Community-based Wildlife Management: Improved livelihoods and wildlife conservation? Bio-Briefs No.1

• Under the right conditions, community-based wildlife management (CWM) can make a significant contribution to local livelihoods without detriment to wildlife populations. However, CWM is often burdened by unrealistic expectations and condemned as a failure before it has a chance to succeed.~• CWM is a complement to, but not a substitute for, protected area approaches to wildlife conservation.~• There are few cases where financial benefits unequivocally exceed financial costs but communities themselves appear in some cases to have decided that the other benefits (livelihood security, biomass, employment etc) are worth the costs (labour, time, resource use restrictions and so on).