McNeely, Jeffrey A.

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PublicationsCollaborative Governance of TropicalLandscapes edited By Carol J. Pierce Colferand Jean-Laurent Pfund (2010), 304 pp.,Earthscan, London, UK. ISBN 9781849711777(hbk), GBP 60.00.I’m not sure quite what I expected from thispublication with the lofty title of Collabora-tive Governance of Tropical Landscapes butthis collection of in-depth case studies andanalyses by researchers from the Centre forInternational Forest Research (CIFOR) andtheir partners is full of surprises. It commen-ces with an evocative imagining of journeysthrough the places studied, illustrating theprofound relationship between the land andthe people whose livelihoods shape, and areshaped by, these landscapes.The introductory chapter sets the tonefor the rest of the book with its remarkablyfrank account of the divergence betweenwhat the research teams had planned todo and what they were able to achieve inpractice. The core of the book covers se-lected governance-related topics to illustrateeach site’s particular characteristics whileaddressing issues with broader applicability.One chapter examines the role of dis-trict government in managing landscapedynamics and livelihoods developmentin Jambi district of Sumatra, Indonesia.A subsequent chapter unpacks the complexissues arising from two very different ex-amples of displacement: direct resettlementfrom areas bordering a national park inLaos; and economic displacement in theEast Usambara Mountains in Tanzania.TheMadagascar andTanzanian case studiesin particular yield interesting insights intothe place of customary forest governancesystems and institutions in the 21st century.An exploration of the role of wild speciesconcludes that despite the fact that manyspecies of megafauna are reported to havestrong cultural or religious beliefs attachedto them, the ability of such values to shapecontemporary governance practice remainslargely unproven. The Cameroon case studyexamines the governance of value chains fornon-timber forest products, clearly illustrat-ing the economic and other links betweeneven remote areas and the wider world inthis era of globalization.For readers with a particular interest inany of the landscapes studied, as I have forIndonesia, the research presented providesa fascinating picture of the complex, multi-level governance processes that play out ineach of the local contexts. There is, however,also some more pragmatic content withwider relevance, including the presentationof a simple method for assessing governanceindicators in forest landscapes and thebeneﬁts and challenges of applying sucha tool in one of the case study sites.The importance of taking a multi-disciplinary approach, of spending signiﬁ-cant periods of time within the studiedlandscapes and communities, of recogniz-ing and responding to the complexity ofdifferent contexts, are all stressed through-out the book. The humanity of the re-searchers shines clearly through both intheir use of language and in their obviousempathy for the communities whose livesthey have touched in the course of theirwork. References to ‘wicked problems’ (asdeﬁned in Wikipedia), to ‘mineﬁelds incollaborative governance’, and to the ne-cessity of ‘muddling through’ all illustratethat these are researchers grounded inmessy reality, rather than academicspreaching from their ivory towers.Of particular note for me is the ethicaldilemma expressed by the authors of pro-moting collaborative governance systemsthat seek to bring closer to the state,communities who have, in many cases,maintained their cultural identity preciselybecause they have remained largely outsidestate control. If I was seeking to end ona pessimistic point, I could highlight the factthat the section entitled The Bad News inthe ﬁnal chapter is twice as long as thatentitled The Somewhat Good News. But atthe end of the day, I’m left with a feeling ofat least partial optimism that there arepeople out there undertaking rigorousmulti-disciplinary research, and supportingadaptive learning and collaborative manage-ment, with a genuine commitment to main-taining our planet’s rich biodiversity ina way that also protects people’s livelihoodsand socio-cultural well-being.HELEN SCHNEIDER Fauna & Flora Interna-tional, Jupiter House, Station Road, Cam-bridge, CB1 2JD, UKE-mail helen.schneider@fauna-ﬂora.orgClimate Savvy: Adapting Conservation andResource Management to a ChangingWorld. By Lara J. Hansen and Jennifer R.Hoffman (2011), x + 245 pp., Island Press,Washington D.C. ISBN 978-1-59726-685-7(hbk); 1-59726-685-X (pbk).Climate change was recognized as one of theﬁve major drivers of degradation in bio-diversity and ecosystems in the 2005 Millen-nium Ecosystem Assessment, and the 1992UN Framework Convention on ClimateChange recognized its profound implicationsfor human well-being. The two main re-sponses to climate change are mitigation(roughly speaking, reducing the emission ofgreenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxideand methane) and adaptation (again roughlyspeaking, developing management, engineer-ing and behavioural responses to the comingchanges). While most of the effort andﬁnancial investment to date has gone intomitigation, the results have been deeplydisappointing and the periodic reports fromthe Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange (IPCC) have been increasinglyalarming about the growth of greenhousegas emissions. It is hard to ignore the growingevidence of their impacts, judging from therate of extreme weather events, melting polaricecaps, retreating glaciers, melting perma-frost, changing breeding seasons, increasingacidiﬁcation of the oceans, and so forth, butviable mitigation solutions remain elusive.Alternatives to fossil fuels such as thevarious forms of renewable energy (wind,solar, biofuels, hydro, tidal, geothermal) allcarry varying degrees of negative impactson the world’s ecosystems. This leavesconservation and energy efﬁciency as themost reasonable responses, though they areinsufﬁcient by themselves to address theproblems of climate change or energyconsumption. Sadly, neither governmentsnor the general public seem willing to takethe necessary painful step of reducing de-pendence on carbon-emitting fossil fuels,even while recognizing that their supply isultimately non-renewable and their effectson climate will change both ecosystems andthe course of human civilization.While efforts at mitigation must con-tinue, despite their frustrations, it is longpast time to accelerate plans for adapting tothe climate changes that seem inevitable,and to implement at least some of theseplans. Climate Savvy is a good recipe bookfor helping resource managers start adapt-ing to the coming changes, howeveruncertain these changes may be at anyparticular site. It starts with a brief in-troduction to climate change and its rele-vance to natural resource management,emphasizing the point that new approacheswill be required. The remainder of the bookis divided into three main parts. Part 1devotes four chapters to building adaptationª 2011 Fauna & Flora International, Oryx, 45(3), 456–459 doi:10.1017/S0030605311001244https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605311001232Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 09:44:40, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available atplans, including useful advice on how tobuy time, assessing vulnerability to climatechange, developing strategies to reducevulnerability, and emphasizing the role ofmodels and technology. Part 2 has ﬁve chap-ters on taking action, including strengthen-ing protected areas, addressing the needsof species, the role of connectivity in thelandscape, habitat restoration, and dealingwith the problem of invasive species. Theseare mainstream conservation actions famil-iar to resource managers but here seenthrough the lens of climate change. Part 3has four chapters on governance issues,including regulating harvest of energy, reg-ulating pollutants, integrating the needs ofnature and people, and adapting governancefor change. Again, much of this is familiarground for readers of this journal but en-riched with climate change concerns addedto the usual responses.The Afterword contains some addi-tional useful advice, presented in a semi-light-hearted way that is very welcome aftera fairly depressing prognosis of the impactsof climate change, using headings bor-rowed from a renowned American philos-opher, including: ‘The future ain’t what itused to be’, ‘When you come to a fork inthe road, take it’, ‘You can observe a lot byjust watching’, ‘We make too many wrongmistakes’, ‘If you don’t know where you’regoing, you might not get there’, ‘If theworld was perfect, it wouldn’t be’, and ‘Itain’t over ‘til it’s over.’Most of the book’s prescriptions aresensible and would be useful advice forresource managers even if climate changewere not such a worrying concern. Forindividuals working in conservation this isan excellent and balanced discussion ofthe kinds of climate-related issues theyare likely to face in the coming years. Butsome minor problems creep in: some sug-gested approaches to adaptation are in factmore like mitigation (e.g. ‘reduce the rateand extent of local and regional climatechange’); the discussion of the AmazonBasin should have mentioned that whilethis vast forest may support its own cli-mate, in some recent drought years it hasbeen a net producer of carbon dioxiderather than a carbon sink; more advice onconverting knowledge about rates ofchange into action to address these wouldhave been useful; and more citations wouldbe helpful (for example, the alleged case inwhich a World Health Organization vanwas burned in an Indian village because itscaduceus-like symbol with a snake wasdespised by villagers).But the book also has a few morefundamental limitations. Firstly, it deﬁnesadaptation in solely human terms, explicitlyexcluding evolutionary or biological adapta-tion even though it discusses the latter formsin some detail and says relatively little abouthow to change human behaviour. Secondly,the book is speciﬁcally aimed at resourcemanagers as if they were major players inthe climate change issue. Whilst of courseeverybody must contribute, and maintain-ing biological diversity is the best insurancefor adapting to changing conditions, themost important actors are surely on otherstages, and expecting resource managers to‘reduce the rate and extent of global change’(p. 83) or stopping the Chinese from build-ing dams on the upper Mekong River(p. 190) is hardly realistic. Thirdly, the bookis written from an American perspective,although with some international exampleswell integrated throughout; but nowheredoes it mention the sad reality in the USAthat politics is the key constraint to progress,with one political party, whose name cannotbe mentioned, being led by Senators whosteadfastly deny even the reality of climatechange, much less the need to do anythingabout it. Fourthly, the book lacks the his-torical perspective that might have providedimportant insights about how people haveactually adapted to major climate changesthroughout history without the wise guid-ance of resource managers; this provides the‘evolutionary and reverential literature’ thatthe authors say is lacking, instead chargingthe IPCC of forcing adaptation on us‘almost by edict’. The reality is that bothecosystems and humans will adapt, one wayor another; the IPCC is just trying to reducethe pain of doing so. Finally, the bookincludes humans almost as an afterthought,even though modern resource managersdeal with the human dimension on a regularbasis, and arguably the most importantaspect of climate change for people is thathistorically it has been accompanied byserious human conﬂicts, even ones thatmay be existential when applied to modernconditions.In short, this is a useful handbook forhelping resource managers realize some ofthe challenges that they will need to addressin the coming years. The readers of thisjournal will ﬁnd it a helpful discussion but,in the end, it feels more like displacementbehaviour. It is putting the focus on some ofthe victims of climate change (species, pro-tected areas, natural habitats) rather that theperpetrators (look in the rear-view mirror ofyour Land Rover).JEFFREY A. MCNEELY IUCN, Rue Mauverney28, 1196 Gland, SwitzerlandE-mail jam@iucn.orgTrade-offs in Conservation: Deciding Whatto Save edited by Nigel Leader-Williams,William M. Adams and Robert J. Smith(2010), xxvi + 398 pp., Wiley-Blackwell,Oxford, UK. ISBN 9781405193832 (pbk), GBP42.50.Trade-offs in Conservation is based ona series of presentations at a 2-day Sympo-sium in Conservation Biology hosted by theZoological Society of London in November2007. Notwithstanding an impressive list ofdelegates and contributors Imust admit thatmy ﬁrst thought on reading this in thePreface was that the book would suffer fromthe common problems that beset proceed-ings of meetings: contributors and contentare largely dependent on who is available forthe meeting, proceedings papers are oftenrushed and of varying quality, and it can bedifﬁcult to achieve a coherent narrative. I’mdelighted to say that, in the case of this book,this is emphatically not the case. Eithereveryone in the world who knows aboutpractical conservation was in London inNovember 2007 or the editors have done anexcellent job in ﬁlling in the gaps andensuring high quality. I suspect the latter.The book is divided into ﬁve parts:I, Current Approaches and Toolkits; II,Inﬂuence of Value Systems; III, Econom-ics and Governance; IV, Social and In-stitutional Constraints; and V, Futurechallenges. The ﬁrst section gives exam-ples of conservation dilemmas as appliedto decision-making frameworks andmethodologies. The authors don’t pullany punches and I was particularly in-terested in the chapter on global hotspotsand other prioritization methodologiesthat seek objectivity but suffer from lackof data, arbitrary cut-offs and, in applica-tion, often fail to take into account basicbusiness principles such as cost-effective-ness. The conclusion that proactive con-servation is more effective than reactiveconservation is hard to argue with. Thereis also a useful chapter on biodiversityversus ecosystem service approaches, theconclusion being that there are plenty ofwin–win opportunities even if the twoapproaches are often not synonymous.The ﬁnal chapter in this section on de-ﬁning and measuring success in conserva-tion is a must read wherever you are on theconservation spectrum.Part two looks at value systems andincludes a chapter on evaluating and artic-ulating the importance of invertebrates andother organisms that we regard as creepyrather than cuddly. The second chapterexpands on this theme by examining thedifferent perspectives and trade-offs betweenPublications 457ª 2011 Fauna & Flora International, Oryx, 45(3), 456–459https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605311001232Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 09:44:40, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at

Book Review: Climate Savvy: Adapting Conservation and Resource Management to a Changing World: Climate Savvy: Adapting Conservation and Resource Management to a Changing World. By HansenLara J. and HoffmanJennifer R. (2011), x + 245 pp., Island Press, Washington D.C. ISBN 978-1-59726-685-7 (hbk); 1-59726-685-X (pbk)

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