A framework for assessing livelihood impacts of forest conservation programmes

The importance of integrating the needs and livelihoods of local communities with biodiversity conservation efforts is now widely recognised as a key element for sustainable conservation solutions. The policy mechanisms through which to achieve this integration, however, have rarely been tested and remain poorly understood.

This project aims to addresses this gap by developing a framework for evaluating the livelihood and conservation impacts of biodiversity projects which is then applied to the case of the Gola Forest Reserves in Sierra Leone, one of the largest remnant of Upper Guinea Tropical forest in West Africa and one of the world’s global biodiversity hotspots.

Other CCI-funded projects in Gola Forest related to this one include:

This project was funded by the CCI Collaborative Fund for Conservation.

Project Aims

This project seeks to develop a framework for undertaking a randomized experimental policy evaluation study to assess the livelihood impacts of a major conservation project, namely the Gola Forest Programme. Our chosen methodology provides the best possible avenue for attempting to explicitly demonstrate a causal (and not merely correlational) analysis between a policy (treatment) and its outcomes (impacts). Such approaches have been used extensively and successfully in many other areas of public policy such as health, education or governance programmes but, to-date, there are no applications to assess the effectiveness of biodiversity policies.

The project aims to overcome both practical and ethical difficulties in applying this approach to the case of biodiversity conservation projects and then undertake an assessment of the Gola Forest project. This will be the first ever randomized experimental policy evaluation of a biodiversity conservation project and as such the project is truly and greatly novel.