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The work of conservation organisations in sub-Saharan Africa*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2010

Dan Brockington  and
Katherine Scholfield
Dan Brockington*
Affiliation:
Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom
Katherine Scholfield*
Affiliation:
Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom
*
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Conservation non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have excited a great deal of comment and debate, generally quite divided, in diverse journals. Some advocate them as forces for good, others decry their clumsy dealings with rural peoples and the impoverishment their activities can cause. The debate suffers in two ways. First, it ignores a large parallel literature about the work of development NGOs. Second, there is a paucity of general knowledge about the state of the conservation NGO sector. We do not know where it works, what the main players are doing, or much at all about the extent or activities of the smaller conservation organisations. We do not know how much money the sector spends. In this paper we first briefly outline why work on development NGOs should be applied to conservation NGOs, and then offer an overview of the sector's activities based on a survey of over 280 organisations. We describe some of the basic contours of these activities, and reflect on the implications of our findings for existing writings about conservation NGOs and future research.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 1 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

Our thanks to two anonymous reviewers of this paper and many many commentators on this work while the research was in progress. Bill Adams, Andrew Balmford, Neil Burgess, Rosaleen Duffy, Jim Igoe and Kartik Shanker gave this work a great deal of time and thought. Any mistakes and views expressed are ours. Dan Brockington's work was supported by ESRC Fellowship RES-000-27-0174, which we gratefully acknowledge.

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