‘Good business’ and the collection of ‘wild lives’

In recent years the ongoing debate in development and resource management has tended to present a strengthening of and a shift in responsibility to local people as a panacea to past ills. The emphasis on communities is part of a wider shift in thinking about the relative roles of the state, the market and the 'intermediary structures' (Bulmer in Crow and Allan 1994:1) coming under the term 'community'. The recent fashion for community-founded resource management is founded on the pursuit of conservation goals by including, rather than excluding, local people in project planning, decision-making and implementation. The roots of this 'new conservation' (Hulme and Murphree 1999) can be traced to a number of developments. In the first place, conservation thinking is making a shift from the preservationist framework aimed at segregating humans from nature, towards notions of 'sustainable development' that aim to integrate the needs of humans with that of nature. The call for sustainable development rather than national park formation, and a new emphasis on the conservation of biodiversity outside protected areas is aided by the recognition that reducing conservation to 'islands' in a 'sea' of degraded landscapes offers no hope of survival for many species. The same insight as well as the political cost of protected area establishment has led many densely populated European countries to integrate the requirements of conservation with human activities in a living multi-purpose landscape rather than to pursue a policy of segregation. In this perspective, the 'community' comprising both local people and their natural resources has become the locus of intervention. A second element leading to a renewed focus on the responsibility of local people in resource management comes from a shift in thinking on the role of the state and its public policies vis-A-vis civic society. Where until the 1970s, the state with its national parks was seen as taking responsibility for managing the public interest, the 1980s witnessed an increasingly influential