Study delves into overlooked community perceptions of conservation impact

Most conservation projects today must answer a key question: How does the project affect the local people? But high-quality studies that measure the impacts of conservation projects on people’s well-being remain few and far between. Whatever rigorous research does exist tends to focus on a narrow range of economic indicators, such as household income or expenditure, serving as proxies for people’s well-being. But well-being can mean different things to different people. And indicators like income, while objective, may not capture aspects of well-being that are actually important to the people themselves, some conservationists argue. Instead, the conservationists have called for complementing the more objective methods with approaches that measure what the people think are important to them, because people’s perceptions of impacts can determine future support for conservation projects. To that end, a new study published in World Development has found a novel way of measuring impacts on people’s lives, by letting them define what matters to them. To see how a strictly protected area and community forest management in Madagascar are affecting people’s quality of life, Ranaivo Rasolofoson, a researcher at the University of Vermont, U.S., and colleagues adapted the Global Person Generated Index (GPGI), an index that has previously been used in the health sector to see what people consider important for their quality of life, and lets the people rate the performance of their self-chosen domains. This is the first time the GPGI has been used to assess the social impacts of a nature conservation strategy, Rasolofoson said. “Well-being includes many…

from Conservation news http://ift.tt/2GtOkzk
via IFTTT