Community engagement in wildlife management
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This presentation was delivered by Nathalie van Vliet at the World Forestry Congress in Durban.
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Community engagement in wildlife management
- 2. 1. Why is community engagement necessary? 2. A historical perspective 3. Challenges 4. Key ingredients to success
- 3. Social conservationists Ecocentric environmentalists The elephant in the room
- 5. Putting the cart before the horse Why is law enforcement not a success? Bennet (2011) “Another inconvenient truth: the failure of enforcement systems to save charismatic species”
- 6. Before the colonial period, relations between local forest communities and the natural spaces were based on four systems of access and ownership : 1)collective ownership of all anthropoid spaces; 2)individual control of farmlands, water and some tree species; 3)free access to some major rivers, arid zones, roads and special products; 4)limited access to a common pool of resources like wildlife, forest products, NTFPs, some streams and natural forests A historical perspective
- 7. From ownership to user rights Over the colonial period, customary ownership and rights over natural resources were profoundly changed.
- 10. Poverty Challenges Some times, exacerbated by industrial and conservation land grabs Brudland report
- 13. The corporate land use shift (Bauer, 205) Challenges
- 14. The loss of wildlife harvest traditions and the cultural dimensions of biodiversity Challenges
- 16. Ownership : “the government’s wildlife” Challenges
- 17. Challenges
- 18. Economic value of wildlife Challenges Non consumptive use Consumptive use “Como podemos conservar sin tocar” curaca Ticuna Amazonas Colombia
- 20. Long term monitoring and participatory methods for decision makings
Notes de l'éditeur
- Thank you very much to the organisers for the invitation to introduce this important session. This presentation intends to set the scene on community engagement in wildlife management
- We will discuss the reasons for seeking community engagement in wildlife management, then shortly recall the historical perspective on communities role in wildlife management, and then introduce some of the main challenges and key ingredients of success….
- Althought community engament seems like the elephant in the room for some: obvious but still ignored. The issue is still a matter of debate among pratitioners, as witnesses this paper from 2015 Reconciling ecological and social justice to promote biodiversity conservation. In this paper, the authors show the continued dichotomy between social conservationists and ecocentric environmentalists. The first believe that efforts to protect the environment through conservation often threatens community livelihoods and endangers traditional practices. The second believe that conservation should be based not only on the instrumental value of nature to humans, but more importantly, on intrinsic value
- In fact, in many regions of the world, conservation has been largely influenced by Western neocolonial views of environmentalism and often assimilated to capitalist and neo-imperialist schools, as described in this very interesting and polemic book. In practice, and particularly in Africa, conservation action has translated into LAW ENFORCEMENT, as the only recipy to avoid extinction.
- However, law enforcement efforts did not provide the succesful outcomes expected. There are several reasons that explain failures in wildlife law enforcement: First, some argue that wildlife law enforcement measures have failed given the inadequate understanding of the real drivers of poaching such as the rising prices and the growing relative poverty between areas of supply and centers of demand, and the increased involvement of organized criminals with the capacity to operate even under increased enforcement effort. Second, many government authorities face the problem of bureaucracy in a corrupt context, a situation of ‘‘covenants with broken swords’’ as described by Sundström (2015). Third, law enforcement measures often apply indistinctively to all types of hunting, failing to differentiate subsistence and local commercial use of wildlife for food security from the purely lucrative and organized trade of charismatic species. Those two distinct ways of poaching require different approaches; Forth, laws are often interpreted as a synonym to “prohibitions” instead of understanding the role of laws in protecting rights. Fifth, it is now also increasingly accepted that existing national-level legislations in many tropical regions are inadequate to respond to their wildlife conservation and poverty reduction strategies, either because hunting rules imposed have no ecological fundaments or because they undermine local user’s needs in a poverty context. As such, investing in law enforcement alone, seems like putting the cart before the horse.
- In tropical areas, before the colonial period, relations between local forest communities and the natural spaces were based on four systems of access and ownership : collective ownership of all anthropoid spaces; individual control of farmlands, and some tree species; free access to some major rivers,, roads and special products; limited access to a common pool of resources like wildlife, forest products, NTFPs, some streams and natural forests
- However, over the colonial period, customary ownership and rights over natural resources were profoundly changed. Colonial administrations adapted written laws to gradually replace customary laws. The objective was then to promote the development of virgin lands through public services. For example, when Central African countries gained independence in the early 1960s, the postcolonial land-tenure system incorporated customary land, into state land. Customary ownership and tenure rights were replaced with user rights granted to local communities. In practice, as shown by Samuel Assembe, given the scarce governmental resources, laws are rarely enforced and people are left with the ambiguity between the need to comply with legal frameworks and with what remains of their customary practices.
- Poverty has, since the Brundtland report, been recognized as one of the major causes for environmental (and wildlife) destruction. People living with wildlife are often those living with no access to clean water, medical care, sufficient food, and are often the victims of political conflict that includes different types of “landgrabs”
- Including industrial forest concessions
- mining
- Agroindustries Incluir fotos del paro agrario
- And protected areas
- These corporate landuse shifts as described by Bauer, leed to the collapse of traditional ecological knowledge and local markets in favour of the acquisition of the valuable assets of communities by powerful elites and the exacerbation of organised illegal trade.
- Several authors have described how the loss of culture and traditional ecological knowledge is intimately linked to the the loss of biodiversity, arguing that the erosion of Traditional Ecological knowledge might be the first step in a vicious cycle of biodiversity loss…
- Antoher issue of concern is the growing human-wildlife conflicts. Wildlife conservation efforts together with the transformation of wild habitats into industrial production systems, have increased human-wildlife conflicts, making it even more difficult for communities to trully engage in wildlife conservation. This table shows the incidents on human wildlife conflicts in Mbire district, northern Zimbabwe. Five years ago, lions killed four people and over a hundred livestock in Mbire district, an area bordering a complex of protected wildlife areas of global conservation importance. The events prompted a local outcry and prominent media coverage (nothing like that experienced for Cecile). Interstingly enough most calls from the western public were for the translocation of people to safer areas (Matema and Anderson, 2015). Once again, showing that conservation may sometimes alianate local people from their lands in favor of the conservation of emblematic species.
- More importantly, however, than any of these arguments is the question of land rights, forest rights, and wildlife rights. Only if ownership is solved can we talk about the responsibilities. As long as wildlife species are seen as “government’s wildlife” or “les animaux des blancs”, little hope there in ensuring community engagement in wildlife management.
- The focus on land and property rights, is of great significance. Yet how will it be implemented? In many parts of the world, indigenous peoples have sought the formalization of their customary territories to ensure the enforcement of their borders. However, Larson et al, in their paper from 2015, show that the process of formalization often generates new conflicts. The process of constituting collective territories is intimately related to the constitution of authority, as it involves not only the negotiation of physical boundaries but also the recognition of a particular entity to represent the collective. Although the devolution of ownership in modern communities is a challenge, successful examples of wildlife ownership do exist, among others the conservancies from Namibia.
- One aspect that needs to be highlighted here, is that most lands in this planet are of potential interest to agro-industries, mining and other high value generating land uses. As such, the only remaining hope to conserve wildlife is if wildlife does generate a competitive economic value. This includes both non consumptive use (mainly through tourism or payment for environmental services) and consumptive use. In areas where tourism is not a possible option, consumptive use through sustainable management strategies is probably the only option. As such, it becomes urgent to realize that promoting sustainable use by local communities, with their full engaement, might be the only option to preserve wildlife in many places of this planet.
- This recent report by IIED illustrates succesful case studies of community engagement and potential for replication. Among the most important indregients of success described here are: Clear ownership Resilient micro governance structures
- And finally: Long term monitoring Sucessful participatory methods for decision making
- To conclude, I encourage you to read the recommendations produced at the symposium from April this year called « Beyond Enforcement: Communities, governance, incentives and sustainable use in combating wildlife crime”. The symposium brought together over 70 researchers, community representatives and NGOs from five continents. The case studies explored the drivers of IWT within communities, including poverty. They further highlighted impressive examples of engagement of communities in reducing IWT, including in enforcement against poaching, from a wide range of countries and contexts, as well as examples of extreme dysfunction and alienation. The importance of increasing the values of wildlife and conservation to communities (through a diversity of culturally appropriate means) was a key theme of many presentations. The recommendations can be found following this link:
- With that, I thank you very much for your attention, and wish you en enjoyable session with the presentations that will follow, many of whcih will provide you with sucessful cases and methodological insights on some of the concepts illustrated here.