A Study On The Social Economy Of The Surrounding Communities Of Dafengding Nature Reserve

Nature reserve is a special area that aims at protection of natural resource and environment. It has various functions for it is combined with its surrounding communities and works as a united system of nature, society and economy. And also, there are unavoidable interactions between nature reserve and its surrounding communities. On one hand, the establishment of nature reserve has impacted on communities' social economy and local people's production and life. On the other hand, the economic development of communities depends on the local resources. Therefore, the study on the relationship between nature reserve and its surrounding communities has much sense to the analysis of the causes of the problems, and provide the background data to find out some feasible approaches for the further harmonic development of reserve and communities.As a national nature reserve established in minority area, Dafengding nature reserve in Mabian, Sichuan province, has some problems of reserve management and its surrounding communities' social economy. Our aim of this investigation on the communities' social economy is to find out the conflicts between reserve and communities, and the causes of these conflicts, and put forward some suggestions for further work.Two methods are applied in this investigation. One is participatory rural appraisal(PRA), a common method generally used in social economy. Also it can be used in reserve's surrounding communities' study. This method emphasizes on the local people's participation to the management and project. We can get useful first hand information by analyzing the PRA results. PRA includes a serial of contents. In this investigation, we use questionnaire and visit local people to collect information about their production and life.And another method is knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) study. We apply this method to assess the local people's opinion towards the nature reserve and natural conservation. This is a meaningful attempt for us to obtain the information about people's knowledge and attitude of reserve and natural conservation, and their own behavior about the natural conservation. To analyze these situations is available for us to learn more about the conflicts between reserve and people.Our results show that the communities indeed have many impacts on reserve and local natural conservation, the main factors including poverty, population growth, poor education and people's traditional behavior. These negative factors do not work independently. They are associated with each other. The poverty is caused by the low-level economic development. However, the local economy depends on natural resources strongly. To increase the income, people will demand more resources from surrounding environment. And with the increase of local people, the pressure of large population has more and more obviously impacts on natural resources, energy and wildlife protection. Therefore, local natural resources have been threatened by surrounding communities. And this threat will increase with the growth of labor force. While poor education fails to resolve the illiteracy problem, and labor force are unable to migrate out for work. Additionally, local people's traditional lifestyle and negative effect caused by the establishment of reserve becomes serious obstacle on the reserve management. For the traditional opinion, people satisfy with their present economic situation, and are lazy to work for better life. They expect the local government could help them to get rid of the poverty. Also, they are unable to realize their behavior, such as hunting, will do harm to the biodiversity protection. Besides, because of lack of funds, managers and workers, nature reserve could hardly carry out the normal protective work and propagation. Thus the people's knowledge about reserve and natural conservation is still in low level. However, the local government fails to make an appropriate plan for compensation, there are still some people can not accept the reserve for the loss caused by the establishment of reserve. Therefore, these factors combine into an intricate and correlated net.In view of our consequence, we propose some suggestion to alleviate the conflicts between reserve and communities. And these suggestions will be available for further research and project.