Chapter 8 Community-Based Conservation as Grassroots Sustainability Enterprise? Sea Turtle Egg Harvesting in Ostional, Costa Rica

Abstract

In developing country contexts, it has become difficult to imagine the word ‘conservation’ without ‘community’ sitting alongside it, as their combination is part of the international conservation and development lexicon. Community-based conservation (CBC) encompasses several core principles, including: involving communities in decision-making; devolving control over resource management; developing community institutions for management; incorporating traditional or local knowledge; legitimising community property rights; linking environment and development objectives and providing incentives for conservation (Barrow & Murphree, 2001; Kellert, Mehta, Ebbin, & Litchtenfeld, 2000; Songorwa, 1999; Western & Wright, 1994). All of these are employed with the aims of overcoming the limitations associated with traditional ‘top-down’ approaches to conservation (Adams & Hulme, 2001; Campbell, 2002a). Ideally, CBC should benefit both people and environments, contributing to both development and conservation. In this way CBC is directly aligned to wider discourses of sustainability and to innovations in the field of conserving natural resources.

Citation

Campbell, L.M., Haalboom, B.J. and Trow, J. (2012), "Chapter 8 Community-Based Conservation as Grassroots Sustainability Enterprise? Sea Turtle Egg Harvesting in Ostional, Costa Rica", Davies, A. (Ed.) Enterprising Communities: Grassroots Sustainability Innovations (Advances in Ecopolitics, Vol. 9), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 145-162. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2041-806X(2012)0000009011