The exclusionary protected area-based approach to biodiversity conservation has succeeded at several places, but at a significant social cost and conflict, especially in the developing country tropics. More inclusive approaches, including community-based conservation (CBC), its subset enterprise-based conservation (EBC), and payments-based conservation (PES) programs, have been tried in the past 15years.Abrief summary of the literature on socio-economic impacts of the exclusionary approach suggests that, although detailed studies and documentation is missing, impacts are significant, and the ethical argument against forced displacement quite strong. We then examine the potential of non exclusionary approaches from a broader perspective that values biodiversity gains as well as socio-economic ones. Our review suggests that (a) comprehensive socio–ecological and comparative studies of such initiatives are surprisingly scarce, (b) enterprise-based conservation offers some potential if design flaws, poor implementation, assumptions about homogeneous communities, and inattention to tenurial change and security are addressed, (c) payments-based programs require caution because of their focus on economic efficiency, and simplified assumptions regarding the nature of rights, biological information, monitoring costs, and state interventions, and (d) the alternatives to exclusion have often not been given adequate state support and space to function, nor is the ongoing neoliberalization of the political-economic system conducive to giving them that space, except when they fit the direction of this larger process.