Published on Development Impact

Avoiding open-access to protected areas

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Real-world contextual knowledge helps in developing interesting and important research questions, so I value readings from and conversations with practitioners. In learning about two very different protected areas, one a tiger reserve in India and the other a national park in the Republic of the Congo, I’ve noticed a common issue: human migration into and around protected areas. While the total human population living near protected areas may correlate more strongly with wildlife depletion, in-migration poses unique and addressable challenges to conservation.

Management of natural resources, such as limits on the quantity of hunting, are the key to ensuring that wildlife and their habitat persist. And large levels of in-migration make creating and maintaining management institutions much more difficult. One of the first steps in creating a management regime is defining the set of authorized resource users, which is hard if the set of potential users keeps changing.

After the creation of a management regime, if migrants do not gain rights to hunt, fish, graze livestock, or harvest timber and other forest products, the costs of excluding migrants may overwhelm the will and capacity to enforcement management rules. But if migrants do gain use rights, then the per-person economic rent created by resource management likely decreases. As open-access—when anyone can use resources with no limits—diminishes rents to zero, preserving the rents created by management may help maintain local support for such regulations.

Nitin Sekar’s What’s Left of the Jungle illustrates these difficulties in Buxa Tiger Reserve, West Bengal, India: “Buxa’s institutions were not geared to manage…Since the government did not regulate who moved into Buxa’s villages or what they did once they arrived, Akshu [the book’s protagonist] said there was a regular influx of migrants from all over the region that showed up, cut down some forest, and built a house…‘Everything is free here! You can cut timber here, catch and sell fish for free, sell non-timber forest products…’” (p. 329).

I heard the same theme visiting Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park last year. Northern Republic of the Congo is sparsely populated, with only two villages within 40 kilometers of the park. While today there are still no villages inside the park, the human population in the buffer region outside the park is increasing in part due to migration from the neighboring countries of the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in part due to economic opportunities generated by forestry operations and increasing accessibility as roads are built. I am of course sympathetic to people moving for better economic opportunities or to escape armed conflict. But wildlife will only persist if the total levels of hunting and fishing are limited. Because wildlife cross park boundaries, large increases in hunting and fishing outside the park would deplete the region’s wildlife.

Nouabalé-Ndoki and Buxa are on different continents and they have different baseline levels of human population density, but in both granting incumbents exclusive rights appears to be the leading solution to conserve wildlife and habitat and the economic rents from natural resources. When incumbents from Bomassa, one of the villages near Nouabalé-Ndoki, assert their customary land rights to new arrivals, they explain that they will tolerate a temporary hunting or fishing camp, but not a new permanent village. With these rights defining the set of authorized resource users over each area, the next step of developing hunting and fishing charters that limit harvesting to sustainable levels is underway. In 2021, Akshu received paperwork from the Indian government recognizing his exclusive land ownership, which could similarly enable local resource management institutions.

These case studies from India and the Republic of the Congo suggest several research questions.  Does in-migration toward protected areas deplete wildlife and habitat in these areas? What drives human migration toward protected areas? And which strategies can ethically deter in-migration? More research on such questions would improve our understanding of the challenges to conserving wildlife in protected areas and would identify solutions that balance the needs of people and wildlife. 


Gabriel Englander

Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank

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