Global Gains at Local Costs: Imposing Protected Areas: A Case Study From India

Abstract

"With the ever-increasing understanding about the earth as a living network of interdependent ecosystems, there seems to be a growing consensus that the whole planet is a global common. This feeling, however, is not bereft of severe complications arising from conflicting interests of different nations placed at varying levels of development. In this paper the main issue I wish to raise is regarding the price the locals have to pay for conservation-related global concerns because the area-specific local collective choice is weaker than the global collective choice. While global concerns can influence the construction of constitutional choices, through various means both coercive and persuasive, local concerns rarely find expression. I have discussed this with the help of a case study of six villages located within the Taboba-Andhari Tiger Reserve (TATR) in central India to show how the decisions of creating protected areas made at the national level, in keeping with the global concerns of biodiversity conservation, lead to marginalization of the poor. For understanding this complex situation this paper is developed on the lines of the Institutional Analysis and Design (IAD) framework, which incorporates multiple levels of analysis and multiple arenas of decision-making. In this paper I first briefly discuss definition of Protected Area, then explain the approach towards PAs in India in short, then present results of a study of Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, and finally present institutional analysis as well as economic analysis using utility-possibility frontier to test Pareto optimality conditions."