376 C. Howe et al.


of ecosystem services to provide a common language to talk about conservation and development goals, in the process masking divergent ideologies and priorities with respect to ecosystem management and development planning. Part of the present task is to make more visible the hard choices that are currently hidden. Two current examples reflect how complexities are


masked behind a win-win rhetoric: the proposed Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) and the United Nations Environment Programme’s Green Economy Initiative (UNEP, 2016).SAGCOT is an agricultur- al partnership launched in 2011 to improve agricultural prod- uctivity, food security and livelihoods, which seeks also to enhance conservation activities along a broad corridor in southern Tanzania. Supporting documents note that ecosys- tems (especially forests) provide ‘key ecosystem services to support the health of the country’s people and the product- ivity of its enterprises’ (SAGCOT, 2016;p.C-4), but do not specify how these relationships work. Thus although forests and protected areas are seen tomaintain stocks of terrestrial carbon, it is not clear howeither impinges on local poverty. It is suggested newmanagement approaches will ‘fairly distrib- ute the benefits generated fromecosystems and their services at various scales’ (ibid.), but we do not learn how this will be done, or with what benefits, or for whom (SAGCOT, 2016). In the same way, UNEP’s scoping study for the small island state of Saint Lucia also frames a win-win opportunity: it pro- poses that ‘a green economy transition’ would provide ‘aun- ique opportunity to promote prolonged economic growth, boost employment and protect the environment’ (p. 13) and emphasizes that ‘critical ecosystems.. . can serve to boost conservation efforts while enhancing the sustainable use of local materials for social and economic activities’ (p. 14). These statements assume that the priorities inform- ing these different objectives are mutually compatible when, in fact, sustained economic growth on the islandmay lead to a range of ecological impacts with negative implications for ecosystem functions and services. It is recognized in the academic literature that the actual


pathways between managing ecosystems services to achieve conservation outcomes as well as poverty alleviation are more complex than this win-win rhetoric allows (Naeem et al., 2009; Suich et al., 2015). Win-win outcomes are ob- tainable (Howe et al., 2014), but by no means straightfor- ward (Muradian et al., 2013). The assumption that ecosystem services provision and poverty alleviation goals can be achieved at the same time fails to acknowledge the existence of incompatibilities that limit the possibility of synergies (Adams, 2014). These research insights are not well recognized in the conservation policy world, where win-win framings persist. A significant difference between debates now and those of the early 2000s is the nature of policy debate about these trade-offs. In the 2000s there was heated and visible debate between those advocating


(in research literature and policy documents) conservation claims of win-win poverty/conservation outcomes and those criticizing conservation’s social impacts (Adams et al., 2004; Roe et al., 2012). Then researchers were divided, now they are more united under a win-win framing that has emerged from the ecosystem services paradigm, and that submerges debate about trade-offs between development and environmental conservation goals. Yet there is an extensive literature on conflict, trade-off


and difference relevant to the relationship between ecosys- tem services and poverty alleviation. Examples include work on integrated landscape approaches (Sayer et al, 2013; Reed et al, 2017), trade-offs (McShane et al., 2011) and the work of the Poverty and Conservation Learning Group (Poverty and Conservation, 2018). This research provides a further im- perative for this paper: unless differences that we highlight below are explicitly recognized then the learning on how to reconcile and work with such divergence may be overlooked. In what followswe present five normative positions thatwe


believe structure debates with respect to both ecosystem ser- vices, conservation and poverty. Similar contributions have been made on the basis of interviews with scientists working on ecosystem services (Hermelingmeier & Nicholas, 2017). Our approach is different because we are concerned with how poverty alleviation and ecosystem services intersect and how both will influence conservation. As was the case for Adams et al. (2004), these positions have been derived from a mixture of our reviews of the literature (e.g. Howe et al., 2014), and engagement with diverse practitioners and ele- ments of the research community.


Distinct positions


The five normative positions introduced below reflect dif- ferent mixes of concern for ecosystem condition, conserva- tion, poverty and economic growth. They differ in the extent to which they accept transformations of nature, their priori- tization of poverty reduction and the scale of their ambition. Subsequently, they also diverge in their preferred ecosystem management approaches, the ecosystem services they would be keener to enhance, and the actors in charge of financing, designing and/or brokering policy decisions (Table 1). The first two positions will be familiar to conservationists


reading this journal. The next three positions may appear less distinct. They have to be separated because they entail different paradigms within international development pol- icy and practice about how best to achieve social and eco- nomic change, which also have significant implications for the way nature conservation is pursued.


(1) Ecosystems should be managed to deliver services in ways that enable biodiversity conservation.


This position prioritizes conservation goals and the pres- ervation of ecosystem attributes. It emphasizes the intrinsic


Oryx, 2020, 54(3), 375–382 © 2018 Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605318000261


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