Creating direct incentives through ecotourism for protecting wildlife

Full Solution

by Paul Eshoo, Wildlife Conservation Society

Spotlighting for wildlife at night tour

Tony Deary / WCS

The Nam Nern Night Safari is a tour in Nam Et-Phou Louey NPA, Lao PDR, designed to give communities incentives to reduce illegal hunting and sale of endangered species. Tourism has been initiated as a measure to reduce threats in addition to enforcement and outreach activities. Incentives are created through a contract signed with the 1,186 families of 14 forest-edge communities, which ensures income to families for every tourist and wildlife sighting on the tour.

Last update: 02 Oct 2020

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Context

Challenges addressed

Poaching

Lack of alternative income opportunities

Poor monitoring and enforcement

Poor governance and participation

illegal sale of wildlife and hunting with illegal weapons Hunting for sale of wild meat for domestic and international markets is endangering Laos’ biodiversity. The project has sought to give communities clear and direct incentives to reducing threats to key species by reducing the number of people entering the totally protected zone (TPZ); hunting with illegal weapons (guns and steel traps and snares); and illegal sale of wildlife.

Scale of implementation

Local

Subnational

National

Ecosystems

Temperate deciduous forest

River, stream

Theme

Access and benefit sharing

Biodiversity mainstreaming

Ecosystem services

Gender mainstreaming

Cities and infrastructure

Indigenous people

Local actors

Tourism

Human health and well being, species and extinction

Location

Nam Et-Phou Louey NPA, Lao

Southeast Asia

Process

Summary of the process

The building blocks work quite simply together. The first step is creating a concept and results chain. This is done through an open discussion that focuses on how actions will result in reducing threats. The second step is creating the benefit sharing contract(s), which is based on the overall concept but is narrowed down to the essential elements that can be easily understood by the target audience, the community. The third step involves everything related to developing, marketing and selling your product. The final step is regular, adaptive management, namely making changes and improvements to the contract(s) as needed.

Building Blocks

Creating a Theory of Change Model with Your Team

Before creating the contracts, a conceptual model and results chain was created. This model clearly outlines how actions will result in addressing the identified threats, and what indicators will be used to monitor the progress towards goals. This is the fundamental step in creating a solid model that clearly addresses threats and identifies how the actions will affect change.

Enabling factors

It was important to have a team with experience in creating conceptual models and who valued the importance of the conservation planning process. The team enjoyed the freedom to discuss and come up with a new model specific to the threats and context, without having to follow a rigid or prescriptive plan from the start. A collaborative work environment that enabled brainstorming and open discussion was a key enabling factor for this building block.

Lesson learned

At the time of creating the model, the ideas were discussed but were not put into the conceptual model program (Miradi) or mapped out visually. However, it’s recommended that the model be discussed using visual cues, either paper placed walls to indicate different elements of the model or a computer-generated model. Visual cues can help people better understand and imagine the model and discuss the intricacies of the theory of change.

Creating Simple Conservation Contracts with Communities

The project used one very simple and clear contract to lay out the benefits each community and family member would earn as a result of their conservation efforts. The contracts were about one page long and were written in an easy language for villagers to understand, with prices for wildlife sightings clearly written for everyone to see. Approval by the village chief alone—a convenient and traditional protocol—was avoided because of the underlying premise of the model that all potential hunters need to be included equally in sharing benefits and responsibilities. The contracts were, instead, signed by a representative from every family in each community to ensure that everyone understood their potential benefits and required commitment. The contract was also not simply read out loud in each community, but instead there was a question and answer session to gauge villagers’ understanding and help them visualize the system.

Enabling factors

Protected area, district and provincial officials supported the concept and allowed the contract to be made in this non-traditional fashion because of their interest in conservation. Meetings with district and village officials were made prior to introducing the contracts to the communities in order to make the contracts understandable and fair from a local perspective, while making a more efficient process for approval in the villages.

Lesson learned

Creating the concept required holding separate meetings with each different stakeholder group. The first step in creating the contracts was outlining the main points, which was done internally with key project staff who understood the situation and were committed to the overall goals of the project. Once the outline was created, a more detailed draft contract was presented to government counterparts who worked closely with the project. After that, it was presented to other government and village officials who worked with the project, but not as closely, for their input. It was important to start like this rather than including all stakeholders together in one meeting because of the newness of the concept and the need to present a solid and comprehensible draft to those less familiar with the project.

Developing and promoting the tourism product

This building block involves everything related to producing your tourism product. It is recommended that a private sector partner possessing the appropriate market focus and experience in ecotourism be selected before embarking on tourism development in order to ensure long-term sustainability. Our model suffered as a result of not having a partner from the start, putting all responsibility for marketing and tour operation on the project. Selecting and training village tourism service group members is the next important step, and should be done with involvement of community leaders, the local government tourism agency and the private sector partner. Contracts with service group members can be used to create incentives for good service and protection of wildlife. Infrastructure should be built as a community project to instill maximum ownership. A cost effective, high impact marketing tool is a ‘familiarization trip(s)’ for tour companies and journalists, in contrast to printing brochures. Word of mouth is the most important factor and is ultimately determined by a unique and well thought out product.

Enabling factors

It’s important for stakeholders to understand the importance to partner with the private sector. It is equally important that the private sector understand the product and the goals of the project. If these conditions are not met, an appropriate partnership may not be created, handicapping the project’s ability to create a sound business model. If a partnership cannot be created from the start, it is important to have the financial resources to incubate the product until the conditions are better for forming a partnership.

Lesson learned

Private sector partnership is key to developing a sustainable business model, especially in remote areas that require heavy marketing to attract visitors. In the absence of a clear partnership, the project must be ready to operate the tour, possibly with subsidies from donor funds if tour numbers are low in the beginning. This is not recommended, as it takes resources from other project components and risks failure. Infrastructure built and maintained by the community should be designed in the sturdiest fashion to reduce maintenance costs. In selecting and training village tourism service group members, effort should be made to find responsibilities that allow for gender balance

Revise Contracts with Community Input (Adaptive Management)

Every year since the project started meetings have been conducted in each partner community to summarize annual benefits and infractions and discuss issues. These meetings have resulted in changes and improvements to the benefit sharing contract. It is very important to allow contracts to be adapted, changed and improved, as all issues cannot be foreseen from the start. It is also important that changes be made by villagers themselves in order to engender ownership. Here are some examples of changes that were made over the first four years of operation: • Increased penalty for killing of Class I (protected) species such as a tiger, leopard or bear to a 100% loss of a village’s fund. • Increased number of participating villages from 9 to 14 to further reduce threats in the tour area. • Sharing benefits by family rather than by village in order to give equal responsibility to families for protecting wildlife. • Providing incentives to report on wildlife crimes in one’s own village by making a rule of no reduction in a village fund for cases where information is provided by the village itself.

Enabling factors

Regular annual meetings facilitated adaptive management. The meeting format allowed villagers to feel comfortable to speak up and make suggestions. Extra budget from donors also allowed this to happen, since annual meetings do incur an extra cost above what tourism revenue alone can contribute with low tourist numbers at the start. A private business would likely not be able spend money on such meetings, which require a meeting in every community.

Lesson learned

There have been issues with process of amending contracts. Contract changes were not planned for, and as result voting procedures were absent in the beginning. It is also important to note the difficultly posed by the large time and resource cost of having follow up meetings in each community to vote on amendments. Furthermore, increased amendments to the contracts have made them more difficult for local people to read, remember and understand, reducing their effectiveness. Proposed changes have also been influenced by non-community members, both from government and non-government sides, weakening community ownership.

Impacts

There are three measures used for determining project impact. The first is the average number of wildlife sightings by tourists plus income earned by communities. If income to communities increases, wildlife sightings by tourists should also increase. In the first four years, income and wildlife sightings increased overall. However, increases in wildlife sightings alone do not indicate a positive impact, as more tourists along the river might only serve to scare hunters into other areas, with no actual reduction in threats. So, threats are also monitored. The ecotourism contracts create negative incentives for breaking protected area regulations through reductions in communal and individual benefits. As a result, the project was able to reduce hunting infractions from six to zero in the first four years. The project also compared total hunting signs (threats) between patrol sectors to determine the comparative advantage of a sector with tourism versus those sectors without. The project was able to demonstrate a flat-lining of threats in the tourism sector, in contrast to the average increases of threats found in non-tourism sectors

Beneficiaries

14 communities surrounding the tour area (the Nam Nern Sector of the protected area) that includes 1,186 families, National Protected Area management and district administration as well as the tourism industry in Houaphan Province

Story

Khampaeng is one of twenty guides and boatmen from Son Koua Village working on the Nam Nern Night Safari. He uses his expert knowledge of the forest to point out wildlife to tourists and interpret medicinal plants and tell ethnic folktales. He was in the first group of villagers trained as guides in 2010. All members of the tourism service groups are required to sign contracts with the national protected area pledging that they and their family members will not illegally hunt or sell wildlife and that they will forfeit their tourism job if they do. Hunting has been quite common in the area for generations and has been a central part of the culture and way of life. So, adhering to the contract is quite a challenge for many, especially those with extraordinary hunting skills, like Khamphaeng. The temptation to hunt for the guides is especially great when seeing animals on tour, having to fight back the hunter’s reflex, passed down to them by their fathers and grandfathers. Many of Khamphaeng’s close friends trained in the first group of guides chose to continue hunting, despite the contract. This created enormous peer pressure on him, being one of the most skilled hunters in the group. But, Khamphaeng chose not to, ignoring the requests and temptations offered by his friends. Through his perseverance he is the now one of the senior guides on the tour, helping to train new guides. Many of his best friends are no longer working as guides having broken the contract. This has built trust in his fellow villagers so much that they recently elected him to be the village chief—quite an accomplishment for a guy at his young age. Khamphaeng has also saved up some of his tourism income and built the first guesthouse in the village. He is now one of the main spokemen for the project and a model for the village.