The Kabartal wetland situated in the upper Indo-Gangetic flood plains in northern India is significant because of its hydrological and ecological services, and the socio-economic and cultural values that it represents. Despite being designated as a wildlife sanctuary, this wetland is under threat from anthropogenic pressures.

We used a semistructured social survey of 590 households in 37 villages along the southern boundary of Kaziranga National Park and World Heritage Site, Assam, India in late 2000 and early 2001 to assess resource use and demographic and socioeconomic conditions.

Home-garden-system is an ecosystem of different kind and a common feature of most suburban landscape in many rice farming tropical countries. If these kinds of ecosystems are well maintained, well-developed and used most sustainably; they can contribute a lot to the conservation of biological diversity by lessening the destructive use of the few nature reserves and forest ecosystems remaining.

Action to conserve biodiversity, particularly through the creation of protected areas (PAs), is inherently political. Political ecology is a field of study that embraces the interactions between the way nature is understood and the politics and impacts of environmental action. This paper explores the political ecology of conservation, particularly the establishment of PAs.