1.Front section - IUCN

chapter 7
© Thomas O. McShane
Protected areas and development
assistance agencies: at the intersection
of conservation and development
by Thomas O. McShane
Editor’s introduction
While development assistance agencies are hardly a
“new constituency” for protected areas, much has
been learned over the past decade about the
relationship between protected areas and the
development assistance agencies. Early enthusiasm
for so-called integrated conservation and
development projects (ICDP) has been tempered by
experience and many important lessons have been
learned about how to design protected area projects
so that they can be relevant to the objectives of
development assistance. In summarising this work,
Tom McShane has emphasised the importance of
linking protected areas to larger contexts,
acknowledging trade-offs between conservation and
development, and identifying incentives for protected
area conservation. Maintaining the development
assistance agencies as important supporters of
protected areas in the coming decade will require
clarity about goals and objectives, an improved
understanding of the constraints of project structures,
an expanded scale of intervention that often extends to
the landscape level, a component of policy change
that accompanies site-level intervention, developing
appropriate local institutions that can support
improved relations between local people and
protected areas, clear acknowledgement of trade-offs
between conservation and development objectives, an
improved understanding of poverty, and adaptive
management that enables an active process of
learning from experience and then modifying
interventions. As other papers in this book
demonstrate, protected areas have much to offer to
human welfare, and are therefore worthy of
investments from development assistance agencies.
Photo: Mosaic of natural forest and agricultural land in Ethiopia. The future of this landscape rests with a new generation.
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