Conservation and Sustainable Use of the Biosphere - WBGU

Sustainable land use E 3.3
143
used in pursuit of conservation and use goals and, on
the other hand, in some cases stipulations under
administrative law, such as the specification of catch
quotas or adherence to allocated use territories, cannot
be avoided.
As already mentioned, many previous nature conservation
strategies suffer from the fact that too little
account is taken of the local population and the
intended protection goals are circumvented for this
reason. The ‘conservation through use’ concept
draws attention to the importance of incentives for
the local population to protect the biosphere. In addition
to the ‘allocation of rights of disposal’ instrument,
further economic incentive instruments should
be developed in order to provide incentives for conservation
as well as promote the acceptance of this
new nature conservation regime. Instruments at
local, national and global level should be developed
for this purpose (McNeely, 1988). It is especially
important to deploy incentive instruments at a local
level so that the philosophy of protection is not circumvented
by permitted use. For this reason, some
possible instruments of this type are briefly presented
below.
Direct financial incentives – including negative
incentives, for example in the form of penalties – use
monetary behaviour control to influence the goal of
preserving or sustainably using the stock of biological
resources. Instruments of this kind could be, for
example, the reimbursement of entry fees from protected
areas used for tourism, monetary rewards for
behaviour which protects the environment, penalties
for the illegal use of biological resources and compensation
payments for damage caused by wild animals.
In addition to financial incentives of this kind,
material incentives in the form of food, animals and
access to areas where sustainable use is practised
could be considered (McNeely, 1988).
In addition to these ‘direct’ incentive instruments,
indirect incentives can also be used to promote local
authority interest in biosphere conservation, for
example in the form of tax relief, especially for major
land owners (core) protection areas, insurance payments
for failed harvests and social security payments
(McNeely, 1988).
A very interesting instrument in this connection is
the proposal of Panayatou (1995) to use development
rights in the designation of protected areas. For
example, a procedure of this kind is used in Puerto
Rico. Here, the coastal regions are divided into areas
worthy of protection which are not intended for further
economic development, and development areas
which are to be kept available for settlement, transportation
and commerce. Owners of land in the protected
areas are granted tradeable development
rights and can use them themselves in development
areas or sell them to the highest bidder.The development
right, which permanently increases the value of
the land, allows certain contraventions of building
regulations which are to be defined in corresponding
statutory regulations. It therefore represents an economic
value that can financially compensate inhabitants
whose economic use has been restricted without
the need for the state to take responsibility for
these compensation payments (Panayatou, 1995;
Bizer, 1997).
It has become clear that implementation of the
‘conservation through use’ strategy will have to be
achieved by a combination of a number of different
instruments which, in individual cases, should be
checked with regard to their applicability and cannot
be presented in full here. An OECD study about the
economic incentive instruments in biodiversity policy
comes to the conclusion that a combination of
several instruments is needed to achieve the objective
of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the
conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, with
the help of economic incentive instruments (OECD,
1998; Section I 3.5.1).
E 3.3.3.6
Concluding remarks: decentralization as a
necessary institutional condition
The discussion so far has shown that transferring
rights of disposal to individuals or farmers, legalizing
the use of elements of the biosphere – in most cases
the use of wild animals – and creating opportunities
for trade in natural products creates the prerequisite
for placing a value on biosphere services and the
basis for implementation of the ‘conservation
through use’ strategy. However, the accompanying
institutional framework is also of central importance
to the success of this approach. Alongside this, corresponding
local institutions also have to be set up
which not only supervise use, impose sanctions and
ensure a fair distribution of income, but should also
be integrated into the entire planning and decisionmaking
process of the ‘conservation through use’
strategy implementation. Control and monitoring
mechanisms that build upon local institutions are an
important prerequisite for guaranteeing the ecological
dimension of the sustainability goal (Krug, 1997;
Section E 3.9).
The need to gain distance from a biosphere policy
based unilaterally on centralist approaches becomes
especially clear from the point of view of the economic
federalism theory. Many biosphere services
affect cost and benefit factors at the local level, and
for this reason this is also the appropriate place for
the planning and implementation of conservation