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) and Integrated River Basin Management. Although many integrated approaches make ambitious claims about their likely benefits, in practice the results of implementation have been mixed in terms of ecological, social and economic impacts. This paper examines what has worked and failed to work in integrated approaches and why. It investigates the enabling conditions and well as the biding constraints that appear to affect the success of such approaches. We draw on examples from integrated conservation and development to examine these issues.
"The paper first explores the conceptual issues of integration, outlining the different ways in which integration can occur and the different directions it can take. Integration can mean, for example, integration of different goals such as biodiversity conservation and social and economic development. It can also be integration between different actors and institutions, such as government and communities, and it can occur at different scales from local to international, and across scales. It can also involve integration between different ecosystem services to improve human well-being. Different types of integration imply the usage of different tools and instruments or combinations of these. For example, integrating conservation and development may require addressing simultaneously property rights, production and marketing issues. The paper then maps the main integrated approaches developed and implemented in recent decades. The mapping illustrates how integration occurs in practice, including the tools and instruments used and scale of implementation. Based on a review of meta-analyses of approaches aimed at integrating conservation and development and on the authors own research, the paper draws general lessons about the enabling conditions and constraints facing integrated strategies, which can be of a political, institutional, economic, social and ecological nature or a combination of them. Although integrated approaches imply synergies and win-win solutions, in practice they also involve important trade-offs, which need to be identified and negotiated so that solutions are minimally acceptable to all stakeholders." |
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