INCENTIVES FOR BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION AT THE LOCAL COMMUNITY LEVEL

Several countries are considering a range of incentive measures to achieve the conservation of biodiversity and the sustainable use of biological resources, as mandated by Article 11 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). To some extent or the other, a number of such measures were already in place in many countries even before the CBD, but the latter has given an additional impetus, and in some cases, a new direction, to the thinking and practice of incentives. Some of these aspects have been dealt with in the CBD Secretariat's relevant papers (UNEP 1996; 1998) and in the decisions regarding this agenda item at the third and fourth Conference of Parties to the CBD (Decisions III/18 and IV/10A). This paper takes a broad view of the kind of incentive measures that a country like India should put into place. India, like many other 'developing ' countries, has the following features that are relevant as a context to the planning of incentive measures: 1. A high degree of economic and social disparities, which affect the management of its natural resources in adverse ways, allowing the privileged to get away with over-exploitation and forcing the under-privileged to degrade their meagre resource base