Ch. 11— Biological Diversity and Development Assistance • 287 



INTEGRATION OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND 

 BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY MAINTENANCE 



Interests and activities of development agen- 

 cies and conservation organizations have 

 merged in recent years, in light of the chang- 

 ing perspectives of these two groups. His- 

 torically, conservation organizations and de- 

 velopment agencies planned their efforts 

 independently in developing countries (64). 

 Conservation groups focused almost exclu- 

 sively on natural areas, promoting protection 

 from human exploitation and preservation of 

 particular wild species and their habitats. In 

 contrast, development organizations focused 

 on raising the standard of living in both rural 

 and urban areas and concentrated on the ma- 

 jor agricultural species. 



Increasingly, development assistance agen- 

 cies and developing country governments are 

 establishing policies that recognize the impor- 

 tance of environmental factors in development 

 strategies. These policies stem from a growing 

 awareness in development planning of the costs 

 of ignoring environmental factors. The greater 

 reliance of developing-country economies on 

 their natural resource base — soils, fisheries, and 

 forests — underlies this growing appreciation for 

 sustainability in development initiatives. 



Planning began to include environmental 

 considerations in cost-benefit and similar anal- 

 yses during the 1970s. The emphasis was on 

 mitigating side effects, such as pollution and 

 salinization. By the late 1970s, development 

 agencies began to include components to sus- 

 tain the resource base that affected a project. 

 Watershed protection above irrigation systems 

 received funding, for instance. Development 

 assistance in the early 1980s supported projects 

 to deal directly with the problems associated 

 with natural resource degradation, such as fuel- 

 wood shortages in arid regions. 



Although maintaining biological diversity has 

 not become an objective of assistance projects, 

 these steps led toward development that gen- 

 erally caused less resource degradation and 

 thus generally benefited diversity maintenance. 

 In the 1983 Amendment to the Foreign Assis- 



tance Act (described in the next section). Con- 

 gress directed the Agency for International De- 

 velopment (AID) to support projects that have 

 maintenance of biological diversity as a spe- 

 cific objective, such as establishing protected 

 areas and controlling poaching. 



Conservation organizations, in turn, realized 

 that their traditional emphasis on establishing 

 parks and protected areas would be insufficient 

 to protect biological diversity and began to 

 broaden their approach. These groups have in- 

 creasingly realized that failure to account for 

 the needs of rural people jeopardizes the long- 

 term success of conservation projects. 



A clear manifestation of conservationists' ef- 

 forts to reorient their activities is the develop- 

 ment of the World Conservation Strategy 

 (WCS). This document links conservation with 

 development and provides policy guidelines for 

 determining development priorities that secure 

 sustainable use of resources (20). The WCS has 

 three principal objectives: 1) the maintenance 

 of essential ecological processes, 2) the preser- 

 vation of genetic diversity, and 3) the sustaina- 

 ble use of species and ecosystems. The docu- 

 ment is used to increase dialog on the interests 

 and approaches of the development and con- 

 servation communities. It has been only par- 

 tially successful, however. The WCS has been 

 effective in narrowing the gap of conservation 

 and development interests in policy documents, 

 but on a practical basis this gap remains. 



Part of the problem with linking development 

 and conservation lies in the failure to identify 

 common criteria and benefits. Conservation 

 activities generally justify projects by biologi- 

 cal and esthetic criteria. For example, conser- 

 vation organizations would draw attention to 

 the Tuatara [Sphenodon punctatus) of New 

 Zealand because it is the last remaining spe- 

 cies of an entire order of reptiles (32). Unique 

 or spectacular habitats are also given special 

 attention. Conservation organizations also fo- 

 cus on spectacular species of birds or mammals, 

 largely in response to the esthetic interests of 

 contributors. 



