Human societies throughout the world derive vast amounts of goods and services from their surrounding natural ecosystems. The livelihoods of millions of people depend upon the continuous stream of materials and other benefits from their immediate surroundings. These livelihoods would not have been sustained for millennia without strategies designed to conserve the resource base. Indeed, most societies shat rely on natural resources have evolved cultural and social practices to discourage their overexploitation. In recent years, however, a number of forces have disrupted these traditional practices. Perhaps the most important of these changes is a shift in economic control of resources from indigenous groups to a loose alliance of outsiders, including traders, large landholders, and government organizations and their bureaucrats. In some cases, this shift started long ago. During the last century in British India, the colonial regime starred to expropriate large tracts of forest for reserves that were to be brought under scientific management to meet the needs of the Raj and the empire (Gadgil and Guha 1993). Colonial authorities severely curtailed traditional rights of forest dwellers or relegated them to community forests; these forests, being too small to meet the needs of local communities, were soon degraded. It is now well recognized that, in much of the developing world, progress toward conservation of biodiversity in natural ecosystems requires returning tenured control over ecosystems to local people. Such a shift in control would have to be accompanied by economic incentives to conserve biodiversim The Biodiversiry Conservation Network (BCN) project is designed to test the idea that economic benefits derived from local biotic resources, combined with control over these resources, can motivate local communities to conserve biodiversity.