TNRC Blog Podcast Successful conservation is built on trust podcast

Successful conservation is built on trust

U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre | March 2021 | TNRC Podcast

The Corruption Tapes is a podcast series led by TNRC consortium partner the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre that invites researchers and practitioners to a conversation about some of the most pressing anti-corruption issues in the world of biodiversity and conservation. In this episode of the Corruption Tapes podcast, senior adviser Aled Williams at CMI’s U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre is joined by Petra Burai, associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Annah Zhu, assistant professor at Wageningen University, and Judy Oglethorpe, a senior director at WWF US. They discuss the benefits and limitations of community-based approaches to anti-corruption in conservation, and how local communities can play an important role in both conservation efforts and governance.

Experiences from all over the world show that community-based approaches to anti-corruption in conservation efforts can yield great success. A conservation effort in Makira Natural Park was showing considerable success in combatting the local-level corruption that contributed to the illegal logging of the precious rosewood in the region. It soon turned out that rosewood’s high commercial value compromised the conservation project in ways that were impossible to deal with on a local level. Illegal rosewood logging was so lucrative that it provided a strong incentive for communities to join the illicit networks.

In this episode, experts discuss the rosewood experiences from Makira National Park and how easily a community-based approach can break down once a natural resource gains high economic value. This case also shows that there is no single design that fits all and that anti-corruption intervention must adopt a multi-level approach. This means looking not only at community level dynamics, but also political dynamics at the national level and how they intersect with/undermine local resource management.

Listen to the podcast above, or you can read more from U4 here.