The Dzanga-Sangha landscape consists of a national park surrounded by production forest. It is subject to an integrated conservation and development project (ICDP). In collaboration with the ICDP personnel, a participatory model was constructed to explore wildlife conservation and industrial logging scenarios for the landscape. Three management options for the landscape's production forest were modelled: (I) 'predatory logging', exploitation by a logging company characterised by a lack of long-term plans for staying in the landscape, (II) sustainable exploitation by a certified logging company, and (III) conservation concession with no commercial timber harvesting. The simulation outcomes indicate the extreme difficulties to achieve progress on either conservation or development scenarios. Both logging scenarios give best outcomes for development of the local population. However, the depletion of bushmeat under the predatory logging scenario negatively impacts the population, especially the BaAka pygmy minority who most strongly depend on hunting for their income. The model suggests that conservation and development outcomes are largely determined by the level of economic activity, both inside and outside the landscape. Large investments in the formal sector in the landscape without any measures for protecting wildlife (Scenario I) leads to some species going nearly extinct, while investments in the formal sector including conservation measures (Scenario II) gives best outcomes for maintaining wildlife populations. The conservation concession at simulated investment levels does not reduce poverty, defined here in terms of monetary income. Neither does it seem capable of maintaining wildlife populations since the landscape is already filled with settlers lacking economic opportunities as alternatives to poaching.

The debate concerning the conservation-related displacement of people in Central Africa remains strongly polarised. In an earlier paper (Curran et al. 2009), we made a clear plea for in-depth, multi-disciplinary research to provide factual assessments of the extent of physical and economic displacements which Kai Schmidt-Soltau and colleagues have referred to in a series of papers (Schmidt-Soltau 2003, 2004, 2005a, b, Brockington 2004, Brockington and Igoe 2006, Brockington et al. 2006, Cernea and Schmidt-Soltau 2003a, b, 2006, Schmidt-Soltau and Brockington 2004, 2007). We also stressed the need to fi nd some ‘common ground’ that would allow all of us concerned with this issue to work together in the interests of both biodiversity conservation and human development. The accusation by Schmidt-Soltau (2009) that conservation organisations willfully continue to commit ‘human rights violations’ in Central Africa is, in our view, not true. We do not dispute that there are examples from around the world where conservation projects have not respected peoples’ rights in the past, and we believe that lessons have been learned and that the conservation approach has shifted accordingly. But citing

An ongoing debate over the impacts of protected areas on rural communities in central Africa has become increasingly polarized in recent years, even as definitions of displacement have shifted from outright expulsion to economic dislocation precipitated by lost access to natural resources. Although forcible removal of communities to make way for the creation of National Parks has certainly occurred in the past in some parts of the world, we contend that not a single individual has been physically removed from any of the protected areas created in central Africa over the past decade, despite claims to the contrary of hundreds of thousands of "conservation refugees." Furthermore, we recognize that a scarcity of data precludes impartial evaluation of the potential impacts of economic displacement of local communities living adjacent to protected areas, and we call for a concerted effort by conservationists and the social scientists who criticize conservation efforts, in order to measure the effects of protected areas on livelihoods, and to work towards a more socially responsible conservation paradigm.