Goals and Hypothesis

BCN Goals

The BCN program was established to fulfill two main programmatic goals:

1. Support enterprise-oriented approaches to biodiversity conservation at a number of sites across the Asia/Pacific region, and

2. Evaluate the effectiveness of these enterprise-oriented approaches to community-based conservation of biodiversity and provide lessons and results to BCN's clients. These clients include communities and groups implementing projects, USAID and US-AEP missions and offices, members of the Biodiversity Support Program (BSP) consortium (World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and World Resources Institute), and the broader conservation and development community.

BCN Core Hypothesis

The Biodiversity Conservation Network's core hypothesis is that, if enterprise-oriented approaches to community-based conservation are going to be effective, they must: 1) have a direct link to biodiversity, 2) generate benefits, and 3) involve a community of stakeholders.

More specifically, these three elements of the core hypothesis are:

1. Linkage between the enterprises and biodiversity: The enterprises must directly depend on the in-situ biological resources of the region. BCN thus seeks to develop enterprises whose financial viability is directly dependent on sustainable use of local biological resources.

2. Generation of short and long-term benefits: The enterprises must generate benefits (economic, social, and/or environmental) for a community of stakeholders both in the short run and, with a high probability, in the long run, after BCN funding ends.

3. Community/Stakeholder involvement: The enterprises must involve members of the local community, and often others, who are stakeholders in the enterprises and biodiversity of the area.

In effect, the hypothesis is that if local communities receive sufficient benefits from an enterprise that depends on biodiversity, then they will act to counter internal and external threats to that biodiversity.

WHY BIODIVERSITY   FIELD STORIES   PARTICIPATE   RESULTS   MARKETSPACE ABOUT THE NETWORK   WHAT'S NEW   LEARNING MATERIALS   SEARCH   LINKS   SITE MAP   HOME