Does sharing the benefits from protected areas increase support for wildlife conservation?

Sharing the economic benefits from protected areas with the people living near them has become central to wildlife conservation. Devoting a fraction of protected areas’ tourism revenue to local people is meant to compensate for the costs of conservation and to build long-term support for conservation. What do we know about the impacts of benefit sharing on conservation attitudes and outcomes, and what important knowledge gaps remain?

One set of conservation costs incurred by local people is the land and resource use restrictions that protected areas like national parks impose. For example, farming is typically not allowed inside protected areas, and grazing and hunting are often limited or prohibited. Second, living near wildlife exposes people to the risk of human-wildlife conflict, including losing crops or livestock, or even being injured or killed by wild animals.

The emphasis on benefit sharing in protected area management reflects two considerations that have gained prominence in the last several decades. First, the creation of some protected areas involved forced removals of people living in the areas. Compensating victims and their descendants is seen as just by many conservation practitioners. Second, effective wildlife conservation requires the support and assistance of local people, who choose whether to respect regulations inside protected areas, whether to share useful information with protected area staff, and whether to collaborate with protected area staff in managing hunting, fishing, and human migration into the buffer regions surrounding protected areas.   

Benefit sharing in Africa typically involves community-level benefits like the construction of infrastructure, schools, and health clinics. Individual-level benefits are also common, such as employment opportunities in the protected area and small grants for ‘livelihood activities’ that produce food or income.

Benefit sharing is law in some East African countries like Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. For example, Rwanda earmarks 10% of tourism revenue for benefit sharing and another 5% for compensating victims of human-wildlife conflict (Susan Snyman et al., 2023). Where governments delegate or collaborate in managing protected areas with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), these conservation NGOs also often engage in benefit sharing.

There is some evidence for the hypothesis that benefit sharing increases support for conservation. For example, Juma Kegamba et al. (2023) finds that most people living in the Greater Serengeti Ecosystem in Northern Tanzania “agreed that benefits received encouraged them to support the conservation of nearby protected areas” (p. 1917).

What appears to be missing from the academic literature is causal evidence regarding the relationship between benefit sharing and support for conservation. This matters because funding for most protected areas is inadequate. Understanding the extent to which benefit sharing causally affects attitudes is necessary for maximizing the impact of limited conservation budgets.

Experiments like “Can Redistribution Change Policy Views? Aid and Attitudes Toward Refugees” would be valuable (Travis Baseler et al., 2024). That paper finds that sharing international refugee funding with native Ugandans and Kenyans improves their attitudes towards refugees from neighboring countries. If sufficient data on conservation attitudes could be gathered, a difference-in-differences design could also be possible because different countries have changed benefit sharing policies at different times, and even within countries different types of protected areas have different benefit sharing policies.

The type, quantity, and salience of benefit sharing may also affect support for conservation. For example, Rwandan respondents in Snyman et al. (2023) would like the government to reallocate some benefit sharing funds from infrastructure and education projects toward livelihood activities, while Tanzanian respondents in Kegamba et al. (2023) more commonly prefer scholarships. Does benefit sharing in preferred spending categories create more support for conservation? Regarding salience, Baseler et al. (2024) find that informing subjects of existing benefit sharing policies improves attitudes almost as much as giving subjects a labeled benefit sharing grant. Would this result hold in the context of protected area benefit sharing?

The relationship between benefit sharing and conservation support is the first step in benefit sharing’s theory of change. The second step is whether benefit sharing (via higher conservation support) improves wildlife conservation outcomes, such as reducing unauthorized hunting inside protected areas or enabling populations of endangered species to increase. Answering this causal question would probably require even more extensive data collection than assessing the impact of benefit sharing on conservation attitudes. But it would be a worthy endeavor for researchers and conservation practitioners working toward effective and equitable protected area management.