Indigenous people can make ideal guides, managers and police for areas of managed forest and conservation areas, and they may also derive an adequate livelihood in their traditional environment in doing so (Wesche, 1996). Conservation efforts have often been insensitive to local people, which has alienated them and sometimes triggered poaching and other destructive activities. The best route to conservation is likely to be to avoid alienation and get effective local involvement. However, simply promoting participatory approaches (as has rather been the fashion recently) does not guarantee effective conservation or resource management; there are strong criticisms of community-based conservation. Oates (1999) is one conservationist who warns against politically correct but ineffective conservation; others have also commented on effective authoritarian approaches (Diamond, 2005: 440). When the cost of failure is the extinction of biodiversity, a ‘top-down’ approach may be excusable until workable alternatives can be found.