2012 Volume 3 Issue 1 Pages 36-42
Cardamom mountain of Cambodia was classified as Burma’s hotspot of biodiversity by UNESCO in 2006. It includes watershed, air filtering and many other natural resources such as timber and non-timber forest products (NTFPs), food, medicine and construction materials. Forest has been severely degraded by chronic war and over exploitation of wood by concession companies. Conservation International (CI) has collaborated with Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) to reform forestry laws and establish the Central Cardamom Protected Forest. Payment for Environmental Services (PES), which is an effective concept for biodiversity conservation. The win-win approach of PES mechanism provides benefit to all villagers in return for sustainable conservation. For this reason, an overall goal of the research is to compare Conservation Agreement (CA) features and mechanisms of CI to those of PES. This research intends to describe CA mechanism through PES periscope, analyze institutional design and explain institutional arrangement as well as to indicate factors inducing changes in resident behaviour. This study was conducted inside and around the protected zone of Central Cardamom Protected Forest (CCPF) and it covers three communes of the district. Interviews were conducted on site with the participation of 59 people, including farmers, authorities and NGOs in the study area. Besides, states and NGO officers involved in this research were informally interviewed. The results of this study showed that CA as a mechanism is similar to PES, but it is not just PES due to its features. Although there are many features similar to PES mechanism, it is totally a not voluntary transaction because villagers live in state forests, so they don’t have a legal land title. They don’t have a right to manage the state forests which are controlled by forestry laws. On the other hand, CA design lacks institutional interaction between involved institutions so it is not legally recognized. All changes in local behaviours may be caused by the restriction imposed by the forestry laws and aids for community development that stop land encroachment. Conservation Agreement enhances the community development and alleviates poverty of local settlers inside and around CCPF by providing development training and incentives such as establishing microcredit, NTFPs processing and providing agriculture instruments. Overall Conservation Agreement is not pure PES but has affected participatory conservation and poverty alleviation.
