Roe et al. Environ Evid (2015) 4:22 DOI 10.1186/s13750-015-0048-1
SYSTEMATIC REVIEW
Open Access
Are alternative livelihood projects effective at reducing local threats to specified elements of biodiversity and/or improving or maintaining the conservation status of those elements? Dilys Roe1*, Francesca Booker1,2, Mike Day1,2, Wen Zhou2, Sophie Allebone‑Webb3, Nicholas A. O. Hill3,4, Noelle Kumpel3, Gillian Petrokofsky2,5, Kent Redford6, Diane Russell7, Gill Shepherd8, Juliet Wright3,9 and Terry C. H. Sunderland2
Abstract Background: Alternative livelihood projects are used by a variety of organisations as a tool for achieving biodiver‑ sity conservation. However, despite characterising many conservation approaches, very little is known about what impacts (if any) alternative livelihood projects have had on biodiversity conservation, as well as what determines the relative success or failure of these interventions. Reflecting this concern, Motion 145 was passed at the Vth IUCN World Conservation Congress in 2012 calling for a critical review of alternative livelihood projects and their contribu‑ tion to biodiversity conservation. This systematic map and review intends to contribute to this critical review and provide an overview for researchers, policy makers and practitioners of the current state of the evidence base. Methods: Following an a priori protocol, systematic searches for relevant studies were conducted using the bib‑ liographic databases AGRICOLA, AGRIS, CAB Abstracts, Scopus, and Web of Knowledge, as well as internet searches of Google, Google Scholar, and subject specific and institutional websites. In addition, a call for literature was issued among relevant research networks. The titles, abstracts and full texts of the captured studies were assessed using inclusion criteria for the systematic map and the systematic review, respectively. An Excel spreadsheet was used to record data from each study and to provide a systematic map of the evidence for the effectiveness of alternative liveli‑ hood studies. The studies that met additional criteria to be included in the systematic review were described in more detail through a narrative synthesis. Results: Following full text screening, 97 studies were included in the systematic map covering 106 projects using alternative livelihood interventions. Just 22 of these projects met our additional criteria for inclusion in the systematic review, but one project was removed from the detailed narrative synthesis following critical appraisal. The 21 included projects included reports of positive, neutral and negative conservation outcomes. Conclusions: Our results show that there has been an extensive investment in alternative livelihood projects, yet the structure and results of most of these projects have not been documented in a way that they can be captured using standardised search processes. Either this is because there has been little reporting on the outcomes of these projects,
*Correspondence: dilys.roe@iied.org 1 International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), 80‑86 Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8NH, UK Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © 2015 Roe et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/ zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.