Jim Erickson: This is Jim Erickson with the University of Michigan News Service.
I'm at the School of Natural Resources and Environment, speaking with Professor Arun
Agrawal and postdoctoral researcher Lauren Persha about their study of the social and
ecological benefits of tropical forests.
Professor Agrawal, what were you trying to find out in the study?
Professor Agrawal: We have been trying to understand how the relationship between the
different benefits that forests provide should be understood for about the past 15 years
now. What we are trying to understand in this particular study is how local participation
in making rules to manage forests affects social benefits such as livelihoods, economic
benefits such as incomes of rural populations and, at the same time, how does it affect
biodiversity in the forest.
Erickson: Lauren, how did you go about answering thoise questions?
Lauren Persha: We took a set of cases that were representative of the kinds of human-dominated
landscapes that are in these systems in the tropics and we looked at the relationship
between indicators of biodiversity in the forests and indicators of income in households
and subsistence contributions from forests to their households and assessed the relationship
between these two things. And then we looked at the ways that a set of factors including
local participation were able to explain the different kinds of outcomes that we saw in
our data set.
Erickson: And what was the most significant finding?
Agrawal: You know, forests are amazing things because they are so beneficial to human beings
and many people don't realize that they store carbon, they provide livelihoods and they
store biodiversity. What we found, in contrast to a lot of people
who work on forests, is when people are depending to a substantial extent on forests and, so,
they are taking out economic benefits from forests, it's possible to have higher levels
of biodiversity in those same forests. And what makes it much more likely that you'll
have both higher livelihoods and higher biodiversity is that if local people have control over
larger areas of forests from which to draw benefits for themselves.
Persha: And the second important finding coming out of that is that when those local people
also are able to participate in making rules over the use of that forest they also, again,
are able to obtain both of these things.
Erickson: Professor Agrawal, what are the implications of your findings for forest management
in tropical developing countries?
Agrawal: Over the last 50 years, many different scientists have tried to understand whether
it is possible to get higher levels of benefits from forests at the same time as forests provide
ecological benefits to human beings. One of the key obstacles to arriving at a clear understanding
of this has been lack of data and so we have used very systematically collected data to
show that, in fact, it is possible to do that and what we have tried to do is to provide
information, on the basis of which we can make better policy about managing forests.
Erickson: Where are the study sites that were used to get this data?
Persha: We drew study sites from six countries, three were in east Africa...Kenya, Tanzania
and Uganda...and three countries in south Asia..Nepal, India and Bhutan. And in each
of those countries we had anywhere from five to almost 40 cases and the cases were spread
across different kinds of forests as well, and so we had representation across more highland
tropical areas and lowland, drier kinds of tropical forests.
Erickson: Why would the level of local participation affect social benefits and biodiversity in
a forest? What's the connection there?
Persha: What we think is going on with that connection is that when local villagers are
able to participate legitimately in decision-making processes they're able to use their local
knowledge of the resource, they have better knowledge of the state of the forest and a
stronger incentive now to make decisions that not only balance their short-term interests
but also take into account actions that would sustain the forest over the long term.
Agrawal: If you look at the world's forests, 85 percent of them are owned by governments
and what the study shows is that communities can manage their forests and protect them
and gain benefits from them when they have more control over forests, so it's a lesson
for governments about how to make policies to manage and govern their forests.