Beyond parks as monoliths: Spatially differentiating park-people relationships in the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve in India

Abstract

Parks represent spatially and socially heterogeneous conservation units, yet are often assessed and managed using spatially homogeneous approaches. This paper represents an effort to focus on the larger social–ecological landscapes within which protected areas are embedded, to understand why conservation succeeds and fails in different parts of the landscape. In a wildlife sanctuary in the central plains of India (Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve), we address: (i) how people living within and immediately outside a park differentially impact its resources and (ii) how the park differentially impacts communities living within. Using forest plots, satellite imagery and interviews, we evaluate park conservation by assessing plant diversity, land cover change, forest fragmentation, and attitudes of local communities towards conservation. We find that interior villages have a negative impact on regeneration, but there is a decline in tree species diversity, and increased forest cover change and fragmentation at the park periphery. Interior villages suffer greatly from crop and livestock depredations by wildlife and consider park rules to be unfairly devised. Yet, they affirm the importance of the park for conservation, and are willing to work with park authorities for stricter protection. Park authorities largely focus on resettlement of interior villages, when they should also pay attention to protecting the peripheral areas of the park from severe degradation by surrounding villages. In summary, we find that different parts of the park landscape face different conservation challenges. Taking into account spatial variations in the factors influencing conservation can greatly benefit the management of protected areas.

Introduction

For well over a century, protected areas have been a cornerstone of conservation efforts around the globe. Rapidly expanding in recent decades, protected parks now exist in almost all parts of the world, covering over 13% of the world’s land area (Jenkins and Joppa, 2009). Yet in many parts of the developing world, where there are high population densities, parks coexist with people in tightly coupled, fractious and uneasy relationships (Nagendra 2008). The conflicts between parks and people have been studied for decades, with conservation agencies and social scientists often taking contentious positions on the need for conservation versus human rights (Terborgh et al., 2002, Chapin, 2004). Some participants in this debate make vigorous claims that participatory approaches to conservation have been ineffective, urging a return to strict protection strategies – others point to successful cases of community conservation and urge the need to closely involve local communities as agents of conservation (Persha et al., 2010).

In recent years, many scholars have conducted in depth examinations of large datasets to seek answers to whether parks or community protected areas are effective (DeFries et al., 2010, Naughton-Treves et al., 2005, Nepstad et al., 2005, Hayes, 2006, Nagendra, 2008, Nagendra, 2009, Persha et al., 2010). The answers indicate that many government and community protected areas are effective, while others are degrading despite protection. Both strict protection and participatory conservation appear valid and workable approaches to conservation in some contexts, while failing in other situations. The causes for these varying outcomes have been examined in a number of studies. Nagendra (2007) identifies the nature of the institutional regime, the presence of monitoring, and the size of the user group as critical to the success of forest management in Nepal. In a global analysis, Walker (2009) finds that parks succeed when monitoring is low cost while the benefits of catching rule breakers are high, and when there is a strong likelihood of catching rule breakers. Bray et al. (2008) find that in Guatemala, distance to human settlements and the length of previous settlement was a significant explanatory of deforestation, while in Mexico the distance to previous deforestation was a critical factor. Agrawal and Chhatre (2006) find that biophysical factors such as slope and elevation play a critical role in shaping outcomes of forest change in Indian forests, cautioning that an overly great focus on institutions can obscure the fact that biophysical locations play a critical role in impacting forest management. These studies take an important step forward, by acknowledging that the factors impacting conservation outcomes are likely to be location specific.

Following Ostrom and Nagendra (2006), who ask to “move(s) the debate beyond the internal and external boundaries of protected areas… (to) understand when and why protection, recovery, and clearing occur in these larger landscapes”, we build on this body of previous work on protected areas, by further exploring heterogeneity in forest outcomes within different parts of a protected area-embedded landscape. We study forest change in a central Indian park, the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve (TATR), where one of us has been working extensively with park authorities and local communities for over a decade, to examine the specific trajectories of forest change in different areas of the park. We evaluate a range of aspects that include plant diversity, land cover change, forest fragmentation, and peoples’ attitudes to conservation.

Our goal is to assess how the factors influencing conservation can differ markedly in different parts of the same landscape, thus establishing the usefulness of spatial approaches that move beyond treating parks as homogeneous monolithic units, and paying attention to the diversity of drivers and outcomes of forest management within a park-embedded landscape.

Through this process, we seek to understand how the communities living within and outside the park impact its resources, how they are in turn affected by the park, and to assess workable solutions that can be identified for future effective park management.