Empowerment in conservation and natural resource management

At its conceptual roots, empowerment is a process or outcome of changes in power (Carr, Reference Carr2003). Power is the capacity to decide amongst choices for the most favourable outcome (Kabeer, Reference Kabeer1999). This capacity to choose is constrained by the thoughts, communications, rules and practices of individuals, societies and institutions (Foucault, Reference Foucault1980). Power frequently mediates relationships between competing and unequal entities, with negative connotations of the powerful dominating the disempowered. However, power is not a finite resource to be shared and divided, and gains in power by one individual or group do not necessarily mean that another has lost power.

Empowerment can occur on an individual level whereby an individual gains autonomy over their thoughts and actions (Yoder & Kahn, Reference Yoder and Kahn1992) or a community level whereby the community gains the ability to solve problems and control outcomes (Fawcett et al., Reference Fawcett, Seekins, Whang, Muiu, de Balcazar, Rappaport, Swift and Hess1984). Although empowerment may be facilitated through improved access to information, individuals and groups may only be empowered when people are able to exercise power and make decisions that achieve favourable outcomes (Alsop & Heinsohn, Reference Alsop and Heinsohn2005). Thus, disempowered individuals or groups are often the targets of empowerment efforts because they are denied access to choice (Kabeer, Reference Kabeer1999), including options for how they use their environments and interact with governing institutions. These conceptual distinctions also mirror the development of the use of the term empowerment in conservation discourse.

Empowerment in conservation can be traced back to the early 1970s with the emergence of a new people-centred paradigm. In 1971 UNESCO launched the Man and the Biosphere Programme, marking a new conservation era that benefited people (Stevens, Reference Stevens1997). Community rights, which were subsumed under the use of empowerment as a guiding principle, embodied different factors that inspired this paradigm shift towards people-centred conservation. Principal among these factors were practitioners’ broad concerns over a lack of attention to the impacts of protected areas on local communities (Brandon & Wells, Reference Brandon and Wells1992). Anthropologists, development scholars and ecologists showed that exclusionary preservation-oriented conservation was often ineffective and even counterproductive to reaching conservation and development goals (Western & Wright, Reference Western and Wright1994). In turn, a better understanding of the human dimensions of environmental degradation persuaded practitioners that conservation could not happen in isolation from development (Ghai, Reference Ghai1994), making empowerment a desired outcome of these efforts. The de facto strategy for empowerment then emphasized communities as target social groups for empowerment through re-establishing their rights to sustainably use their natural resources.

This nascent form of empowerment in conservation was limited to poverty alleviation as a tool to mediate how social and political factors influence the way groups of people interact with their environment. Thus, the early generations of integrated conservation and development projects were informed by the premise that poverty and lack of alternative economic activities were the main drivers of resource depletion and environmental degradation. This perspective became central to the prevailing paradigm (Ghai, Reference Ghai1994), placing alternative livelihood activities on the frontlines to empower local communities (Alpert, Reference Alpert1996) and reduce anthropogenic pressures on the environment. Yet this retained the locus of power with external actors who advocated top-down empowerment.

A burgeoning actor-centred rural development scholarship of the 1980s advanced processes that shifted towards bottom-up empowerment that not only included communities, but individuals as target social groups who take control of their own priorities (Ellis & Biggs, Reference Ellis and Biggs2001). As the fields of rural development and conservation began to merge with the growth of integrated conservation and development projects, programme managers shifted their views of empowerment to consider economic impacts alongside other, more diverse metrics. Simultaneously, conservationists and social scientists injected community-level work into more traditional conservation projects to explore the impact of community involvement on conservation (Souto et al., Reference Souto, Deichmann, Núñez and Alonso2014).

In the early 1990s two complementary approaches converged to lay the foundation for how we perceive empowerment today: common pool resources and community-based conservation. Research from prominent scholars in these fields (Berkes, Reference Berkes1989; Ostrom, Reference Ostrom1990) provided strong evidence that community empowerment through devolution of resource governance rights laid the social foundation necessary to achieve conservation. Ecologists also began to explore and expand ways to include local economic realities, worldviews and knowledge into conservation assessments (Gadgil et al., Reference Gadgil, Olsson, Berkes, Folke, Berkes, Colding and Folke2003). In the last 2 decades, these conceptual underpinnings of community conservation models enabled diverse stakeholders to improve local conditions and preserve biodiversity. This is promoted through integrated conservation and development projects (Garnett et al., Reference Garnett, Sayer and Du Toit2007), community-based conservation (Berkes, Reference Berkes2004), community forestry (Agrawal & Chhatre, Reference Agrawal and Chhatre2006), community-based natural resource management (Murphree, Reference Murphree2009; Dressler et al., Reference Dressler, Buscher, Schoon, Brockington, Hayes and Kull2010), common pool resources (Berkes, Reference Berkes1989), ecotourism (Lenao & Basupi, Reference Lenao and Basupi2016) and protected areas (Stephanson & Mascia, Reference Stephanson and Mascia2014). Although growing multidisciplinary interest in empowerment is promising, scholars obfuscate its contribution to conservation science with an array of definitions and metrics.

Meanings, measurements and outcomes of empowerment

Scholars or practitioners who try to parse out the myriad uses of empowerment may be overwhelmed. Empowerment has been conceptualized and used across a diversity of contexts and categories in conservation and community-based natural resource management (Table 1). Although some scholars resist defining empowerment altogether because they believe that its strength lies in its ability to mean different things to different people, others believe that a precise definition makes empowerment measurable over time (Kabeer, Reference Kabeer1999). For example, many researchers outline processes and outcomes that fall under the umbrella of political empowerment, which is considered the strongest form of empowerment. These include rights of adjudication, autonomy in decision-making, access to critical natural resources, capacity for financial management, increased political participation and a shift to a bottom-up, people-centred framework (Stephanson & Mascia, Reference Stephanson and Mascia2014). Scholars document processes involving decentralization of power from national or regional to local authorities. Devolution of resource rights, ability to derive equitable benefits from their use, and capacity to modify and implement local rules are examples of such processes (Kellert et al., Reference Kellert, Mehta, Ebbin and Lichtenfeld2000; Romano, Reference Romano2017). Researchers who examine processes of economic empowerment, harkening back to traditional views, tend to focus on the provision of controlled access to natural resources that are important for livelihood generation in and around areas of value for biodiversity conservation (Budhathoki, Reference Budhathoki2004; Nilsson et al., Reference Nilsson, Baxter, Butler and McAlpine2016). Social and psychological empowerment processes provide the space to realize the potential of traditional knowledge, cultural practices and social capital that emphasized modes of sharing and kinship in resource management (Scheyvens, Reference Scheyvens1999).

Unlike its many interpretations, criteria for identifying, qualifying and assessing empowerment in conservation are rare. For example, a study of 45 community-based marine protected areas in the Philippines explored correlations between the notion of community empowerment and various independent variables pertinent to project success (Pollnac et al., Reference Pollnac, Crawford and Gorospe2001). An expert panel found that empowerment was positively correlated with village population size, democratic decision-making, local participation in projects and the willingness of communities to accept input from government and non-governmental organizations. A study analysing 42 examples of Indigenous entrepreneurship from the United Nations Development Programme's Equator Initiative found that decentralization of management powers over natural resources contributed to political, women's and youth empowerment (Berkes & Adhikari, Reference Berkes and Adhikari2006).

Drawing from its conceptual roots and contributions by Scheyvens (Reference Scheyvens1999), scholars’ uses of empowerment tend to vary according to: (1) the locus of power, (2) target social groups, (3) direction of empowerment, and (4) empowerment as a process or outcome. The loci of power range from governmental entities (Kellert et al., Reference Kellert, Mehta, Ebbin and Lichtenfeld2000) and local livelihoods in some cases (Chambers, Reference Chambers1983; Almudi & Berkes, Reference Almudi and Berkes2010; Oldekop et al., Reference Oldekop, Holmes, Harris and Evans2015) to community-based natural resource management programmes themselves (Kull, Reference Kull2002). Similarly, target social groups range from individuals, people, groups, communities or institutions, although targets may be missing altogether. The direction of empowerment refers to the flow of power, whether top-down, bottom-up, or a combination. Empowerment is also used as a process and/or outcome, with large impacts on the potential for continued support to the groups that seek to be empowered. Some suggest empowerment occurs as a process of decentralization of rights and responsibilities, whereas others indicate it results from increased decision-making ability and control. Although these elements are similar, they diverge when scholars and practitioners apply them in different contexts, and potentially lead to vastly different outcomes.

Despite this variability, scientists and project managers increasingly see empowerment as one important indicator of conservation success. However, some scholars may declare unambiguously the achievement of empowerment (see Kellert et al., Reference Kellert, Mehta, Ebbin and Lichtenfeld2000), whereas others may give up when funding runs out and few or no ecological or social improvements are achieved (Rihoy & Maguranyanga, Reference Rihoy, Maguranyanga and Nelson2010). Conservation's conflicting relationship with empowerment has the potential to backfire, unintentionally generating pushback against people-oriented conservation. A reassessment of the definition and purpose of empowerment could improve conservation's impact within disempowered resource-dependent communities.