People and Protected Areas: An Assessment of Cost and Benefits of Conservation to Local People in Southeastern Ivory Coast

Abstract

The local socioeconomic context of protected areas (PAs) is not well documented, especially in Western Africa, despite the existence of priority conservation sites, along with the steady state of poverty in the region. This article presents research that measures the perceived costs and benefits of a conservation project on rural household welfare. The study uses the market price method along with contingent valuation methodology. The analyses provide empirical evidence that although PAs reduce local welfare, there exist locally valued benefits associated with conservation. Those benefits are, however, inadequate to offset the costs incurred by local people. While the results confirm that protected areas reduce local economic welfare in developing areas, our findings qualify the paradigm that states that “protected areas are bad for local people.”

Keywords:

• biodiversity conservation
• contingent valuation
• economic valuation
• local livelihoods

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Swiss Center for Scientific Research in Ivory Coast. We thank especially the Department of Biodiversity and Food Security and its members for assistance with survey preparation.

Notes

The analysis accounts for the survey design. The data were svyset using the “svy” command and its associated arguments on Stata software. The estimates are those of the model that would be fitted if one had the entire population in the sample.

At the price of US$16.82 per tonne in 2011 on the European market (http://www.cre.fr/en/markets/wholesale-market/the-co2-market).