Poverty and ecosystem Impacts of payment for wildlife conservation initiatives in Africa: Tanzania's wildlife Management Areas (PIMA)

Rural people across the global south are caught between competing land demands for large-scale cultivation, global conservation, and local needs. These can in theory be integrated locally through community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) and payments for ecosystem services (PES): where communities can decide on and benefit directly from natural resources, they may invest in and manage those resources in ways that are more socially and environmentally sustainable. CBNRM/PES initiatives are being rolled out across the global south, but there are conflicting views as to how well they work, for whom and under what circumstances. This is partly due to the complexity and multidimensionality of the ecosystem services (ES) and poverty alleviation (PA) outcomes involved, and the inevitable tradeoffs, but also to the hitherto limited use of either qualitatively or quantitatively rigorous impact evaluation approaches that are independent, control for confounding factors and ensure the voices of the most marginalized are heard. As well as being limited by generally weak research design, studies to date have often failed to account for the ways political sensitivities around changing access to and use of ecosystem services may compromise data quality and mask differentiated impacts.

PIMA seizes a unique policy moment, with Tanzania's poverty reduction strategy Mkukuta driving nationwide implementation of CBNRM/PES-based Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs), and other countries in the region considering comparable initiatives. The WMAs comprise different ecosystems (rangeland, miombo), socio-political structures (long-established/ethnically uniform vs recent, heterogeneous constituent villages), and a broad range of ecosystem services (water-regulating and -supplying, provision of forest products, grazing, livestock, crop and wildlife production, cultural services both local and global (from locally significant social and ritual spaces, to heritage and tourism). Before/after, inside/outside comparison of social and ecological outcomes for established WMAs with matched non-WMA areas (within the same ecosystems) offers an ideal opportunity for rigorous impact evaluation. PIMA combines analysis of remotely-sensed, public-domain MODIS and NDVI data, with cutting edge study of governance, and new data from qualitatively and quantitatively rigorous, differentiated survey of livelihoods and resource use histories, structured within a before/after, control/impact (BACI) research design. PIMA brings together a powerful international research team to work with strongly-rooted civil society organizations to ensure research excellence and development impact.

Building on ongoing stakeholder engagement, with input sought from users, practitioners and policymakers at all stages pre- to post-project, PIMA ensures findings will be of direct use locally, nationally and internationally. PIMA 's framework and approach create channels for grassroots users to make experienced change in ecosystem services quality and quantity, and in poverty and wellbeing, more clearly heard by policymakers and practitioners, as well as highlighting tradeoffs and best practice lessons. Establishing what works, why and for whom will be of use not only to the one million rural people directly affected by WMAs, but will deliver insights and best practice lessons generalizable to the many millions more whose livelihoods and wellbeing are to be shaped by comparable CBNRM/PES initiatives. The findings delivered, and the mechanisms piloted, will give local users and national and international policymakers and practitioners the insights and tools to improve interventions through creating better upward and downward accountability. PIMA findings will be of use locally to rural people making collective and individual resource use decisions, through national levels, to international donors deciding how to invest scarce resources for ecosystem services and poverty alleviation.

PIMA research findings will improve ecosystem services/ poverty alleviation (ES/PA) interventions by establishing what works, why and for whom in a central test case. PIMA will improve upward and downward accountability by creating ways for grassroots users to make clear their experience of intervention-associated changes in ES quality and quantity, poverty and wellbeing, and associated tradeoffs, and by giving policymakers, practitioners and donors the insights and tools to improve interventions.

PIMA's intended beneficiaries include:
(a) poor local people in the case study sites. WMAs already impact directly on one million rural people in Tanzania, and new WMAs in various stages of planning and implementation will affect a further 1.5 million rural Tanzanians. PIMA insights and best practice lessons will be generalizable to people in the many comparable ES/PA schemes being rolled out across the region and across the global south
(b) implementing organizations: PIMA is independent from but networked with NGO implementers involved in study WMAs, while other (non-study) WMA and CBNRM interveners/ practitioners participating in PIMA workshops include a wide range of NGOs (WWF, AWF, JBG/WCST, DHA, Africare, FZS, FarmAfrica) who operate internationally, and are keen to make interventions more effective
(c) researchers exploring the interplay of ecosystem services and poverty alleviation in East Africa and across the global south
(d) national/ global policy-makers, practitioners, donors, and the wider ESPA network
(e) investors including East Africa tour operating companies, carbon, REDD+ and other PES scheme entrepreneurs.

PIMA will clarify WMA impacts on ES-based livelihoods, tradeoffs, and their implications, making more clear the needs and priorities of poor people using savanna and miombo woodland ecosystems, and the feedback loops that transmit pressures on poor populations back to the ES on which they depend. PIMA will support poor people's livelihoods by making WMA-associated changes in their wellbeing visible to national and international policymakers and practitioners, making it easier for them to identify appropriate policy/governance structures to encourage socially and environmentally sustainable outcomes. Donors and investors will use PIMA findings to ensure their resources are invested to best effect, and in demonstrably ethical ways. Research into use thus builds on engagement of, feedback from, dissemination through and uptake by the networks of users outlined above. PIMA findings are likely to reveal a range of tradeoffs, as a result of WMA impacts on distribution of ES benefits among different groups (by age, sex, wealth and residential status), of differential outcomes on quality and quality of different ES, and on ES at the expense of PA or vice versa. Development partners will need to facilitate mechanisms for equitable, socially and environmentally sustainable compromises with respect to such tradeoffs; the ESPA Directorate will need to disseminate the working compromises attained.

South researchers will integrate their in-depth local knowledge into, and influence development of, new conceptual frameworks around socio-ecological processes. They will be exposed to new scientific and research funding and management skills. North researchers will learn from African partners' in-depth local social and ecological knowledge and expertise in developing work that is locally credible and relevant. Dovetailing North scientific and technical capacity with South expertise and local knowledge delivers impact greater than the sum of the individual parts. Western science is built in part on models evolved in more temperate social-ecological systems, not always appropriate for understanding sub/tropical systems. Local ecological knowledge not only increasingly informs emerging scientific models but gives insights relevant to increasingly unpredictable and variable contexts in UK and worldwide.