Waylen, Kerry A., Fischer, Anke, McGowan, Philip J.K.,Thirgood, Simon, J., and Milner-Gulland, E.J. (2010) The effect of local cultural context on community-based conservation interventions: evaluating ecological, economic, attitudinal and behavioural outcomes.Link to Source
The authors included 68 case studies from 31 different countries, mostly from Africa and South America region. The majority of the studies assessed some form of protected area intervention.
The authors find that supportive local cultural context influences conservation intervention outcomes. The results also indicate that interventions that involved local institutions participation are more likely to be successful. Local participation, conservation education, market integration and benefit provision appear to have more limited effect on the success of conservation interventions.
The authors conclude that cultural context is a key factor affecting outcomes of community based conservation interventions and they recommend that such interventions should be designed and implemented after careful consideration of local contexts. They also recommend improving the quality and quantity of studies assessing the relation between local cultural context and conservation interventions.
There is wide literature assessing the effectiveness of community based conservation (CBC) interventions. However, few studies focus on exploring the factors that explain the success or failure of these interventions. Local community context is often mentioned as a key explanatory factor driving the effectiveness of this intervention. Nevertheless, no systematic review has previously assessed the role of local community context on explaining the effectiveness of conservation interventions.
To assess the evidence on the effect of local cultural context on the outcomes of community based conservation interventions.
The authors included primary studies focusing on community based conservation projects, assessing the role of local context and measuring ecological, economic, attitudinal or behavioral outcomes.
The authors searched published and unpublished literature written in English. They searched ISI Web of Knowledge, Anthropology Plus and JSTOR, and also used Google scholar for covering unpublished literature.The authors generated 15 predictor variables (as per interventions, contexts and design) to measure four outcomes for analysing the study results. They used correlation analysis for synthesising results.
The systematic review is based on a relatively comprehensive search and systematic data collection from included studies. However, the review has some major limitations. Most importantly, there are no inclusion criteria in terms of study design and review does not report any systematic assessment of risk of bias in the included studies. Hence it is not clear to users what type of evidence the review is based on. Additionally, there are some limitations with the search: it only includes studies written in English, authors were not contacted and reference lists were not checked.