Biodiversity and human welfare

Abstract

"This paper examines the complex relationships between biodiversity and human welfare. It aims to show how biodiversity and human welfare are perceived differently by a wide range of actors. These contested meanings constitute the politics of biodiversity, an understanding of which has profound implications for conservation policy-making. The main questions addressed are: (i) How has biodiversity been understood by different groups of people? (ii) What aspects of human welfare are affected by biodiversity degradation and by conservation? (iii) Who bears the costs and reaps the benefits of biodiversity degradation and conservation? (iv) What are the practical mechanisms “on the ground” that will deliver such benefits? While policy makers and writers at the international level perceive a synergy between biodiversity conservation and human welfare as an unproblematic “vision” of conservation, from the level of practice their supposed relationship more often appears as rhetoric. There have been formidable political problems in the way of negotiating biodiversity conservation at the international level. There has also been serious questioning of the capability and will of many states to formulate and implement conservation policies on the ground. At the local level, conservation efforts have led to the definition and appropriation of biodiversity resources, usually in the name of the state, and this in turn has precipitated struggles over those resources. Finally, there are crucial ambiguities and contradictions in the formulation and practice of biodiversity conservation, particularly in the role of science and “facts” in the biodiversity discourse. Thus, while the contemporary debate about biodiversity appears to represent elements of a new moral dimension of “human-nature” relationships, it is also a testimony to familiar political-economic divisions. These involve divisions between international, national and local interests; between North and South; between science and politics; official and folk; and power relations at the local level deriving from differences of class, ethnicity and gender. Bearing these issues in mind, it is easy to see that analysis of the relationship between biodiversity and human welfare cannot be only a matter of scientific research. While scientific methods may be powerful ways to identify and present the problems of biodiversity erosion, they are not the only ones. Biodiversity is constituted as a range of resources, which are the focus of both commercial exploitation and livelihoods. The debate is thus highly politicized. Even within the academic and international policy-making environment, we need to be critically aware of the social forces that withdraw and confer credibility to various scientific ideas. A sociology of scientific knowledge indicates that scientific “facts” are used to support various intellectual projects, upon which reputation, promotion and consultancy fees depend. Therefore discourses take place at many different levels and by a wide cast of protagonists. This paper attempts to identify different actors and stakeholders in the biodiversity arena, their interests, how they are perceived and articulated, and then promoted in the face of other different and often competing ones."(pg 1)