Practices of participatory conservation: an ethnographic investigation in the Sundarbans of Bangladesh

Participatory conservation embraces the idea that nature and people can, and must, work together to manage biodiversity sustainably. Significant live examples—such as that of the Sundarbans mangroves in Bangladesh—suggest that layers of complexity underpin ideas of participatory conservation, often confounding its goals to produce positive outcomes for both nature and people. The Sundarbans of Bangladesh, part of the world’s largest mangrove forest, faces several human-induced challenges, including overharvesting of non-timber forest products and expansion of the commercial shrimp industry. Since 2010, a comprehensive plan has been in place to protect the forest and the 76 communities living there, following the principles of co-management—one of the early participatory approaches in conservation. However, outcomes from the strategies implemented as part of this plan remain unclear. I applied an interdisciplinary mixed-methods ethnographic methodology with an interpretative constructivist perspective to comprehensively evaluate the practised participatory conservation in the Bangladesh Sundarbans. This research is the first to conduct a detailed policy evaluation related to the Bangladesh Sundarbans and its local communities by considering the Kalinchi community as a single case study. Analysis of economic, social, and environmental policies, land use land cover changes, and income analysis are used to examine the appropriateness of practised conservation in this mangrove. This thesis also provides the first-ever detailed qualitative evaluation of participation practised under the co-management arrangements in the Bangladesh Sundarbans, combining the selected community’s lived experiences with the policy administrators’ and practitioners’ perceptions. The empirical evidence from this research suggests that a limited consideration of historical and institutional contexts in conservation planning has restricted the possibility of success. Feelings of negativity and disenchantment expressed by the Kalinchi community indicate that the enabling factors of effective participatory conservation – namely, the highest degrees of engagement and empowerment – were neither enacted nor achieved in the Bangladesh Sundarbans. While the motivations of policy administrators might have been well-intentioned, their assumptions that appeared to have been brought to the processes of participatory conservation saw policy practitioners label the communities living in the Sundarbans as the problem. Tokenistic participation was performed in exchange for the communities’ conservation compliance rather than to facilitate genuine engagement on how they interact with this mangrove ecosystem and what might be altered or initiated to improve the forest and its people’s wellbeing. The research ultimately shows that positive implementation of participatory conservation relies on the motives and practices of decision-makers and their active, nuanced and balanced consideration of the social and political contexts confronting local communities. Until this happens, participatory conservation is doomed to fail in delivering its promises. It is hoped that lessons from this thesis will deliver evidence and provide inspiration for what might be able to be achieved for the next phase of conservation in the Sundarbans and elsewhere