Journal Article

A report suggesting that governments will not meet the SDGs unless they tackle the specific obstacles faced by marginalised groups, including addressing discriminatory attitudes and the need for international pressure to bring about normative change.

Bhatkal, T., Samman, E. & Stuart, E. 2015. Leave no one behind: The real bottom billion. Overseas Development Institute, London, UK.

In light of the Aichi target to manage protected areas equitably by 2020, the authors ask how the conservation sector should be incorporating concerns for social justice. Authors focus in particular on ‘recognition’, because it is the least well understood aspect of environmental justice, and yet highly relevant to conservation because of its concern with respect for local knowledge and cultures. In order to explore the meaning of recognition in the conservation context, the authors take four main steps.

Community-based rangeland management (CBRM) has been promoted as a promising option for achieving both rangeland conservation and community well-being. However, research on its effectiveness is limited, and the reported outcomes are mixed, especially with regard to socio-economic outcomes. The authors for this research paper measured social outcomes of CBRM in Mongolia by comparing 77 formally organized pastoral groups with 65 traditional herder neighbourhoods across four ecological zones.

Community Forest Management (CFM) devolves forest management to local communities to achieve conservation and human well-being goals. Yet, the evidence for CFM’s impacts is mixed and difficult to interpret because of inadequate attention to rival explanations for the observed empirical patterns. In a national-scale analysis in Madagascar that carefully considers these rival explanations, we estimate CFM impacts on household living standards, as measured by per capita consumption expenditures. The estimated impact is positive, but small and not statistically different from zero.