Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

This bibliography on community-based conservation seeks to provide academic colleagues and practitioners a quick handbook on recent writings on the role of community in environmental conservation. In the past two decades, communities around the world have been recognized for their role in maintaining, protecting, and developing resources, even as they have used these resources for millennia. It is true that communities have degraded and exploited their resources unsustainably. But there is an increasing perception that without involving communities in management of resources, government policies crafted at the macro level are unlikely to have intended impacts as their translate into influences on people’s behavior at the local or the micro levels. This is because heightened environmental awareness globally, and its translation into concrete efforts to protect resources and biodiversity have often meant reduced access to marginal, local, rural populations. Resulting conflicts between rural populations who witness the disruption of their customary use patterns and government representatives who are empowered to protect resources imply dynamics that noone interested in conservation wishes to promote. Conservation should not occur on the backs of the poor and the powerless.

This ethical inference is strengthened by political concerns. The likelihood that disenfranchised populations will not cooperate in conservation, and that their lack of cooperation may render protection mechanisms impotent prompts new attempts to involve such populations in protecting resources and to develop arrangements that will make them into stakeholders for conservation. The involvement of communities in conservation results at least in part from such calculations. In consequence, the role of community in conservation has grown in the past two decades.

There are, of course, many other reasons that have come together to act as levers to raise community as a viable actor in the realm of conservation. The exact conjuncture of these alignments has varied regionally, and by resource type. What is clear, however, is that steps taken to involve communities in conservation have, as yet, found only some success, where success is usually defined in terms of better management, greater biodiversity, or more equitable distribution of benefits that are harvested. There are, of course, some significant success stories, and many other cases that provide reason for hoping that the future may yet bear out the anticipation raised by the emergence of community. Critical to understanding why community-based conservation efforts have been more successful in some regions successful than in others is comparative analysis: investigations that pay attention to the systematic national and regional patterns in governments’ attempts to involve communities into new policies, and to the variable, already-existing connections between communities and governments.

The bibliography that follows has been organized keeping these ideas in mind. The principal organizing themes of the bibliography are two: regional affiliation, and resource type. Thus, all the articles on a particular region are presented together, and within the region, the articles cluster according to the resource type whose management is being analyzed. The principal regions/sections by which the bibliography can be searched are: 1) Africa, 2) East Asia, 3) Europe, 4) Latin America, 5) North America, 6) Oceania, 7) South Asia, 8) Southeast Asia, and 9) Theoretical. The principal resource types along which entries in each of the above regions have been categorized are: 1) Agriculture, 2) Forest, 3) General, 4) Irrigation/Watershed, 5) Land Tenure/Property Rights/Commons, 6) Marine/Fisheries, 7) Mountain, 8) Protected Area, and 9)Wildlife,

We expect that researchers working to gain a better understanding of the role of community in resource management may find regional elements in selected cases that would repay comparative investigation. Some of these elements may relate to the timing of particular management innovations, the relationship of communities to states, or the nature of institutional designs that are selected by national governments to further democratic processes or incorporate communities into governance. But the following bibliography should be equally useful to those who wish to use it as a starting point for more specific research questions.