Reactions to the Impending Collapse of Wildlife in the 1980s/1990s: Community-Based Approaches to Conservation as the Solution to Africa’s Conservation Dilemma
The crisis of national parks in many African countries in the 1980s and 1990s (Lewis 1996) led to a rethinking of protected area policy across the continent in the late 1980s and 1990s. Several international developments led to a renewed optimism and reorientation of conservation: (1) the end of the grand East-West confrontation with its proxy wars in e.g. Angola and Mozambique, (2) the final independence of Namibia and the demise of the South African Apartheid regime, and (3) major international conferences like the Rio 1992 Earth Summit. Two directions were discussed: more international aid, and more community involvement. More financial engagement and more technical aid were to facilitate wildlife protection and tourism within the parks’ boundaries and at the same time foster economic and social development in rural Africa.
Community-based conservation (CBC) approaches were based on a number of presumptions. (1) The lack of community support for conservation measures had resulted in a social environment that facilitated poaching and wildlife related crimes, hence to gain such local support was mandatory. (2) The weakness of administrations had led to a state of lawlessness and had left an institutional vacuum; hence local institutions had at least to support governmental organization. (3) State-controlled tourism activities in many national parks had faltered and not reached their far-fetched goals, hence private businesses had to invest in protected areas, ideally in public-private enterprises that joined private and public interests.
The simple message was that as soon as rural communities could reliably profit from conservation they would take good care of valuable wildlife resources. Wildlife-based value chains had the potential to diversify rural economies and make them less vulnerable. Community institutions would take over the monitoring and planning of conservation-related activities. Such institutions would be locally acknowledged and legitimate. Notably, then, the major concern of conservationists was how to tie in communities, how to create enduring local institutions and how to encourage public-private partnerships (Hulme and Murphree 1999, Adams and Hulme 2001).
In many places, CBC was implemented as community-based natural resource management. Generally, community-based natural resource management meant ‘local groups of people (“communities”) managing resources in an active manner and with some significant degree of formal (de jure) or informal (de facto) control or tenure over those resources’ (Roe et al. (eds) 2009: 13). CBC projects linked conservation with development, sought to engage local communities as active stakeholders, and devolved some control over natural resources to local-level institutions (Brooks et al. 2012). This conformed with neoliberal approaches to conservation, which stipulated that the commodification of wildlife and landscapes, and the inclusion of rural citizens in global value chains, could become a significant motor for both conservation and rural development; although only in southern Africa (notably, in Namibia, Zambia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe) has CBC been closely connected to decentralization and the devolution of rights – to natural resources in general, and wildlife in particular – to rural communities (e.g. Bollig and Menestrey Schwieger 2014).
However, community-based conservation programmes have come under considerable critique since the early 2000s. Several critical points about conservation are raised repeatedly. (1) Communities are idealized and intra-community cleavages and inequalities are not considered in planning. (2) Existing inequalities are exacerbated and the wealthy households are more likely to gain from CBC than poorer ones (Holmes and Cavanagh 2016: 205). (3) The economics of community-based conservation have been judged differently. While some bemoan negligible contributions to the local economy (Gargallo 2015, 2020), others point to sizeable community income through trophy hunting and tourism (Naidoo et al. 2016). (4) In many national contexts, the devolvement of rights is contested, as administrations often do not cede their prerogatives voluntarily (Cassidy et al. 2023). Hence, rural dwellers often end up burdened with sizeable costs resulting from human-wildlife conflict, frustrations about elite capture, and fraud and conflicts over access to natural resources (Holmes and Cavanagh 2016, Sullivan 2006, Gargallo 2015, Schnegg and Kiaka 2018). Therefore, community-based conservation demanded a deal of social-engineering for a promising future: social institutions had to be legitimized, external links forged, and support structures established (e.g. Bollig 2020 for northern Namibia, Ntuli and Machapondwa for Zimbabwe 2018, Cassidy 2021 for Botswana, Bluwstein 2017 for Tanzania).
Highly focused and active monitoring took place via local game guards. These guards were educated intensively in courses run by different conservationist institutions of higher learning. They were salaried (often at a low level though) and equipped with basic technologies with which to monitor wildlife adequately. The event-book system facilitated the notification of wildlife observations and allowed for the comparison of demographic trends in distinct wildlife populations and the ordered notification of human-wildlife conflicts. In recent years, game guards have been equipped with smart-phones and specialized apps to take photographs of spoors, wildlife, and notable sightings. Hence, community-based conservation goes along with a distinct approach to social engineering and an easily accessible monitoring technology (Hewitson and Sullivan 2023).