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Promoting Transformation by Linking Natural Resource
Management, Poverty Reduction and Equitable Governance

TransLinks is a 5-year Leader with Associates cooperative agreement that has been funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to further the objective of increasing social, economic and environmental benefits through sustainable natural resource management. This new partnership of the Wildlife Conservation Society (lead organization), the Earth Institute of Columbia University, Enterprise Works/VITA, Forest Trends, the Land Tenure Center of the University of Wisconsin and USAID is designed to support income growth of the rural poor through conservation and sustainable use of the natural resource base upon which their livelihoods depend.

Nature, Wealth and Power

Many of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas that are extremely rich in biological diversity, but poor in social services and economic opportunities. A paucity of livelihood options in these remote areas often results in heavy dependence on natural resources for sustenance and income.

Where local governance systems are unable to establish and enforce natural resource use norms, the very resources upon which the rural poor depend may be depleted through unsustainable use. Where globalization has increased the industrial scale extraction of natural resources, local access is often diminished, sustainable management systems are frequently compromised and resource dependent families are commonly impoverished. Over dependence on declining natural resources can result in a poverty trap for rural families that may exacerbate existing challenges in acessing health care, education, clean water, fuel and income. Persistent poverty and livelihood insecurity can foment or perpetuate conflict, further diminishing the investments needed to foster economic growth.

For these reasons, understanding the relationships between Nature (ecosystem services), Wealth (income from natural and social assets) and Power (governance systems that manage and distribute benefits from natural resources) is critical for developing more effective approaches towards rural poverty alleviation and sustainable natural resource management. TransLinks aims to address these issues by identifying practical field-tested approaches that simultaneously promote natural resource conservation, rural wealth creation and strong, equitable governance systems.

The TransLinks Approach

The program is organized around four core activities that will be implemented in overlapping phases over the life of the program. These are:

1. Knowledge building, including an initial review, synthesis and dissemination of current knowledge, and applied comparative research in a number of different field locations to help fill gaps in our knowledge;

2. Identification and development of diagnostic and decision support tools that will help us better understand the positive, negative or neutral relationships among natural resource conservation, natural resource governance and alleviation of rural poverty;

3. Cross-partner skill exchange to better enable planning, implementing and adaptively managing projects and programs in ways that maximize synergies between good governance, conservation and wealth creation;

4. Global dissemination of knowledge, tools, and best practices for promoting wealth creation of the rural poor, environmental governance and resource conservation.

To ensure that, over the 5-year life of the program, TransLinks develops a coherent, compelling and, most importantly, useful corpus of information about the value of, and approaches to, integrating Nature, Wealth and Power, TransLinks is structuring the work around two core issues – 1) payments for ecosystem services and 2) property rights and resource tenure.

Payments for Ecosystem Services and Governance

TransLinks is focusing on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) because it is a relatively new and rapidly evolving approach for conserving biodiversity and securing livelihoods outside of protected areas over the long term. Given this, we need to better understand when and why these PES approaches are most viable and effective. As PES systems typically require willing buyers to purchase services from willing sellers, the latter must have either traditional or legal authority to sell or lease these services. Understanding the role that property rights and resource tenure play in facilitating and maintaining PES markets is critical. TransLinks will explore these issues to characterize how rights and tenure influence the establishment of markets and the distribution of benefits to ecosystem service providers or guardians.

For PES markets to deliver benefits to rural communities over the long term, governance systems that regulate access to and meter use of natural resources, and ensure the equitable sharing of benefits from their sale need to be in place. Given this, TransLinks is also investigating how governance systems can establish and support resource use norms that promote the sustainable use of communally-shared ecosystem services. These local level institutions for managing natural resources, or community assets, are, in effect, micro- scale versions of the macro-scale institutions required for democratic and accountable government at the national level. Given this, helping rural communities develop functional natural resource governance systems is one of the most effective ways to provide the public with a clear and practical knowledge of not only how equitable systems of government work, but why they are important. By doing so, we are effectively building demand for municipal, regional and national level systems that are transparent, accountable and democratic.

TransLinks has been made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), under the conditions of the Cooperative Agreement No. EPP-A-00-06-00014-00. The contents of this site are the responsibility of the lead partner and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.