Community Rights, Conservation

and Contested Land

In memory of Alan Rodgers (1944–2009):
ecologist, activist and mentor to several
generations of conservationists in
East Africa and beyond
Community Rights, Conservation
and Contested Land
The Politics of Natural Resource
Governance in Africa

Edited by
Fred Nelson

publishing for a sustainable future

London · New York

First published in 2010 by Earthscan
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Community rights, conservation and contested land: the politics of natural resource governance
in Africa / edited by Fred Nelson.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-84407-916-2 (hardback)
1. Nature conservation–Government policy–Africa. 2. Conservation and natural resources–
Government policy–Africa. 3. Biodiversity–Government policy–Africa. 4. Land tenure–Africa.
5. Community development–Africa. 6. Political participation–Africa. 7. Africa–Environmental
conditions. 8. Africa Politics and government. I. Nelson, Fred, 1976-
QH77.A4C56 2010
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 Contents

List of Figures, Tables and Boxes vii

List of Contributors ix
Preface xiii
Acronyms and Abbreviations xv

Part 1 Introduction

1 Introduction: The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in Africa 3

Fred Nelson

2 Agrarian Social Change and Post-Colonial Natural Resource

Management Interventions in Southern Africa’s ‘Communal
Tenure’ Regimes 32
James C. Murombedzi

Part 2 Political Economies of Natural

Resource Governance
3 The Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource
Management in Botswana 55
Liz Rihoy and Brian Maguranyanga

4 Peasants’ Forests and the King’s Game? Institutional Divergence and

Convergence in Tanzania’s Forestry and
Wildlife Sectors 79
Fred Nelson and Tom Blomley

5 The Evolution of Namibia’s Communal Conservancies 106

Brian Jones

6 Historic and Contemporary Struggles for a Local Wildlife

Governance Regime in Kenya 121
Ngeta Kabiri
vi Community Rights, Conservation and Contested Land

Part 3 Local Struggles and Negotiations across

Multiple Scales

7 Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion? Local Communities in the

Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area, South Africa 147
Webster Whande

8 ‘People are Not Happy’: Crisis, Adaptation and Resilience in

Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE Programme 174
Liz Rihoy, Chaka Chirozva and Simon Anstey

9 The Rise and Fall of Community-Based Natural Resource

Management in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley: An Illustration of
Micro- and Macro-Governance Issues 202
Rodgers Lubilo and Brian Child
10 External Agency and Local Authority: Facilitating CBNRM in
Mahel, Mozambique 227
Marta Monjane

11 Adaptive or Anachronistic? Maintaining Indigenous Natural

Resource Governance Systems in Northern Botswana 241
Masego Madzwamuse

12 Pastoral Activists: Negotiating Power Imbalances in the

Tanzanian Serengeti 269
Maanda Ngoitiko, Makko Sinandei, Partalala Meitaya
and Fred Nelson

Part 4 Looking Forward

13 A Changing Climate for Community Resource Governance:
Threats and Opportunities from Climate Change and the
Emerging Carbon Market 293
Maxwell Gomera, Liz Rihoy and Fred Nelson

14 Democratizing Natural Resource Governance: Searching for

Institutional Change 310
Fred Nelson

Index
 List of Figures, Tables and Boxes

Figures
7.1 The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area and
constituent protected areas 150
7.2 The forced removals from the Madimbo corridor 154
9.1 Governance and scale 203
9.2 A comparison of the organization structures and revenue flows
of different organizational levels in the three project phases 210
10.1 General elements of the CBNRM model in Mozambique 229
11.1 Map indicating the location of Khwai and Xaxaba 250
12.1 Map of Loliondo 270
14.1 Differences in quality of governance across eastern and southern
African nations as measured by the Ibrahim Governance
Index (y-axis) and Transparency International’s Corruption
Perceptions Index (x-axis) 319
14.2 Levels of ‘voice and accountability’ across different developing
areas, as ranked by the World Bank’s Governance Indicators
database 323
14.3 Simplified alternative models for providing external support
for natural resource decentralization reforms 327

Tables
3.1 CBOs with joint venture partnerships in Ngamiland, Botswana 67
4.1 Current coverage of CBFM across Tanzania 84
4.2 Area of forest land under timber concessions in select African
countries 86
4.3 Selected areas of forest under village management and their
revenue generation potential, Tanzania 89
4.4 A comparison of key aspects of the governance frameworks for
community-based management of wildlife (WMAs) and forests
(VLFRs) in Tanzania 97
6.1 Kenya Wildlife Service expenditures, 1998–2003 131
viii Community Rights, Conservation and Contested Land

6.2 Tourism earnings in Kenya, 2000–2007 137

6.3 Kenya Wildlife Service income and expenditure, 1998–2004 138
6.4 Contributions by IFAW to various Kenyan organizations in 2005
and 2006 138
8.1 Household dividend payments and proportion of overall
revenue in Mahenye, 1996, 1997 and 2004 184
9.1 An assessment of annual performance (participation, benefits,
financial accountability, information flows) at different levels of
community administration in the three phases of the programme 209
9.2 A comparison of information on finances in communities
between the ‘participatory’ (1997–1999) and ‘recentralization’
(2007) phases 220
11.1 Annual benefits derived from CBNRM activities in Khwai
and Xaxaba 251
14.1 Key findings from select national cases regarding patterns of
change and reform in natural resource governance, and the
underlying drivers of those changes 314

Boxes
13.1 Key predicted climate change impacts in Africa 296
 List of Contributors

Simon Anstey was born in Tanzania and has spent most of his working life in
western and southern Africa, with three years in central Asia and the Middle East.
In 1992, he initiated IUCN’s Mozambique programme, supporting post-conflict
protected area rehabilitation and pilot community natural resource management
initiatives until 2002. He has a doctorate on the politics of natural resource govern-
ance and Yao history in northern Mozambique from the University of Zimbabwe
and is currently the Director of ResourceAfrica UK.

Tom Blomley is a community-based natural resource management specialist,

with a strong background in east Africa. From 2003 to 2008 he advised the
Tanzanian government on the development of a national multi-donor programme
in support of participatory forest management. He currently lives in the UK and
works as a freelance natural resource management consultant.

Brian Child is Associate Professor in the Geography Department at the University

of Florida, and editor of Parks in Transition (2004). He worked for wildlife depart-
ments in Zimbabwe for 12 years, subsequently supported park and community-
based initiatives in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley, and has worked within the wildlife
sector in Uganda, Kenya, Namibia and South Africa.

Chaka Chirozva is currently studying for a PhD with the Communication and
Innovation Studies Group of Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He is a
Lecturer at the Centre for Applied Social Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe
and is also Facilitator with the IDRC-funded Scenario Planning, Iterative
Assessment and Adaptive Management Project, a regional research and devel-
opment initiative which uses participatory scenario planning methodologies with
communities in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area.

Maxwell Gomera is a resource economist with experience in community devel-

opment issues, biodiversity conservation, commercialization of natural products
and community-based natural resource management. He managed the IUCN
Regional Office for Southern Africa’s engagement with the mining and extractive
industries and was co-chair of the International Working Group on Mining and
Metals that produced the mining and metals supplement to the Global Reporting
Initiative. Currently, Maxwell is working with the United Nations Environment
Programme based in Nairobi, Kenya.
x Community Rights, Conservation and Contested Land

Brian Jones is an environment and development consultant and researcher,

working mainly on CBNRM policy and governance issues in Namibia and the
Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. He worked as a
government official in the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism for
ten years where he coordinated the ministry’s CBNRM programme, and has
recently worked as a CBNRM policy advisor and protected area co-management
policy advisor to the Ministry.

Ngeta Kabiri is a political scientist specializing in African politics and conserva-

tion policy. He has been a lecturer at Kenyatta University, completed his PhD
dissertation at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill on community
conservation in cross-border areas of Kenya and Tanzania, and most recently was
a post-doctoral fellow at Yale University.

Rodgers Lubilo is a natural resources management facilitator with 13 years of

experience in community mobilization and facilitation. He has worked for the
Luangwa Integrated Resource Development Project in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley,
supporting 45 Village Action Groups and 6 Community Resources Boards. He
runs Luangwa Management Services, a consultancy in CBNRM development.

Masego Madzwamuse is trained in environmental sciences and sociology and

has over ten years’ experience in conservation and development in southern
Africa. She worked for IUCN as the Botswana Country Programme Coordinator
(2001–2006) then later as Regional Programme Development Officer with IUCN
ROSA and UNDP on the TerrAfrica Programme. She has over the years under-
taken research and written publications on the land rights and development chal-
lenges of ethnic minorities in various parts of Botswana; livelihood security in
dryland ecosystems; community-based natural resource management and adap-
tive livelihoods. She is currently an independent consultant and researcher based
in South Africa.

Brian Maguranyanga is sociologist and independent consultant in organiza-

tion and environment in southern Africa. He has consulted for IUCN, WWF
and TRAFFIC in the area of policy and community-based natural resource
management. He is part-time dissertation supervisor at the Graduate School of
Management, University of Zimbabwe. Brian holds a doctorate from the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor (USA) and his dissertation explored transformation and
black empowerment in the South African national park system.

Partalala Meitaya is a resident of Ololosokwan village, Loliondo, northern

Tanzania. He has worked as Programme Officer for the Ujamaa Community
Resource Trust, based in Arusha and Loliondo, for more than ten years.

Marta Monjane has over 15 years’ experience in conservation and develop-

ment in southern Africa. She has worked for IUCN for the past seven years, first
as a programme officer (2002–2007), then subsequently as the Head of IUCN
Mozambique Country office (2008). Presently she coordinates the IUCN Forest
Regional Programme for East and Southern Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya.
 List of Contributors xi

James Murombedzi is a property rights and resource governance consultant.

His main research interests include agrarian political economy, land tenure, natural
resources management and climate change in Africa.

Fred Nelson has worked on community-based natural resource management,

ecotourism, and conservation policy in eastern Africa since 1998. He presently
directs Maliasili Initiatives, a consulting firm working to address biodiversity
conservation and natural resource management challenges using innovative,
collaborative and market-based strategies.

Maanda Ngoitiko is a Maasai activist, development expert and community

leader originally from Soit Sambu village, Loliondo, in northern Tanzania. She is
the founder and Coordinator of the Pastoral Women’s Council, based in Loliondo,
was one of the first Maasai NGO activists working with the NGO, KIPOC, in
Loliondo in the early 1990s, and is also a founding Programme Officer with the
Ujamaa Community Resource Trust.
Liz Rihoy currently resides in Kenya and is the Programme Director of the Zeitz
Foundation. She has worked with non-governmental organizations in a number
of African countries on community development and natural resource manage-
ment issues. Her particular interests lie in governance in relation to CBNRM
and she is completing a PhD thesis on related policy processes in Zimbabwe and
Botswana for the University of the Western Cape.

Makko Sinandei is from Arash village, Loliondo, in northern Tanzania and

works as Programme Officer with the Ujamaa Community Resource Trust, based
in Loliondo and Arusha. He has worked as a community development facilitator,
organizer, and activist for nearly 20 years in northern Tanzania.

Webster Whande, an environmental geographer, is the Programme Coordinator

for the ‘Human Mobility, Networks and Institutions for the Management of
Natural Resources in Africa’ programme, operating from the Institute for
Ethnology at the University of Köln and also Research Associate and Consultant
with RUZIVO Trust, a land, natural resource and agrarian reform research insti-
tute in Zimbabwe.
 Preface

This book has come together during the past three years, starting with its initial
genesis at a meeting of the International Union for Conservation of Nature
(IUCN) Southern Africa Sustainable Use Specialist Group (SASUSG) in May
2007. During this time, the volume’s core subject – local and national institutional
struggles over natural resource use, tenure and control – has increasingly been a
subject of debate and public attention, both within African countries and more
widely around the world.
During the past year, a string of studies and media reports in newspapers from
Tanzania to India to Britain have highlighted the rapidly growing global demand
for African lands and resources. Attention is increasingly focused on this emerging
21st century ‘land grab’, driven by global market interest in African landscapes
desired for agriculture, biofuels, wildlife tourism and other natural resource-
based investments. While many African economies have recorded strong levels of
macro-economic growth during the past decade, in stark contrast to the economic
malaise of the 1980s and 1990s, it remains an open question as to what degree this
growth has improved the livelihoods of the majority of people living in rural areas.
Is Africa entering a new era of investment, growth and prosperity, or an unpre­
cedented period of resource alienation, rural marginalization and consolidation of
undemocratic political relationships between states and citizens?
Similar dynamics are evident across the wider developing world. For example,
as the book was nearing completion in mid-2009, Peru was engulfed by violent
protests pitting central government policies allocating oil and timber conces-
sions against the land and resource rights of indigenous communities in the
Amazon basin.
This book arose from widespread concerns amongst scholars and field prac-
titioners across east and southern Africa that the efforts undertaken during the
past 20 years to empower local communities with greater rights over lands and
resources have not had the envisioned impacts, and that these efforts have gener-
ally been undermined by forces which are at root political and institutional in
nature. Natural resource governance reform efforts that seek to strengthen local
rights and tenure cut across conservation, developmental and political aims and
interests throughout the region. The core aim of this volume is to strengthen the
political understanding of those governance processes as a way of understanding
natural resource management outcomes, including existing barriers to change or,
where applicable, the reasons underlying successful institutional transformations.
xiv Community Rights, Conservation and Contested Land

The book represents a call to take political institutions and dynamics seriously as
a core element of understanding natural resource management outcomes in their
multi-faceted social, economic and ecological dimensions. In other words, politics
is central to efforts to promote sustainable development and the sustainable use
of natural resources.
The book has been carried out as a project of SASUSG, with most of the
contributors being long-term members of the network and, in many cases, collab-
orators through a range of community-based natural resource management initia-
tives across the region. Support for the project has been provided by SASUSG
through funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Additional finan-
cial support for the volume has been provided by the Sand County Foundation
Bradley Fund for the Environment. Both sources of financial support are grate-
fully acknowledged.
The development of the volume has been a collaborative effort throughout,
starting with the initial concept. In particular, two of the contributing authors,
Simon Anstey and Liz Rihoy, also played a central role in contributing ideas to the
initial conceptual framework and objectives for the volume and in identifying and
recruiting a number of the other authors to the project. Marshall Murphree played
a key role in providing early encouragement to the initiative as well as invaluable
feedback on initial concept notes and a number of the draft chapters. Beyond the
SASUSG network, Jesse Ribot and Ashwini Chhatre also provided helpful sugges-
tions and feedback as the volume’s structure and objectives took shape.
Other individuals who provided critical feedback and helpful comments
on earlier drafts of various chapters include the following: Liz Alden Wily, Tor
Benjaminsen, Ivan Bond, Bram Büscher, Mike Jones, Patience Mutopo, David
Peterson, Chris Sandbrook, Michael Schoon and Geir Sundet.
Support to the project has also been provided by the IUCN South Africa
office, and in particular Ditse Mduli enabled the smooth logistical preparation
and execution of the authors meeting held in Johannesburg in August 2008.
Additional support from within IUCN and SASUSG during the course of this
initiative has come from Brian Child, Kule Chitepo and Masego Madzwamuse.
At Sand County Foundation, Mike Jones and Kevin McAleese provided helpful
feedback and facilitation in developing the proposal to the Bradley Fund for the
Environment.

Fred Nelson
October 2009
Arusha
 Acronyms and Abbreviations

AA Appropriate Authority
ACORD Agency for Cooperation and Research in Development
ADC Area Development Committee
ADMADE Administrative Management and Design for Game
Management Areas
AGM Annual General Meeting
AWF African Wildlife Foundation
BDP Botswana Democratic Party
BOCOBONET Botswana Community-Based Organizations Network
CA CAMPFIRE Association
CA Cooperative Agreement
CAMPFIRE Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous
Resources, Zimbabwe
CBFM Community-based forest management
CBNRM Community-based natural resource management
CBO Community-based organization
CCA Conservation Corporation Africa
CCG CAMPFIRE Collaborative Group
CDM Clean Development Mechanism
CEO Chief Executive Officer
CI Conservation International
CKGR Central Kalahari Game Reserve
CNP Contractual National Park
CPA Communal Property Association
CRB Community Resource Board
CTT Cgaecgae Tlhabololo Trust
DfID Department for International Development
DNPWM Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management
DWNP Department of Wildlife and National Parks
EAWLS East African Wildlife Society
FAO Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations
FBD Forestry and Beekeeping Division
FDI Foreign direct investment
FPK First People of the Kalahari
FZS Frankfurt Zoological Society
xvi Community Rights, Conservation and Contested Land

GDP Gross domestic product

GHG Greenhouse gas
GLTFCA Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area
GLTP Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park
GMA Game Management Area
GNU Government of National Unity
GPA Global Political Agreement
GRZ Government of the Republic of Zambia
GTZ German Development Agency
IBEAC Imperial British East Africa Company
IFAW International Fund for Animal Welfare
IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
IRDNC Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation
IUCN International Union for Conservation of Nature
JMB Joint Management Board
JVP Joint venture partnerships
KANU Kenya African National Union
KCWCM Kenya Coalition for Wildlife Conservation and Management
KDT Khwai Development Trust
KIPOC Koronkoro Indigenous Peoples Oriented to Conservation
KWS Kenya Wildlife Service
KWWG Kenya Wildlife Working Group
LIFE Living in a Finite Environment
LIRDA Lupande Integrated Rural Development Authority
LIRDP Luangwa Integrated Resource Development Programme
LLS Livelihoods and Landscape Programme
MCC Mahenye CAMPFIRE Committee
MDC Movement for Democratic Change
MEA Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
MET Ministry of Environment and Tourism
MMD Movement for Multiparty Democracy
MNRT Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism
MoU Memorandum of Understanding
MP Member of Parliament
MWCT Ministry of Wildlife, Conservation and Tourism
NACSO Namibian Association of CBNRM Support Organisations
NCA Ngorongoro Conservation Area
NCAA Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority
NGO Non-government organization
NPWS National Parks and Wildlife Service, Zambia
NRMP Natural Resource Management Program
OBC Ortello Business Corporation
OCT Okavango Community Trust
ODA Overseas development aid
OKMT Okavango Kopano Mokoro Tru
OWS Okavango Wilderness Safaris
PES Payments for ecosystem services
 Acronyms and Abbreviations xvii

PPF Peace Parks Foundation

RDC Rural District Council
REDD Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation
SADC Southern African Development Community
SADF South African Defence Forces
SANDF South African National Defence Forces
SANParks South Africa National Parks
SAP Structural Adjustment Programme
SASUSG Southern Africa Sustainable Use Specialist Group
SIDA Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency
SNP Serengeti National Park
SNV Netherlands Development Organization
SWAPO South West Africa People’s Organization
TANAPA Tanzania National Parks
TBL Tanzania Breweries Limited
TFCA Transfrontier Conservation Area
TFCG Tanzania Forest Conservation Group
TGLP Tribal Grazing Land Policy
TLA Traditional Leaders Act
TOCADI Trust for Okavango Cultural and Development Initiatives
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
USAID United States Agency for International Development
VAG Village Action Group
VLFR Village Land Forest Reserve
VTC Village Technical Committee
VTC Village Trust Committee
WADCO Ward Development Committee
WIMSA Working Group for Indigenous Peoples of Southern Africa
WMA Wildlife Management Area
WWF World Wide Fund for Nature/World Wildlife Fund
Z$ Zimbabwe Dollar
ZANU-PF Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front
ZAWA Zambia Wildlife Authority
 Part 1

Introduction
 1

Introduction: The Politics of Natural

Resource Governance in Africa

Fred Nelson

The land is the economy, the economy is the land.

Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF)
election slogan

Wildlife is our oil.

Tanzania National Parks official (quoted in Sachedina, 2008)

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Frederick Douglass, 1857

Few matters are more central to the daily lives of African societies than the use
and governance of natural resources. The majority of Africa’s human population
relies on the resources that grow or live on the land, and the ecological services
which underpin agricultural and pastoralist livelihoods. Patterns of resource use
are fundamental to rural and national economies, as well as to local and global
concerns about environmental conservation. In the political sphere, the desire of
Europeans to capture and exploit African resources played a key role in the trans-
formative process of colonialism. Natural resource governance issues such as land
tenure continue to underpin evolving relations between citizens and states in the
post-colonial era.
Institutional histories and political interests fundamentally shape rights over
natural resources, which in turn are central to the way those resources are used.
The core characteristic of Africa’s colonial era was the imposition of new forms
of centralized political authority over access to land and resources that had previ-
ously been controlled by more localized institutions. After independence arrived
in most of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s, this centralized authority over natural
resources was generally reinforced as states sought to consolidate the political
authority needed to drive modernization processes and to control patronage
resources.
4 Introduction

During the past several decades, a diverse array of factors have challenged these
prevailing historical patterns of natural resource policy and management practice
across sub-Saharan Africa, and indeed much of the world. Central state agen-
cies have often mismanaged natural resources, due to both insufficient capacity
and misaligned incentives which lead to appropriation of public assets for private
gain and patronage. In many African countries, centralized state ownership of
resources such as wildlife, forests and fisheries has led to conditions of open access
exploitation, as central capacity to enforce restrictions on use has not matched the
state’s claims of ownership. Local communities whose livelihoods depend directly
on natural assets continue to lack the formal authority to conserve and manage
those resources. As knowledge has grown over the past 20 years about the dura-
bility and sustainability of many local collective resource governance institutions
(e.g. Ostrom, 1990), numerous initiatives have emerged in developing countries
to reform centralized resource management systems by vesting more secure rights
and responsibilities at the local level (Ribot, 2004; Batterbury and Fernando,
2006). In Africa, these reforms have been driven not only by concerns about
developing more sustainable and participatory resource governance systems, but
also by broader political economic changes. These include the declining capacity
of bureaucratic agencies in many states following the economic crises of the 1970s
and 1980s, which led to externally driven policy reform processes (e.g. ‘struc-
tural adjustment’), as well as the spread of democracy and multi-party politics
throughout Africa in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War (Bratton and
van de Walle, 1997).
In some east and southern African countries, innovative reforms granting local
communities greater rights to use and manage resources have led to tangible
development and conservation gains on the ground and catalysed broader enthu-
siasm for reforms (Suich et al, 2008). Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE programme has
been particularly influential, resulting in over US$20 million in revenues from
wildlife being captured at district and community levels during 1989–2001 (Frost
and Bond, 2008). Namibia’s communal conservancies adapted some of the key
lessons, including both successes and limitations, from CAMPFIRE, and this has
resulted in widespread wildlife recoveries and rapidly increasing local revenues
from wildlife and tourism on communal lands (NACSO, 2008). In Tanzania,
policy and legal reforms carried out in the 1990s which enable local communi-
ties to formalize collective rights over forests have resulted in both widespread
ecological recoveries and new local benefits (Blomley et al, 2008; Lund and Treue,
2008). Globally, evidence is increasing that local communities are often able to
manage and conserve resources more sustainably than state protected areas, and
often at a fraction of the costs (e.g. Hayes, 2006). Local experiments such as
CAMPFIRE have provided the empirical basis for the widespread support that
has emerged since the 1980s for more decentralized and participatory forms of
natural resource management such as ‘community conservation’ and ‘commu-
nity-based natural resource management’ (CBNRM) (Adams and Hulme, 2001;
Suich et al, 2008).
Such efforts to reform natural resource governance policies and institutions
highlight not only the potential and importance of local management regimes on
ecological and socio-economic grounds, but also the practical barriers facing such
 The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in Africa 5

changes. In an influential global review, Ribot (2004) finds that most of the natural
resource decentralization reforms being promoted are effectively ‘charades’ due
to the lack of real reform and implementation on the ground. Around the world,
governments have adopted the rhetoric of decentralization, devolution and local
empowerment, but rarely has this change in language been matched by the substan-
tive depth of institutional reforms. By contrast, numerous measures ensure that
centralized government agencies across Africa, Asia and Latin America maintain
discretionary control over valuable natural resources, and local tenure remains
insecure (Ribot et al, 2006).
In eastern and southern Africa, numerous studies, project reviews and prac-
titioner reflections are evidence of the illusory nature of many natural resource
reforms and the difficulty of achieving real change (IIED, 1994; Barrow et al,
2000; Shackleton et al, 2002; Jones, 2004; Jones and Murphree, 2004). The lack
of progress on the ground has in some instances caused erstwhile supporters of
community-based approaches to natural resource management to shift to other
narratives and strategies, or to argue that community-based natural resource
management initiatives have broadly failed to live up to their promise (Hutton et
al, 2005; Blaikie, 2006).
If there has been a broad failure of these community-based approaches, it has
been not in the performance of their operational principles, which have rarely
been put into practice (Murphree, 2004), but in the recognition of the nature and
depth of resistance to reform that exists across the region. This resistance is polit-
ical in nature, and relates to the interests and incentives that central agencies and
individuals possess for maintaining or expanding control over natural resources
(Gibson, 1999; Nelson and Agrawal, 2008). Land and natural resource reforms
are often not carried out because, as Alden Wily (2008a, p6) puts it, in relation to
competing state and private commercial interests, ‘these resources are too valu-
able to allow ordinary people to own’. With rapidly growing financial interests
in African natural resources, driven largely by global patterns of commerce and
capital interacting with national and local governance institutions, the political-
economic stakes in African landscapes and ecosystems are rapidly rising.
These political-economic realities and trends create an axiomatic conundrum
facing natural resource governance reform efforts in sub-Saharan Africa: crafting
more sustainable resource management arrangements requires reforms that secure
greater land and resource rights at the local level, but the policy-makers that control
such reform processes generally have substantial disincentives to implementing
such measures (Murphree, 2000). If local groups of people are to become better
able to use, manage and conserve the resources that their livelihoods depend on,
this paradox must be better understood and ultimately negotiated. This is no small
challenge for the diverse array of parties with a stake in rural Africa’s environ-
mental and economic future.
This volume examines these political dimensions of natural resource govern-
ance, in the hope of generating an improved understanding of how and why
reform efforts play out the way that they do, and ultimately contributing to the
development of more effective strategies for influencing institutional changes that
empower local groups of people to secure their livelihoods, territories and envi-
ronments. While this book’s scope is limited to east and southern Africa, these
6 Introduction

case studies and regional syntheses will likely be relevant to efforts elsewhere to
craft more sustainable natural resource governance arrangements in a world of
increasing human demands and depleted ecological capacity.

African economies and natural resource use

Patterns of use and control over natural resources have been a core thread tying
together the course of human history, and in few places is this more the case
than in sub-Saharan Africa. The importance of natural resources in African states’
political histories is a function of the central economic role that such resources
play in agrarian societies. Although African countries are rapidly urbanizing, the
economic foundation of most nations across the region remains their natural
resource base. In rural areas, people rely on agriculture, livestock and a range
of natural products for food and income. Because much of sub-Saharan Africa
is semi-arid with erratic patterns of rainfall and with ancient and infertile soils,
less than 10 per cent of the subcontinent is classified as arable land (FAOSTAT,
2009). Many groups of people continue to rely on extensive pastoralist livestock
production systems, from the Sahel to the Rift Valley to the Namib.
Forests, rangelands, lakes and coastal ecosystems provide a wide range of valu-
able natural products which generate economic activity and underpin people’s
livelihoods. The World Health Organization estimates that up to 80 per cent of
Africa’s human population uses traditional medicines from natural products
as a key form of primary health care (Roe, 2008). In central Africa, wild meat
accounts for between 30 per cent and 80 per cent of rural households’ overall
protein intake (Nasi et al, 2008). In Kenya, pastoralist livestock production, in
the form of milk, meat and hides, is estimated to be worth about US$800 million
to the national economy (Hesse and MacGregor, 2006). A recent World Bank
(2008) study from Tanzania suggests that informal natural resource uses at the
local and national level could be worth up to US$100 per capita, or about 30 per
cent of existing mean national incomes. Even in relatively industrial South Africa,
communal resources, such as non-timber products from forests and woodlands,
provide an annual subsistence value estimated at a mean of nearly US$450 per
household, or a total national value of US$800 million per year (Shackleton and
Shackleton, 2004).
Renewable resources provide the basis for Africa’s growing forestry, tourism
and fishing industries. Commercial timber production in Cameroon was worth
over US$345 million by 2002, while Uganda’s lake fisheries generate an estimated
US$200 million per year and provide employment for over 800,000 fishermen
and small-scale processors (Oyono et al, 2007; Roe, 2008). Forests also provide
key ecological services in the form of water supplied from highland catchment
areas, which serve not only the domestic water needs of urban centres such as
Johannesburg and Dar es Salaam, but also the hydroelectric generation that is a
key component of many African countries’ energy supplies.
International tourism receipts to sub-Saharan Africa amounted to US$14 billion
in 2004, with annual rates of growth consistently above 8 per cent from 2000 to
2005 (World Bank, 2006). Tourism industry growth in Africa reflects the growing
 The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in Africa 7

global demand for nature-based ecotourism, and the competitive advantage that
Africa possesses for delivering such tourism products as a result of its wildlife and
other unique natural assets. As Sachedina (2008) highlights in a recent study of
community-based conservation in northern Tanzania, as captured by the quote
placed at the outset of this chapter, wildlife’s role in the tourism industries of
countries such as Kenya and Tanzania gives wildlife resources a political economic
salience analogous to that of oil in other nations.
Alden Wily (2008b) estimates that up to 25 per cent of the total African land
mass consists of communally managed lands, such as forests and rangelands, with
a conservatively estimated real estate value of at least US$70 billion. Moreover,
she also estimates that ‘over 90 percent of the rural population access land through
indigenous customary mechanisms, and around 370 million of them are definably
poor’ (Alden Wily, 2006, p2).
The centrality of natural resources and ecosystem services to African econo-
mies at scales from rural households to entire nations is a important factor in the
convergence of environmental and developmental concerns during the past 20
years. The economic value of these natural resources also places debates over land
rights and resource use on centre stage politically. Before proceeding to outline
these political economic factors and the way they shape natural resource policies
and management practices, it is important to briefly review the key role that insti-
tutions play in natural resource governance and management outcomes.

Institutional dimensions of natural resource use

Institutions are the rules, both formal and informal, that govern society and which
underpin human economic activities and social interactions (North, 1990). As
such, institutions provide the substantive basis of ‘governance’, both analytically
and operationally. Formal institutions include laws, policies, and constitutions,
which all serve to define, distribute and delimit the powers of states and citizens.
Informal institutions include norms, customs and ethical beliefs, which are all
collective means of governing human behaviour through ‘rules’ of social interac-
tion. Institutions such as property rights determine who may use a resource and
access or capture that resource’s value. Formal property rights enable the forma-
tion of large-scale markets for trade in the resource itself as well as the rights to a
given resource’s value in the future.
The institutional arrangements, including both formal legal rules and informal
social norms, that define the distribution of rights over natural resources shape
patterns of resource use and conservation in fundamental ways. Where rights
over resources are either completely undefined or unenforced, conditions of
‘open access’ tend to encourage the depletion of the resource because nobody
possesses incentives for conserving a resource which is available for appropria-
tion by any prospective user. This may be the case where resources are physi-
cally situated at the global scale, such as pelagic fisheries or the atmosphere,
but where institutions have not been formulated and adopted to govern the
use of these shared global resources. Alternatively, open access scenarios may
exist where the state (or any other actor such as an absentee landowner) claims
8 Introduction

ownership of a resource but does not in fact enforce that right; this is the case
with wildlife across most of sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the tropics. As
a result, wildlife tends to be exploited in an unsustainable manner because local
users do not have rights over the resource and thus lack incentives for investing
in conservation measures that would restrain exploitation and promote sustain-
able use (Nasi et al, 2008).
Resources which are subject to open access are effectively ungoverned; that is
to say, there are no functional rules which govern who may use a resource and
no institutions that allocate rights over resources amongst different groups or
individuals. Such open access scenarios have often been conflated – most influen-
tially by Hardin (1968) in his seminal article on ‘The tragedy of the commons’–
with communal or common property regimes. In such communal regimes,
rights to use resources are shared by a group of people, with membership of that
group somehow defined and rules mutually adopted which govern resource use
(Ostrom, 1990). Rates of resource use which exceed rates of resource renewal –
the definition of ‘unsustainable’ – may be prevented by collective enforcement of
such rules.
The ability of groups of people to devise and maintain collective resource
governance institutions thus has a critical influence on the sustainability of resource
use patterns. As the understanding of common property regimes and collective
resource governance systems has blossomed around the world since the 1980s,
the importance of local institutions in sustaining natural resources has become
increasingly recognized (Dietz et al, 2003). For example, a wealth of evidence
from long-term studies of forests in different parts of the world suggests that local
management institutions may perform as well or better than state protected areas
(Hayes, 2006; Ostrom and Nagendra, 2006). Agrawal (2007, p123) summarizes
the evolving understanding of the relationship between sustainable forest manage-
ment and local institutions as follows:

Rules that are easy to understand and enforce, locally devised, take into account
differences in types of violations, help deal with conflicts, and help hold users and
officials accountable are most likely to lead to effective governance.

Similarly, the rules that govern the exploitation of fisheries have a critical
influence on patterns of use. A recent global study of fisheries management
outcomes demonstrates that fisheries which are managed based on clear and
enforceable property rights over a defined catch volume have largely avoided
the kinds of collapses in stock that characterize many modern fisheries (Costello
et al, 2008).
Institutions shape the way people use resources in fundamental ways by
distributing rights, authority and responsibilities amongst different layers of
society. Importantly, though, institutions are inherently the outcome of the
political negotiations whereby people devise governance systems from local to
national to global scales (North, 1990). In order to understand natural resource
management outcomes, we must understand the political processes that deter-
mine the shape of resource governance institutions and how those institutions
change over time.
 The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in Africa 9

Negotiating reform: The promise and limitations of

community-based natural resource management
Most of African history since the onset of the colonial era in the late 19th century
has been characterized by the transfer of formal authority over lands and natural
resources from local communities to national political jurisdictions (Adams, 2004;
Alden Wily, 2008b). Colonialism resulted in sweeping institutional changes in the
way resources were governed, with authority shifting over time away from local
resource users towards a remote and unaccountable colonial state with objectives
that were very different from those of local communities. This undermined local
resource governance systems, and served to shift many resources from a status
as common property to that of de facto open access. The result has been exten-
sive conflicts over rights and tenure amongst different local, national, and global
resource users, as well as widespread degradation of renewable natural resources
such as forests and wildlife.
Even while colonial and post-colonial measures were extending centralized
authority over lands and resources throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa, the
seeds of alternative decentralized approaches were being planted in some coun-
tries. Starting in the late 1960s, southern African countries such as South Africa,
Zimbabwe and Namibia progressively adopted wildlife management policies which
brought about devolved proprietorship of wildlife and generated local economic
incentives for conservation. This initially occurred between 1965 and 1975 in those
three countries, all of which were ruled by white minority governments at the time,
and this first wave of reforms was concerned solely with alienated freehold lands.
White landowners were given conditional rights to manage and utilize the wildlife
on their properties, which resulted in new incentives for stewardship and increases
in both the number of animals and the economic productivity of wildlife as a form
of land use in all three countries. In Zimbabwe, about 27,000km2 of commercial
farmland gradually shifted, through voluntary landholder choice, towards wildlife
as the main form of land use, with some areas undergoing a broad shift from cattle
ranching to wildlife production (Bond et al, 2004). In Namibia, wildlife on private
lands increased by an estimated 80 per cent between 1972 and 1992 (Barnes and
de Jager, 1995).
These experiences with institutional reforms devolving proprietorship over
wildlife from the state to private landholders provided the conceptual, and ulti-
mately political, basis for attempting to extend similar reforms to the communal
lands in Zimbabwe and Namibia after those countries’ transitions to majority rule
in 1980 and 1990, respectively. In Zimbabwe, this resulted in the development
of the Communal Areas Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE),
which sought to devolve rights over wildlife in communal lands to the local level
(Martin, 1986). CAMPFIRE was, at the time, a highly innovative experiment
in community-based natural resource management. Although the architects of
CAMPFIRE within Zimbabwe’s wildlife bureaucracy were able to gain support
for reforms which in principle aimed to devolve authority over wildlife to the local
level, they were constrained by the institutional context of the country’s communal
lands, where no community-level governance institutions existed with rights over
10 Introduction

a defined area of land (Murphree, 2005). This led to a strategic compromise

whereby authority would be transferred to the level of Rural District Councils
rather than the community or village level as had been envisioned (Ibid.).
This compromise played a central role in CAMPFIRE’s performance and
impacts on the ground, as well as in the broader evolution of ideas about natural
resource governance in southern Africa since the 1980s. From 1989 to 2001, the
CAMPFIRE programme expanded from two districts to 37 districts, with a total
of 43,000km2 of communal lands being allocated for wildlife management (Frost
and Bond, 2008). During this same period CAMPFIRE generated over US$20
million in direct income from wildlife, with about 50 per cent of this revenue going
to the communities themselves, and the other half being captured by the Rural
District Councils (Ibid.).
The capture of such a large proportion of wildlife revenues at the district level
under CAMPFIRE meant that the essential principle of matching local propri-
etorship over wildlife with control over benefits had occurred imperfectly at best.
The direct control over wildlife revenues by the district governments weakened
local incentives for investing in wildlife production and conservation, and this
emerged as the chief critique of CAMPFIRE. Reflecting on the program’s first
decade, Murombedzi (2001, pp247, 255) concludes that:

CAMPFIRE has not sufficiently devolved rights in wildlife to local communities to

the extent where these communities can use these rights to gain an increased stake
in the wildlife utilization enterprise at its multiple levels of value…the top-down
preferences of central government on communities have merely been replaced by the
top-down preferences of local governments on communities.

In neighbouring Namibia, the lessons of CAMPFIRE were absorbed and influ-

enced the design of Namibia’s own wildlife management reforms following inde-
pendence from apartheid South Africa in 1990. Namibia also sought to extend
authority over wildlife to communal lands, but unlike Zimbabwe it did so with
legislative reforms passed in 1996 that enabled communities to form their own
self-defined ‘conservancies’ which would be granted direct proprietorship over
wildlife. Since those reforms were adopted, community conservancies have
spread rapidly, and by 2007 over 50 conservancies containing 118,000km2 – over
14 per cent of Namibia’s total land area – had been established (NACSO, 2008).
The rights granted over wildlife in conservancies enable local communities to
develop joint ventures with private tourism and hunting companies and to keep
100 per cent of revenues generated through such commercial enterprises (Jones,
this volume). In sharp contrast to most countries in Africa and the world, the
local incentives created through this devolved governance framework have helped
enable Namibia to sustain broadly increasing wildlife populations, including rare
species such as black rhinos, across private, state and communal lands (Nelson,
2008).
Experiences such as those of CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe and the communal
conservancies in Namibia have played an important role in catalysing further
experimentation throughout east and southern Africa, and outside the region
as well (Hulme and Murphree, 2001). Natural resource managers and rural
 The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in Africa 11

development and conservation practitioners elsewhere in the region also developed

similar models independently. In Kenya, efforts to develop models of community-
based conservation which integrated wildlife management with local livelihoods
are traceable to initiatives in the 1960s around Amboseli National Park (Western,
1994). Experiments with decentralized forest management arose in countries such
as Uganda and Tanzania in the early 1990s, drawing as much on experiences with
joint forest management in southern Asia as on initiatives elsewhere in Africa.
As a result, during the 1990s, community-based natural resource management
(CBNRM) or ‘community conservation’ strategies became a widely promoted
narrative for achieving interconnected conservation, rural development and local
governance aims (Adams and Hulme, 2001). But by the end of the decade the
tone had begun to change in many quarters, with growing doubt both within the
region and amongst external donors and supporters as to the efficacy of these
community-based approaches. The core problem has been that for effective local
management regimes to emerge, institutional reforms need to shift authority over
natural resources from state bureaucracies to local communities (Alden Wily and
Mbaya, 2001; Shackleton et al, 2002; Nelson and Agrawal, 2008). With some
notable exceptions, this has rarely occurred. Surveying southern Africa, Murphree
(2002, pp1–2) concludes that:

…most initiatives lacked the critical ingredient for success: the devolution of
authority and responsibility through societally sanctioned entitlements. Government
and agency implementation retained ultimate power to shape objectives and control
benefits; ‘involvement’ became compliance and ‘participation’ became co-option.

These constraints are common to natural resource reform efforts outside of

southern or sub-Saharan Africa. A vast academic literature and chronicle of field
experiences from around the world testifies to the challenges of shifting rights over
resources from central bureaucratic agencies to local resource users (Ribot, 2004;
Ribot et al, 2006; Sunderlin et al, 2008). These diverse experiences also testify to a
main common cause of the failure of reforms: unwillingness at the political centre
to divest authority over resources.

Natural resources and the African state:

The politics of reform
Most experiences with natural resource decentralization reforms to date, in east and
southern Africa and elsewhere as well, serve to highlight the inherently problem-
atic nature of bringing about institutional changes that increase local authority and
tenure over resources (Batterbury and Fernando, 2006). The underlying barriers
to change lie in the institutional structures and political interests that govern socie-
ties, and the incentives that those interests create in the context of policy formu-
lation. Modern African states possess a number of general characteristics which
fundamentally influence institutional reform processes and their outcomes.
Africa’s colonial states were established in order to control labour, capital
and resources for external, European purposes. This set of political objectives
12 Introduction

resulted in the concentration of central bureaucratic and executive power, with

the states’ powers of coercion used to limit independent forms of social organiza-
tion. Governance was not, self-evidently, democratic, representative or account-
able. Opportunities for people to self-organize in civic institutions such as unions,
cooperatives or political parties were heavily curtailed. States claimed wide powers
over natural resources, particularly land, which was generally placed under
discretionary bureaucratic control with customary rights subordinated to claims
explicitly recognized by the colonial administration (Toulmin and Quan, 2000).
Even where colonial authorities claimed to operate in a decentralized manner,
as in British ‘indirect rule’, this functionally meant concentrating fused execu-
tive, legislative and judicial powers in externally-recognized local authorities who
were bolstered by what Mamdani (1996) calls ‘the fist of colonial power’ (see also
Murombedzi, this volume).
African independence leaders inherited these political structures from their
European predecessors. Domestic administrative capacity tended to be extremely
low at the time of independence in most countries, while developmental aspi-
rations and expectations were high. In many states regional or ethnic cleavages
had been exacerbated by colonial indirect rule arrangements. Post-independence
leaders faced the challenge of consolidating state authority over scattered popula-
tions and pursuing ambitious modernization agendas (Boone, 2003). In pursuing
this agenda of consolidation and expansion of central authority, the colonial state
was de-racialized but rarely democratized (Mamdani, 1996). Ihonvbere (2006,
p10) states that African nationalist struggles ‘culminated in the consolidation,
rationalization, and reproduction of unequal and exploitative neo-colonial rela-
tions.’ With discretionary power heavily concentrated in the hands of the exec-
utive, and limited means of democratically contesting that authority, control of
the presidency in post-colonial African states became a path to power, wealth,
and, through networks of patronage, social and ethnic security (Ake, 1996). The
tremendously high stakes attached to control of the executive branch have led
to many of Africa’s civil wars and conflicts during the past 50 years, and remain
clearly visible in events such as Kenya’s disputed 2007 general election, and the
violence that followed it (Wrong, 2009).
With tremendous private economic opportunities linked to groups’ or individ-
uals’ control of the executive branch, and, at least until recently, limited opportu-
nities for private accumulation elsewhere, politics becomes ‘a means of entry into
business’ through a ‘winner-take-all game in which power allows private appropri-
ation of state resources’ (Szeftel, 1998, p237). The result is that ‘the state remains
a battleground where individuals fight for whatever power or resources they can
capture,’ as Ake (1996, pp67–70) has put it.
An essential characteristic of this intense political struggle in sub-Saharan
Africa is the degree to which it takes place outside the bounds of formal institu-
tions. Political processes often revolve around kinship ties and relationships based
on personal and communal patronage, rather than formal public discourses and
institutions (Hyden, 2008). Chabal and Daloz (1999, p158) highlight the ‘extent
to which vertical and/or personalized relations actually drive the very logic of
the political system…the overall aim of politics is to affect the nature of such
personal relations.’
 The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in Africa 13

The importance of informal patronage in structuring political power in African

countries is central to the region’s governance dynamics. The high degree of infor-
mality of African polities underlies the region’s high levels of corruption, which
verge on what some term the ‘criminalization of the African state’ (Bayart et al,
1998). What is important to grasp in relation to the institutionalization of corrup-
tion in African societies is that, in contrast to much of the global discourse on
‘good governance’, corruption is not an aberrant malignancy of these systems,
but is rather central to the operation and stability of political relations. Corruption
simply reflects the dominance of private interests within the public political realm
in most African countries, be it in the formulation of public policy or the use
and allocation of public resources. In states dominated by informal patron–client
relations, ‘corruption’ is simply a normative term contrasting the prevalence of
informal processes with the more marginal role of formal legal institutions (Chabal
and Daloz, 1999). As Kelsall (2008, p642) notes, ‘this is the essence of neo-patri-
monial governance; the rules are merely a screen, or else they are cynically used to
create opportunities for rent-seeking.’
This emphasis on informality can, however, lead to ascribing all public policy
and political dynamics in African states to informal goals and motivations. Part
of the challenge of studies of African public policy and governance is to untangle
the complexity of interacting formal and informal institutions and processes. Van
de Walle (2001, pp51–52) highlights this ‘hybrid’ nature of the neo-patrimonial
African state:

…most African states are hybrid regimes, in which patrimonial practices coexist
with modern bureaucracy. Outwardly the state has all the trappings of a Weberian
rational-legal system, with a clear distinction between the public and the private
realm, with written laws and a constitutional order. However, this official order is
constantly subverted by a patrimonial logic, in which officeholders almost system-
atically appropriate public resources for their own uses and political authority is
largely based on clientelist practices, including patronage, various forms of rent-
seeking, and prebendalism.

The key point is that both informal patronage relations and formal state institu-
tions such as laws and policies are relevant to governance, and that ignoring either
the formalistic, bureaucratic, ‘visible’ realm, or the informal, personalized, ‘hidden’
realm is likely to lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations of governance
processes and outcomes.
The pervasiveness of informal patron–client relations set within a context of
centralized but often highly contested state authority fundamentally influences
the way public resources are used and governed in African states. Bates (1981,
p96), in his study of the political economy of agricultural policy-making in
African countries, concludes that ‘public institutions no longer embody a collec-
tive vision, but instead reinforce a pattern of private advantage.’ Governance deci-
sions and institutions are thus often oriented towards the production of private
gains and rents, rather than towards producing public goods. Ake (1996, p42)
locates these political economic dynamics at the centre of contemporary develop-
ment outcomes in Africa:
14 Introduction

Instead of being a public force, the state in Africa tends to be privatized, that is,
appropriated to the service of private interests by the dominant faction of the elite…
Given a choice between social transformation, especially development, and political
domination, most African leaders choose the latter.

Natural resources, with their historic mooring in the public domain and their
high economic values, are central to the patronage interests that allow governing
élites to maintain powers and privileges. VonDoepp and Villalón (2005, p18) note
that ‘control over resources translates into political advantage as incumbent elites
obtain the ability to dispense patronage, run viable party organizations, and mount
effective campaigns.’
This political logic of state control over lands and resources shapes natural
resource governance patterns across Africa. Agricultural policy in Africa’s largely
agrarian nations has evolved according to political interests bent towards control-
ling producers’ access to markets and inputs in order to extract rents (Bates,
1981; see Cooksey, 2003, for a more recent example). Forest policy and manage-
ment institutions from Senegal to Cameroon to Tanzania are crafted according to
central patronage interests in controlling and extracting rents from both formal
and informal patterns of trade and utilization in products such as timber and
charcoal (Oyono, 2004; Milledge et al, 2007; Ribot, 2008). Keely and Scoones
(2003, p91) quote an Ethiopian government policy advisor framing the funda-
mental political importance of land tenure institutions with disarming simplicity:
‘“if you control the land you control the people.”’
Gibson (1999, p3), in a relatively unique comparative study of the political
economy of wildlife policy in Zambia, Kenya and Zimbabwe, frames wildlife
governance as a struggle amongst different social actors to control wildlife’s
economic value:

…because wildlife is an important economic and political resource…individuals

and groups have sought to structure policy to secure its benefits for themselves.
These actors operate in an arena composed of numerous institutions that affect
their strategies and choices. The outcome of their efforts is wildlife policies that do
not necessarily protect animals…Rather, wildlife policies and their outcomes reflect
attempts by individuals and groups to gain private advantage.

Gibson’s somewhat understated conclusion is that ‘although rural residents

respond to incentives, bureaucrats do not appear interested in creating policies
that undercut their own authority’ (Gibson, 1999, p160).
The political economic barriers to natural resource reforms are merely one
component, albeit in the rural African context an important one, of broader
struggles over rights and accountability in African nations. Many natural resource
management reforms emerged during the 1990s, during the same decade when
democratic reforms were sweeping across sub-Saharan Africa in the ‘second
liberation’ following the end of the Cold War (Bratton and van de Walle, 1997). As
with natural resource reforms, the extent of these broader changes in governance
has often been limited and invariably contested (Ibid., VonDoepp and Villalón,
2005). While new forms of political pluralism widely emerged during the early
 The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in Africa 15

and mid-1990s, it has often been followed by efforts on the part of incumbent
élites to reconsolidate political authority. Despite the spread of regular multi-
party elections across African states in the 1990s, Ihonvbere and Mbaku (2006,
p2) note that ‘in no instance have elections been able to drastically alter the status
quo and deepen the political process.’ National elections in Kenya and Zimbabwe
in late 2007 and early 2008, respectively, further demonstrate the substantial
barriers that remain in the basic exercise of citizens’ democratic rights even in
the context of multi-party electoral contests, and the explosive social ramifica-
tions that continuing struggles over those rights can bring to bear at national
and local scales. While such events provide dramatic illustrations of the ongoing
nature of struggles for democracy in African societies, contests over land tenure
and resource rights provide a less sensational but perhaps more substantive daily
window into these same processes. As Ribot (2004) suggests, natural resource
governance in developing nations constitutes the basic substance of democracy in
agrarian and natural resource-dependent societies. Shivji (1998, p48), reflecting
on the centrality of struggles over land tenure to Tanzanian democracy and polit-
ical freedom, notes:

There is a deep structural link between the use and control of resources and the
organisation and exercise of power. Control over resources is the ultimate source of
power.

Once one has set natural resource governance and policy formulation within
sub-Saharan Africa’s broader political context, it becomes apparent that
efforts to decentralize or devolve authority over lands and resources are, to
borrow from Kelsall (2008), ‘going against the grain’ of prevalent governance
patterns and power relations. The widely noted failure of many natural resource
reform efforts that have sought to strengthen local rights over resources in
African countries is a function of the incongruity between such reforms and
the political interests governing these states, combined with a democratic
deficit with regard to rural communities’ ability to demand rights and privi-
leges. Arguments supporting decentralization based on technical criteria which
emphasize production of public goods – such as increasing wildlife popula-
tions, more sustainable resource use patterns, or greater tax revenues – tend
to overlook the informal private interests that underpin many or most policy
decisions. In other words, the function of natural resource management in
Africa is not necessarily to sustainably manage public resources in a way
that contributes to public interests, just as Ake (1996, p70), speaking more
broadly of African economies, observes that ‘a national development project in
most African countries is not a rational undertaking.’ Hence natural resource
governance outcomes may be politically rational in the private realm while
environmentally degradative and economically destructive in the public realm.
This misalignment between the personal interests and political logic which
underlie policy formulation and implementation, and public environmental
and economic interests, is central to the full spectrum of conservation and
development issues in contemporary Africa.
16 Introduction

Global influences: Aid and investment

The African political arena wherein natural resource management decisions
are made and governance institutions shaped is not, however, inhabited solely
by contending state and local actors. Now more than ever, African governance
pro­cesses are fundamentally influenced by forces and actors operating at the
global scale (Ferguson, 2006). The two most prominent elements of these global
political-economic forces in relation to natural resource governance are develop-
ment aid and private investment.

Aid agencies and transnational NGOs

The spread of natural resource decentralization and community-based approaches
to conservation within sub-Saharan Africa has been heavily influenced by foreign
development aid agencies (Adams and Hulme, 2001). This includes both multilat-
eral organizations such as the World Bank and the many bilateral donor agencies
such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the
German Development Agency (GTZ) and the British Department for International
Development (DfID). In east and southern Africa, USAID and the four Scandinavian
national development agencies have been particularly active in supporting and
promoting community-based natural resource management, participatory forest
management and related approaches. The emphases among different national agen-
cies inevitably vary, with for example USAID tending to have greater interest in
biodiversity conservation, while European donors generally prioritize poverty reduc-
tion and the social dimensions of local participation in resource governance.
During the past three decades, western development efforts have embraced and
propagated a ‘neo-liberal’ set of ideas, narratives and policies for guiding global
economic development (Ferguson, 2006). These emphasize private investment,
reduced governmental regulation, transnational patterns of trade, and access to
global capital flows as keys to economic growth and development in African coun-
tries, and have been steadily promoted, particularly by the multilateral development
agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund through
its Structural Adjustment Programmes. Decentralization of government services,
secure property rights and promotion of efficient and democratic governance are
all additional elements of this neo-liberal set of policy prescriptions. These broader
development policy narratives have strongly influenced natural resource manage-
ment and conservation policy and account for much of the enthusiasm on the
part of foreign donors for natural resource decentralization and community-based
approaches (Brockington et al, 2008).
Linked to the governmental aid agencies and prevalent neo-liberal policy narra-
tives through organizational, financial and political relationships are international
or transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Transnational private
NGOs and foundations are particularly important players in the development and
conservation arena in sub-Saharan Africa. Prominent development NGOs such
as Oxfam and CARE International are deeply involved in issues of land tenure
and natural resource management, at both local and policy levels. Conservation
 The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in Africa 17

NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, Frankfurt

Zoological Society and African Wildlife Foundation pursue conservation agendas
by attempting to work with state bureaucracies, private investors and local commu-
nities. Scholfield and Brockington (2008) estimate that conservation NGO funding
in sub-Saharan Africa amounts to a total of at least $200 million annually. These
private NGOs often function as implementing agents of governmental aid agen-
cies, since a significant amount of their funding comes from aid, but they also
influence broader development and conservation public policy debates within
developed countries.
Multilateral and bilateral aid agencies and transnational development and conser-
vation NGOs comprise a diverse set of actors and influences, with a wide range
of complementary and conflicting interests. These organizations have played a key
role in promoting natural resource governance reforms in Africa, but also in deter-
mining the shape that reform efforts take. Aid agencies and transnational NGOs
have particular general structural characteristics and organizational interests which
influence the way they conceive and pursue their activities in African countries.
A critical factor shaping actions by both aid agencies and transnational NGOs
is the political reality of operating in foreign countries. Aid agencies themselves
are effectively diplomatic entities, and are part and parcel of the efforts of national
governments to pursue their interests outside their sovereign boundaries. In this
context, development narratives promoted by aid agencies tend to minimize or
obscure the political dimensions of policy choices; indeed, for most of its history the
World Bank contended it did not involve itself in ‘political’ matters but was solely
a technocratic organization, despite the inherent implausibility of any structural
economic policy choices being apolitical in their scope or impacts. This apolitical
culture and outlook continues to pervade the world of development aid, as memo-
rably characterized by Ferguson (1994) as ‘the anti-politics machine’. Even since
the 1990s’ incorporation of ‘good governance’ as a central element of effective
economic development policy, considerable efforts are made to treat ‘governance’
as a set of technical prescriptions, rather than a fundamentally political process.
Aid agencies’ apolitical treatment of governance processes shapes natural
resource reform efforts. First, reform processes are framed as technocratic efforts
designed to enhance production of public goods. For example, a USAID report
on community-based natural resource management describes the process as a
relatively technocratic set of sequential governance measures, with reform being
driven by action at the political centre:

CBNRM is fundamentally based on the devolution of responsibilities, rights and

authority from central government to local communities…Several milestones
must be crossed to create the full enabling environment for better natural resources
management.The first milestone is crossed when there is sufficient national political
will to move toward CBNRM by enacting enabling policies, legislation, and regu-
lations to support the devolution of power, and the policy, legal and institutional
framework for supporting CBNRM. A second milestone requires establishing clear,
simple and transparent procedures for mutual accountability between local, district/
provincial and national levels.
(Alcorn et al, 2002, piv)
18 Introduction

While it is clear from the above narrative that CBNRM is a governance reform
process, what is not interrogated is what might lead to the emergence of ‘political
will’, which has been self-evidently elusive in so many African and global CBNRM
initiatives. Other aid agency analyses are less grounded in the empirical realities of
African governance:

…is devolution good for the government? The answer to this question appears to
be positive. Most CBNRM schemes involve some revenue-sharing mechanism
with the government. Many authors contend, therefore, that CBNRM facilitates a
rural wildlife tax. The state, as the ‘owner’ of natural resources, is simply obtaining
resource rents on its assets. To the extent that involving the community increases
these rents, it is a win-win situation for the state.
(Shyamsundar et al, 2005, p42)

The above World Bank report quotation is conventional in its underlying assump-
tion that natural resource policies are constructed according to states’ interests in
generating public goods such as tax revenues, rather than according to political
élites’ private interests. Those informal political interests, despite their centrality to
policy-making in African states, rarely feature in donors’ analyses of CBNRM and
their strategic approaches to natural resource governance reform.
Because natural resource policy choices and governance patterns are shaped by
conflicting interests which are negotiated in formal and informal political arenas, it
is highly problematic when resource governance issues are framed in an apolitical
manner, or based on dubious assumptions about policy-makers’ motivations. This
has been an important contributor to the unsuccessful outcomes of many natural
resource reform efforts supported by donor agencies and transnational NGOs in
Africa (Nelson, 2009).
This problem is compounded by the reality that African governments effec-
tively mediate the interactions between foreign aid, and the local communities that
are nominally the target ‘beneficiaries’ of CBNRM and related resource govern-
ance reform efforts. Aid itself is managed according to bilateral country agree-
ments and thus African governments exert strong influence over the shape of
foreign development efforts (van de Walle, 2001). This influence is amplified by
donors’ own organizational incentives, which are related to the inherently limited
domestic accountability that western nations’ citizens can exert on aid agencies
operating overseas, making them very difficult to monitor effectively (Martens et
al, 2002). Because of this weakness of citizens’ ability to provide oversight of their
government aid programmes’ impacts, development agencies tend to measure and
report their performance according to criteria such as the volume of expenditures,
which do not correlate well with actual impacts achieved (Gibson et al, 2005).
This creates an entrenched agency problem in the operation of government aid
agencies, and is a central factor in the observed incentives that aid agencies have to
spend large volumes of money over relatively short periods of time (Ibid.).
A related factor is the disincentives that aid agencies possess for applying puni-
tive sanctions to recipient countries, such as withholding funds or terminating
grants or lending programmes, which would have the undesirable internal effect of
reducing aid expenditures. These disincentives have tended to render ineffective
 The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in Africa 19

donors’ efforts to use ‘conditionality’ in aid programmes as a way to influence

policy reforms in recipient states (Collier, 1997; van de Walle, 2001).
Thus one may generalize that donors’ efforts to finance natural resource govern-
ance reforms in African states often have not been based on a sound conceptu-
alization of the political dimensions of governance processes, and in fact many
aid agencies have organizational incentives to resist deeper interrogation of these
political elements. Development agencies also are institutionally tied to African
governments and have limited means of forcing reforms where there is insuff-
ficient domestic constituent demand (see also Devarajan et al, 2001). In addition,
when reform efforts do not yield the intended results, aid agencies face limited
sanction from their own constituent governments and citizens due to difficulties
with monitoring, and have incentives to continue to maximize their expenditures
(Gibson et al, 2005).
This structure of incentives also applies to many transnational NGOs, which as
noted often function as implementing agents of donor agencies, and partners of
host governments, rather than as autonomous agents of ‘civil society’ (Edwards
and Hulme, 1996). Sachedina (2008) provides a thorough account of how these
interests have played out in relation to the efforts of the African Wildlife Foundation
(AWF) to support community-based conservation in Tanzania:

AWF wanted donor money and to be independent from the State. But in order
to achieve growth, AWF needed to position itself as a close government partner in
order to gain legitimacy, influence and funding.
(p330)

AWF undertook a strategic decision: it adopted an approach of working through

government to enhance its legitimacy, networks of power, and donor relations. This
approach compromised its ability to function as an independent civil society organ-
ization [and resulted in a] withdrawal from politically-laden conflicts over land
tenure, money, and resource rights between pastoralists and the state.
(p355)

Thus the relationships between donors, the state and NGOs can exert a profound
influence on the shape of natural resource institutions and power relations
amongst different actors, and specifically on the outcomes of efforts to empower
local communities with greater rights and privileges.

Global commerce and African resources

Up until recently, the defining feature of Africa’s position within the global economy
was its almost complete irrelevance (Ferguson, 2006). This is now changing, with
rapidly increasing levels of foreign direct investment (FDI) as well as changing
patterns of trade and commerce. In 2007, FDI in Africa as a whole reached an
all-time high of US$53 billion, an increase of over 80 per cent from inflows of $29
billion received in 2005, and with US$30 billion of the 2007 total amount going to
sub-Saharan countries (UNCTAD, 2008).
20 Introduction

Increasing investment in African countries is driven by technological changes

as well as increasing global demand for commodities. Resource shortages and
growing affluence both play a role. Chinese demand for unprocessed logs has
led to a dramatic shift in patterns of timber trade from Africa–Europe to Africa–
Asia, with Indian Ocean countries such as Tanzania and Mozambique particularly
affected (Nelson and Blomley, this volume). Concerns about domestic agri-
cultural production and food security are driving a range of Asian and Middle
Eastern countries to attempt to acquire large areas of land in African countries
for exporting food (Cotula et al, 2009). European countries seeking to develop
alternative fuel sources for their domestic markets have been the leaders in the
sudden surge of biofuel investments in Africa during the past three years, which
have acquired or proposed to acquire large areas of land (Cotula et al, 2008).
Africa’s rapidly growing tourism industries are also a resource-based land use
attracting capital to new areas or expanding within established markets and land-
scapes. While most tourists continue to come from North America and Europe,
increasingly tourism properties throughout Africa are as likely to be owned and
managed by Arabian, Indian or South African companies and investors.
The result of these trends is rapidly increasing demand for African resources,
including not only transportable commodities such as timber but also land itself.
The rapid growth in the market value of land and resources often is accompa-
nied by escalating conflict over control of increasingly valuable resources. As some
scholars have pointed out, resource-based conflicts are not necessarily driven
by resource scarcity as such, but can equally arise from the high market value
of resource-rich landscapes (Peluso and Watts, 2001; Duffy, 2006). As resource
values rise in rural parts of Africa, so do the number of claimants competing to use
and control those lands and resources.
Recent accounts portray an African landscape which is rapidly being allocated
to transnational corporations, potentially at the expense of the long-term inter-
ests of both national economies and local communities (Vallely, 2009). For rural
communities, there are important potential opportunities to benefit as custodians
of lands and resources, for example through joint venture partnerships for tourism
developments between local communities and external investors. In countries such
as Kenya and Namibia, such models for wildlife-based ecotourism have generated
considerable revenue for local communities, and may enhance local willingness
and capacity to advocate for their resource rights and claims.
In many cases, though, the penetration of commercial trade into rural land-
scapes simply acts as a mechanism for foreign companies and national polit-
ical élites to dispossess local groups. Patterns of commercial resource trade
and economic value can be a key factor in the interests that policy-makers and
governing élites have for maintaining control over those resources or in allowing
local groups to strengthen their own tenure claims (Nelson and Agrawal, 2008).
As Ribot (2004) points out, the general pattern across the developing world has
been for governments to decentralize control over resources with low commercial
values, and to retain or recentralize control over valuable resources. Ultimately
the changing patterns of commercial investment and trade based on African
lands and resources are likely to have substantial implications for ongoing strug-
gles over resource rights and tenure.
 The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in Africa 21

In search of change, reform and sustainability

The political-economic context for natural resource governance in African nations
encompasses a wide range of actors operating across multiple scales from local to
global. Existing patterns of natural resource governance generally remain central-
ized, and are influenced by the legacy of colonial history, in élites’ political inter-
ests in maintaining privileged control over valuable resources and discretionary
authority, and extant patterns of commercial trade and investment. Reforms
that would devolve or decentralize rights over resources to the local level, and
which could provide the institutional basis for local common property manage-
ment regimes, are frequently incompatible with other more powerful actors’ inter-
ests. The efforts of external aid agencies and transnational NGOs may reinforce
existing power relations because of those organizations’ own interests and ties
to the central government of the states in which they operate. Expanding capital
penetration into rural Africa, through evolving global markets and trade patterns,
can create stronger incentives to alienate local lands and resources. In the face
of these established and potentially growing barriers to local resource rights and
tenure, many parties, ranging from local communities to conservationists to devel-
opment agencies, are left searching for effective measures that can achieve reforms
which deliver more equitable and sustainable resource governance arrangements.
This dilemma is both a practical and conceptual one. Pragmatically, it is clear
that numerous natural resource reform efforts across sub-Saharan Africa have not
produced the intended results, and that the ability of practitioners to catalyse such
changes often remains limited or ineffective. The practical question that arises is
therefore: how can greater local authority over natural resources be effectively
supported and promoted?
Conceptually, there are important flaws with the way that a wide array of local
and international practitioners tend to frame processes of institutional reform.
A central conceptual problem with the narratives used to describe these reform
processes is that they generally presume that change will be driven from the
centre, in the interests of the local. The discourse on natural resource decentrali-
zation is overwhelmingly predicated on central agency and initiative, with decen-
tralization defined by way of central governments’ actions to formally cede powers
to lower levels within a political and administrative hierarchy (see Manor, 1999;
Ribot, 2004). Anstey (2005, p144), writing about Mozambique, observes that the
reforms which seek to enable local natural resource governance regimes tend to be
founded on ‘the premise of ordered dispersal of governance downwards (power,
accountability, authority) from an enabling effective centre.’ A related prevalent
assumption made in most reform efforts is that natural resource governance in
the region is oriented towards sustaining resources in the public interest based on
technical considerations of efficiency, sustainability and productivity.
These kinds of assumptions (that natural resource reforms which decen-
tralize or devolve rights to local communities will occur because they will result
in more efficient, sustainable, and resilient resource governance regimes) are
at best incomplete and at worst highly misleading. Narratives which presume
that central bureaucrats will enact reforms designed to enable greater local
authority over lands and resources often fail to capture the critical political
22 Introduction

interests of those authorities. As a result, institutional reform processes are

framed within incorrect assumptions that misconstrue fundamental aspects of
African governance. This problem is not restricted to natural resource reforms
but more broadly characterizes contemporary efforts to promote ‘good govern-
ance’ in African states (Hyden, 2008; Kelsall, 2008). More effective efforts
to promote decentralization, devolution and democratization require a better
understanding of governance processes if reform efforts are to have greater
impact. Practitioners, external supporters in both public and private organi-
zations, and local activists need to develop conceptual frameworks for insti-
tutional change which more accurately and realistically describe how such
changes may, or do, occur. To continue framing reform as a technocratic and
apolitical process of delegating rights from the political centre to the local level,
often in direct contradiction to the political interests that actually structure
the choices and decisions of key state and non-state actors, is merely to invite
further disappointment. This volume is an effort to develop a more informed
and systematic framework for understanding natural resource governance in
African countries, and the factors that underlie changes in resource manage-
ment institutions.

Searching for the roots of reform:

Democracy and decentralization
The motivating question that lies at the centre of this volume is: where does insti-
tutional change in natural resource governance come from? Using case mate-
rial from India but a theoretical perspective which is of universal utility, Chhatre
(2008, p12) provides a useful starting point for approaching this critical question:
‘Political commitment from above is considered crucial for the success of decen-
tralisation reforms, but where does this commitment come from?’
This poses the self-evident but often unacknowledged point that actions by the
political centre which transfer power to other levels of society are unlikely to occur in
the absence of political forces which create incentives for central actors to take such
actions. In the case of decentralization, the source of such incentives is logically the
local groups of people who are the beneficiaries of such changes and consequently
demand reforms. Such local demand, often accompanied by the use or threat of
violence, has been the underlying driver of many democratic reforms during the
past several centuries, as Frederick Douglass, the 19th-century African-American
antislavery activist, famously noted in the quote reproduced at the beginning of this
chapter (see also Moore, 1966; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2006).
Chhatre (2008, p12) states the answer to his own question regarding the roots
of decentralization accordingly: ‘Decentralisation in natural resource management
is about community agency,’ meaning the ability of communities to ‘mobilize to
oppose the imposition of institutional forms that they deem inappropriate’ and to
advocate for their own resource use interests. Change at the centre is thus inextri-
cably linked to action and agency at the local level. Natural resource decentraliza-
tion depends on the broader political context and in particular the ability of local
groups of people to influence central decision-makers through democratic mecha-
nisms for representation and accountability.
 The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in Africa 23

The importance of this democratic context is a recurrent theme in the cases presented
in this volume. In Namibia, reforms devolving rights over wildlife on communal lands
were crafted by a relatively small technocratic élite within the bureaucracy, but this was
only made possible by the sea change of independence from South Africa achieved
in 1990. In South Africa, post-apartheid land tenure reforms enabling communities
to claim alienated lands have re-shaped negotiations over resource rights, protected
area governance and accountability at the local level. In Kenya, civil society has been
able to play a much more influential role in crafting legislative reforms and public
policy following the watershed 2002 general election which ended the long KANU
(Kenya African National Union party) monopoly on executive power. Those changes
in the macro-political context have had major consequences for the ability of local
communities and non-state actors to influence natural resource governance. In all
those instances, the broader democratic changes were not initiated solely or principally
by the political centre. In contrast, macro-political change was an outcome of genera-
tional struggles over democratic rights, which in many cases were pursued through
violent resistance movements that demanded change.

Analytic framework and content of this volume

This volume’s analytic approach revolves around a set of national and local case
studies, and uses those to attempt to explain the factors that account for natural
resource governance outcomes and negotiations over resource rights and tenure in
a range of settings in east and southern Africa. Such rights are inevitably contested
and negotiated amongst different actors with diverse interests and differential
powers and forms of political capital. The case studies, taken together, aim to
contribute towards developing a deeper and more systematic understanding of the
political variables that drive the outcomes of these institutional negotiations.
All the case studies are guided by two basic questions:

• What factors account for the outcomes of negotiations or distributive contests

over natural resource rights and authority?
• How are these contests or negotiations over natural resource governance
contributing to changes in the wider local governance arena?

Thus the cases examine both the variables that explain the general patterns of insti-
tutional change, and the impacts that those changes are having on local govern-
ance institutions and the capacity for collective resource governance.
In examining these processes, we adapt the analytic framework of Keeley and
Scoones (2003) on African environmental policy formulation. Their framework
takes a usefully broad view of policy processes, recognizing the importance of the
instrumental interests of policy-makers and other key actors in shaping policy,
as well as the importance of ideas framed through narratives and discourses, in
determining certain policy outcomes. Both of these conceptual lenses are valuable,
and as the chapters demonstrate, their relative importance varies across different
cases. Incorporating both helps the cases avoid a more narrow disciplinary focus
and to account for the diversity that one encounters in trying to distil the key
drivers of complex institutional processes.
24 Introduction

Natural resource governance processes are shaped, in large part, by the inter-
ests and relative powers of different actors. Political scientists frame decision-
making processes according to this ‘rational actor’ assumption, which holds
that people pursue their own economic interests. An important element of this
theoretical framework is the assumption that people are able to, with a reason-
able degree of efficiency, calculate their own interests in the face of numerous
possible courses of action. The work of North (1990) on institutional change
and economic performance employs this framework to illustrate how the social
rules and norms that govern markets are constructed according to the interests
and relative bargaining power of different societal actors. Ostrom (1990) also
employs the ‘rational actor’ framework, and earlier work on human cooperative
behaviour developed through game theory modelling, in her work on collective
natural resource governance institutions. Gibson (1999) applies this political
economic framework to the formulation of African wildlife policy, demon-
strating how wildlife governance outcomes are a function of the relative interests
and powers of key actors including members of parliament, government bureau-
crats, local communities and foreign donors. The cases in this volume build on
this work in political economy by identifying the key actors that influence the
outcomes of local and national-level contests over resource rights and govern-
ance, and describing the interests which lead those actors to pursue various
courses of action.
Although people tend to pursue their own interests within a certain economic
and social context, people’s own ideas, perceptions and actions can be strongly
influenced by narratives and discourses which frame issues in particular ways.
Roe (1991) provides the seminal definition of policy ‘narratives’ as stories that
provide a compelling description of cause and effect in terms of a particular
social or environmental outcome. In Africa, such narratives play a powerful role in
shaping people’s ideas, often independently of scientific evidence on the ground
(Anderson and Grove, 1987; Keeley and Scoones, 2003). Examples of environ-
mental narratives that have had a powerful influence on policy in Africa during
the past 30 years include the tragedy of the commons; desertification; deforesta-
tion and erosion; and overgrazing and rangeland degradation (Leach and Mearns,
1996). During the past 20 years, community-based natural resource management
has also become a narrative used to create the implicit assumption of feasibly
marrying rural development and biodiversity conservation goals, sometimes in
the face of weak empirical evidence regarding the likelihood of achieving both
outcomes in a given place and time (Adams and Hulme, 2001). As the cases in
this volume demonstrate, policy narratives continue to play an important role in
framing negotiations and debates over resource rights and tenure throughout east
and southern Africa.
One point which should be highlighted is that the interests of influential actors,
and popular narratives or discourses, can be either mutually reinforcing or contra-
dictory. For example, decentralization is often widely promoted in formal policy
discourse, while the informal political interests of policy-makers contrastingly drive
the consolidation of central authority over resources. Policy ‘narratives’ can be
used to mask the more instrumentally-determined directions of policy and legisla-
tive changes, both from foreign donor supporters and domestic constituents.
 The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in Africa 25

In order to most clearly diagnose the key regional institutional trends concerning
the governance of natural resources, the chapters in this volume focus on studying
the distribution of rights rather than the content of policy. It is important to recog-
nize that, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, the two are by no means synonymous.
Often policy changes are espoused but not implemented. Legislative changes may
reflect policy-makers’ key strategic interests whereas policy is used, like broader
discursive narratives, to shroud the actual direction of institutional change. Thus
we place less emphasis on policy (cf. Keeley and Scoones, 2003) and focus more
on the distribution of rights, power and institutional accountability (cf. Agrawal
and Ribot, 1999). Even formal rights expressed in law, however, do not necessarily
translate into exercisable authority, and the cases attempt to focus on rights as they
exist in practice rather than as they may be legislatively defined.
The volume is divided into four sections. The first section is introductory, setting
the regional and conceptual context for the case studies. Following this introduc-
tory chapter, James Murombedzi frames the evolution of community-based natural
resource management regimes in southern Africa through a review of key historical
and political-economic forces influencing agrarian relations in the region. He high-
lights the way that CBNRM has generally failed to address the root causes of inequality
and marginalization in southern Africa’s communal tenure regimes, and the need for
more transformative approaches to natural resource governance reform.
The second section focuses on the political economy of natural resource
governance at the national level, with case studies drawn from Kenya, Namibia,
Tanzania and Botswana. These cases draw largely on experiences with wildlife
governance reforms in the region’s savannah landscapes, with the Tanzania case
also providing a detailed comparison between institutional reforms in the wildlife
and forestry sectors. All four cases focus on contemporary national struggles over
wildlife governance, but also frame these struggles within a longer historic set of
institutional developments and evolutions. Important contrasts emerge from the
cases, with Namibia providing the strongest, and rather aberrant, case of devolving
significant rights over wildlife to the local level, while neighbouring Botswana has
recently witnessed a considerable re-centralization of its CBNRM programme. In
Tanzania, wildlife governance has been recentralized during the past decade, in
sharp contrast to a narrative of devolutionary policy reform and also in contrast
to tangible institutional changes supporting localized management regimes in the
country’s own forestry sector.
The third section takes the analysis closer to the grass-roots level, examining
local governance dynamics and institutional linkages across multiple scales in
Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Tanzania. These
cases examine linkages between macro and micro natural resource governance
and local strategies for influencing institutional changes. The cases highlight the
non-linear pattern of institutional change across the region; apparently successful
local models of community-based management can collapse due to higher-scale
political changes and processes (e.g. Zambia, Zimbabwe), yet at the same time
communities frequently demonstrate resilience in their ability to organize to
engage with higher-scale developments. The cases all highlight the constant, itera-
tive nature of local negotiations over resources in contexts influenced by both local
and non-local factors.
26 Introduction

The final section is synthetic and forward-looking, attempting to distil the

key patterns of institutional change across the region, and, in the case of climate
change, to anticipate the influence of important new dynamics which may drive
substantial change in the near future.
The volume aims to contribute towards the development of more effective
approaches to natural resource reform, community empowerment and sustainable
use of natural resources in east and southern Africa, and potentially beyond. The
material presented here can also be looked at through the lens of broader strug-
gles over governance, which not only influence the ways that natural resources
are used, but which also are in turn shaped by ongoing contests over resource
rights, tenure and local resource governance. Just as a range of development and
conservation practitioners seek more accountable and decentralized arrange-
ments for managing the environment and natural resources, African citizens as
well as external interests such as foreign donors continue to search for measures
to strengthen democratic governance across the region. Struggles over natural
resource use are an important arena of action in this search for more account-
able governance. Democracy and sustainability are two sides of the same coin
with respect to natural resource governance; this does not mean that democratic
governance guarantees sustainable use, but rather that the search for democracy
and sustainable institutional arrangements for natural resource use are fundamen-
tally intertwined.

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 2

Agrarian Social Change and

Post-Colonial Natural Resource
Management Interventions in Southern
Africa’s ‘Communal Tenure’ Regimes

James C. Murombedzi

Southern Africa has been hailed as a leading innovator in designing and imple-
menting community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes
that devolve rights over natural resources to local communities. Most of the region’s
CBNRM programmes have been based on the legal devolution of narrowly delim-
ited rights over specific resources from state agencies to local authorities or some
representative body of the ‘local community’ (Steiner and Rihoy, 1995; Hulme
and Murphree, 2001). Within the regional CBNRM movement, there is a growing
realization that most initiatives have fallen short of providing significant rights over
resources to local communities (Murombedzi, 2001); that typically the principal
benefits accruing to communities are relatively limited revenues from resource
use and exploitation by others rather than real rights to the resources (Bond,
1993; Murombedzi, 2001); and that in most cases the revenues are invested in
collective social services or ‘petty projects of municipal socialism’ (Shopo, 1985;
Murombedzi, 1994).
As the shortcomings of CBNRM policies and practices have become more
apparent, the viability of CBNRM as a strategy for achieving both conservation
and development objectives has come under increasing scrutiny. Calls for a rever-
sion to centrist natural resource management regimes have emerged (Redford and
Taber, 2000). Referred to by some as the ‘back to the barriers counter-narrative’
(Hutton et al, 2005), these calls are based on the view that despite some posi-
tive social impacts, CBNRM has not sufficiently improved the status of wildlife
or forest resources and that evidence suggests that centralized management of
natural resources is more efficient.
Consequently, the regional CBNRM discourse has focused on refining its poli-
cies and practices in order to support improved conditions of resource tenure for
 Agrarian Social Change 33

local communities by perfecting the devolutionary process itself (i.e. amending

legislation, devolving more control and rights to communities than to local govern-
ments, and so on). In addition to this ‘flawed devolution’ discourse in CBNRM
there have also been calls for the extension of CBNRM to other resources beyond
the traditional southern African focus on wildlife (Dzingirai, 1995; Madzudzo,
1996). But even these calls have focused on resources that can attract commercial
capitalist interests such as forest resources (including timber and now carbon) and
water. Although CBNRM initiatives in some places have generated benefits for
participating communities, including revenues and greater institutional capacity,
in general the reforms carried out to date have been peripheral to the land and
resource rights contestations of greatest salience to the beneficiary communities.
CBNRM initiatives are implemented in the context of southern Africa’s
communal tenure regimes, typically without problematizing the nature and
dynamics of these so-called ‘customary’ tenure systems and their associated
governance and power structures. Many authors have highlighted the central role
that the formation of customary tenure regimes played in the development of
the colonial state in Africa (e.g. Mamdani, 1996; Amanor, 1999; Peters, 2004).
Communal tenure in post-colonial southern Africa is maintained to the extent
that it privileges a small political élite and enables them to stay in power (Amanor,
1999), and continues to be applied in ways that typically create space to main-
tain a high level of bureaucratic intervention in local economies. CBNRM efforts
have tended to reinforce this state–local relationship, and to further opportunities
for the state to define and control local land use. Furthermore, CBNRM often
extends the reach of private capital into communal areas, resulting in further land
and resource expropriations (Hughes, 2006).
Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and much of the developing world, evidence
abounds of intensifying competition and conflict over land and natural resources,
accompanied by deepening social differentiation (Peters, 2004). These pro­cesses
have their origins in commodity production in the form of export crops, and a
subsequent fall in crop prices in the 1930s; colonial constraints on African trading
and land markets; oscillating patterns of migration; tenure reforms associated with
the post-World War II push to develop a ‘yeoman’ farmer class in many British
territories; rising debt and declining prices for primary commodities which led
to the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s and 1990s (Ibid). The
resultant widespread inability of rural producers to maintain earlier levels of
farming, coupled with Structural Adjustment Programmes’ induced retrench-
ments of civil servants and other losses of formal employment, all provided
impetus for the diversification of rural incomes. In the face of limited opportuni-
ties, family land has increasingly come to constitute the most significant source
of cash and food (Ibid). The increasing importance of land contributes to the
increasing intensity of land conflicts both within communities, and also between
communities and outsiders.
Other causes of land conflicts in many southern African contexts are immi-
gration between communities (Dzingirai, 1995; Murombedzi, 1995; Nyambara,
2001); alienation of land for ‘development’ projects such as the recent growth
in biofuel plantations; and land set aside for conservation programmes. These
land alienations put pressure on available arable land and pastures (Peters,
34 Introduction

2004), and lead to increased land use competition and conflicts. In Peters’
(2004, p291) words:

…rural groups seek to intensify commodity production and food production, while
retrenched members of a downsized salariat look for land to improve food income
options; states demarcate forestry and other reserves, and identify areas worthy
of conservation (often under pressure from donors and international lobbying
groups)…and valuable resources both on and under the land (timber, oil, gold, other
minerals) attract intensifying exploitation by agents from the most local…to trans­
national networks…

Because conventional CBNRM initiatives do not confront these complex agrarian

political economic realities, such initiatives may be attractive to southern African
governments as an opportunity to implement development initiatives that do not
challenge existing land tenure arrangements and tenure regimes. In some cases
CBNRM actually increases the state’s reach into rural communities (Alexander
and McGregor, 2001), and allows for greater intervention and control of local land
use, usually through the mechanism of local government authorities (Murombedzi,
1994). CBNRM also appeals to foreign governments’ aid agencies to the extent
that it conforms with approaches to development that build on existing systems of
land and resource tenure rather than seeking to transform them.
In southern Africa, communities today are actively demanding land and prop-
erty rights. These demands take many different forms, and social movements
are coalescing around the issue of land tenure and property rights, as they did
during colonial liberation struggles (Moyo and Yeros, 2005). However, commu-
nities encounter legal, policy and power obstacles in this pursuit. By placing the
evolution of CBNRM initiatives in the historical agrarian context of southern
Africa, this chapter attempts to explain the complex ways in which the managerial
project of the region’s CBNRM initiatives has resulted in a parochial focus on a
few commercially valuable natural resources (Murombedzi, 1994), avoidance of
agrarian politics and ‘political ecology’ (Abel and Blaikie, 1986), and an inherent
inability to engage with prominent issues surrounding the fundamental transfor-
mation of agrarian relations in the region’s communal tenure regimes (Dzingirai,
1994; Murombedzi, 2001; Moyo and Yeros, 2005).
With few exceptions (Murphree, 1993; 1995; Dzingirai, 1994; Adams and
Mulligan, 2003), studies of CBNRM in southern Africa rarely contextualize the
evolution of these policies and programmes. The historical and material context in
which these policies and programmes evolved is frequently reduced to a benevo-
lent technocratic response by the policy-makers to the realization that communi-
ties are more efficient managers of communal resources than the central state.
Communities are perceived to be more efficient managers than the state because
they are closer to the resource in question, can more efficiently internalize the costs
of resource management, and it is their ‘natural right’ (Parker, 1993). However, the
historical claims that communities have to the resources in question, the ongoing
struggles to resolve the land question (of which resource tenure is a part), and the
politics of rural land and resource use are not the determinants of these policies
and practices.1
 Agrarian Social Change 35

One of the most enduring outcomes of colonialism in southern Africa is the

creation of the ‘customary’ or ‘communal’ land tenure system and its attendant
systems of local government and administration. Both of these are key issues in
the evolution, focus and nature of CBNRM programmes in the region and serve
to frame ongoing struggles over resource rights, tenure and access. It is thus neces-
sary to preface this discussion with an exploration of the historical trajectory of
colonialism in the region, and place the evolution of CBNRM within this historical
context.

The colonial agrarian order

Post-colonial states in southern Africa are confronted with the challenges of
resolving the impacts of long-term exploitation of its labour force by colonial
capital (the ‘labour question’); integrating the indigenous population into the
citizenry of the post-colonial state (the ‘native question’); and transforming
the state itself in order to create the basis for post-colonial development (the
‘national question’). In resolving this national question, perhaps the most
important policy issue in post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa is the issue of
agrarian reform. In southern Africa, agrarian transformation is dominated by
the land question (Amin, 1976; Mamdani, 1996; Moyo and Yeros, 2005). This
is particularly true in the post-settler colonial states of Namibia, Mozambique,
South Africa and Zimbabwe, but also applies to post-colonial transformation in
the rest of southern Africa.
It is not easy to generalize the complex colonial and environmental histories
of the southern African region. However, there are certain commonalities that
have had generally similar implications for post-colonial transformations in the
different countries of the region. First, a defining feature of sub-Saharan Africa’s
history is the relatively late establishment of colonial rule. As former Tanzanian
President Julius Nyerere once remarked, ‘For Lenin imperialism was the last stage
of capitalism, but for Africa it was the first’ (quoted in Woodhouse et al, 2000, p3).
The principal European powers that established vast colonial territories in Africa
(Britain and France) were industrialized countries and their ‘second industrial
revolution’ generated a massive growth of demand for agricultural and mineral
raw materials which were to be supplied by colonial economies in an expanding
and shifting international division of labour. Southern Africa was an important
region for the supply of both agricultural and mineral raw materials, and the colo-
nial economies of the region were progressively structured to this end. Settler
colonialism in parts of the region also contributed to the late decolonization of the
region in comparison to other parts of Africa.
Second, in Africa colonialism encountered a vast range of social formations,
habitats and modes of livelihood, on which colonial administrations attempted
to impose their own structures, first through pacification, and then through
various forms of social engineering. Many of the features of these social forma-
tions survived colonial social engineering and persisted into the post-colonial
era, and continue to exert significant influence on state–society relationships and
interactions.
36 Introduction

Amin (1976) distinguished three macro-regions of sub-Saharan Africa through

a broad typology of their colonial formations. West Africa was characterized by
agricultural export production by peasant farmers, and in some cases by large-
scale indigenous producers. It did not entail widespread dispossession and its
patterns of commoditization of the rural economy proceeded without the institu-
tion of private property rights and markets in land. In many cases commoditiza-
tion was realized through movement into and clearing of new areas to farm cocoa,
oil palm (in the forest belt), and cotton and groundnuts (in the savannah). These
remain the four classic export crops of West Africa.
Second, the ‘labour reserve’ colonies stretching through parts of central to
southern Africa in which there was widespread land alienation to European
settlers. The rationale for dispossessing Africans and concentrating them in ‘native
reserves’ was two-fold: to provide land for settlers and commercial farming, and
to create regular supplies of labour to these large farms and plantations, as well as
to the mining complexes of North and South Rhodesia (Zambia and Zimbabwe,
respectively) and of South Africa.
The third category is the ‘Africa of concessionary companies’ found in the
region of the Congo River basin. The concessionary companies were granted
vast territories for exploitation, with serious consequences for both their inhabit-
ants and natural resources. Generally, however, they were unable to establish the
conditions of systematic and sustained capitalist agriculture that came to prevail
in east and southern Africa. The actual trajectories of Africa’s modern history
are inevitably less clear-cut than explained by Amin’s broad schema. In West
African colonies, for instance, land was often expropriated for extractive indus-
tries (mining, timber, rubber), if not for purposes of European settlement (as in
the Gold Coast/Ghana). Some countries combined elements of all three types of
colonial economy, notably Mozambique and Angola under Portuguese rule. At
the same time, peasant commodity production (and its associated class differen-
tiation) was never completely extinguished in the labour reserve/settler colonies,
even within the severe constraints imposed by colonial authorities. Moreover, over
time the colonial economy shifted towards a greater weight of peasant commodity
production which was actively promoted in the latter colonial period. In most
of sub-Saharan Africa, with the exception of the territories featuring extensive
(white) settlement (Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, South Africa), peasant farmers
(including pastoralists) were not dispossessed but encouraged, through economic
and extra-economic forms of coercion, to enter the commodity-based economy as
producers of agricultural commodities and/or labour power.

Indirect rule and the colonial construction of customary

authority
At the same time as colonial African economies were being organized to produce
tropical agricultural products and mineral ores for export, these activities were also
expected to yield the revenues to pay for European colonial administration. The
formation and operation of colonial states were based on indirect rule in British
colonies, ‘association’ in French colonies, or segregation (later apartheid) in South
Africa, which were all in effect similar responses to the common challenge of
 Agrarian Social Change 37

establishing and maintaining ‘native’ subjugation and to exercise political domina-

tion at low cost to the colonial authorities (Amin, 1976; Berry, 1993; Mamdani,
1996; Bernstein, 2005). Berry (1993) refers to this phenomenon as ‘hegemony on
a shoestring’.
Under indirect rule, the lower tiers of state administration in the countryside
were allocated to the authority of local chiefs and headmen governing through the
ostensive ‘customary law’ of particular ‘tribes’, to which rural people were subject
on the basis of their ‘tribal’ identity as perceived and legislated by colonial rulers
(Mamdani, 1996). While the powers of the chiefs were completely subordinated
to those of the colonial state in relation to key functions such as tax collection
and labour recruitment, they were often greatly increased in relation to their local
subjects. This colonial refashioning of chieftaincy in effect fused executive, legisla-
tive and judicial powers of customary authority in the countryside, and was not
so much an embrace of local ‘traditional’ institutions but rather the construction
of new forms of local political authority that were inherently tied to the colonial
project. Mamdani (1996) refers to these local governance systems as the ‘decen-
tralized despotism’ of indirect rule.
Indirect rule had potent and enduring effects for rural land tenure and resource
use practices and institutions, as for local governance more generally. As a key
foundation of indirect rule and chiefly authority, ‘customary’ or ‘communal’ land
tenure functioned in part to maintain rural stability, and in part to prevent, limit
or otherwise manage the dynamics of class formation (e.g. by returning migrant
workers to their ‘tribal communities’ and the benign patriarchal authority of
their chiefs) (Bernstein, 2005). Through the institution of indirect rule, the
‘customary’ in Africa in relation to land, as well as political authority, was refash-
ioned or even reinvented. To ensure the success of this project, colonial authori-
ties suppressed the commoditization of land, including the development of land
markets, which might have led to greater social and economic mobility in rural
areas. Communal land tenure was fashioned in this context as part of a package
of economic and extra-economic measures to limit the agricultural and other
resource use potential of the native populations, thereby coercing them into
wage labour and other forms of political and economic dependence (Bernstein,
2005; Moyo and Yeros, 2005).

Constructions and legacies of communal tenure

The ways in which ‘communal’ or ‘customary’ land on the one hand, and state
land on the other hand, were defined and contested retain a powerful resonance
in many parts of Africa today. This resonance is amplified by widespread rural
poverty and growing inequality. Land expropriation and the colonial reconstruc-
tion of ‘communal’ tenure combined to undermine rural livelihoods in the region.
Partly as a result of the overcrowding and resultant unregulated or ‘open access’
resource use, most natural resources in the communal lands were degraded in the
years immediately following their creation. This contributed to driving the popula-
tions of the reserves into wage labour, and years later provided fertile recruiting
ground for the region’s liberation wars. Landlessness and land hunger were the
principal drivers of those liberation wars.
38 Introduction

An important feature of colonialism in the 1930s that has ongoing repercus-

sions for the land and native questions is so-called ‘Fabian colonialism’ (Cowen
and Shenton, 1991). This refers to the set of ideas and practices in which the
central motif of colonialism was notionally to protect the natives from the costs
of capitalism while gradually allowing them to share in its benefits. ‘Protection’ of
the natives required the prevention (or indefinite postponement) of such features
of bourgeois civilization as private property rights in land and ease of access to
commercial credit for African entrepreneurs (Bernstein, 2005; Moyo and Yeros,
2005). This phase was characterized by the introduction of a wide range of
community development projects, social clubs and other local initiatives which
were designed to ‘advance’ the native populations in various respects (Murapa,
1977). This notional advancement of Africans was expressed in a number of areas
of economic and social policy including land use planning, environmental conser-
vation, welfare and development, hygiene and so on (Burke, 1996).
Some analysts have concluded that ‘Fabian colonialism’ did function to effec-
tively halt the further advance of colonial capital into the native reserves, and
thereby retain enclaves that would become important areas of investment for
indigenous capital in the post-colonial era (Hughes, 2006). However, studies of
the expansion of commodification in the reserves suggest otherwise. Burke (1996)
makes the case for both the hegemonic practices of colonial and capitalist interests
and the efforts made by native actors to participate in and resist these practices in
the development of merchant capital and manufacturing in Southern Rhodesia.
An array of laws, practices, incentives and disincentives combined to limit native
merchant capital and restrict class formation in the reserves. Moreover, even when
there were some disincentives for colonial capitalist expansion into the native
reserves, where high-value resources existed in sufficient quantity, capital expan-
sion was never restricted. This was indeed the experience with mining, as well as
with other natural resource-based investments such as safari hunting following the
1960s boom in the safari industry. In Zimbabwe, for instance, most of the safari
hunting was undertaken outside the conservation estate on freehold lands or in the
native reserves themselves.
Starting in the late colonial era after World War II, when some African colonies
were being prepared for independence through various governance reform meas-
ures, and continuing through the post-independence period, indirect rule through
customary authority began to be partially replaced by efforts to institute repre-
sentative local government in the form of municipal townships and rural councils.
These councils were endowed with legislative powers to discharge specific func-
tions, to raise part or much of their revenue, and to recruit and manage staff. This
often added new layers of complexity and tension to those of indirect rule, and
the claims and counter-claims of chiefly authority, which was challenged by these
new elective structures rather than necessarily being extinguished. The challenge
of raising revenues for the newly established local authorities in the native reserves
meant that from the outset, these authorities encouraged all manner of commercial
investment, and also sought to control revenues in order to finance their own recur-
rent expenditures. These pressures were to increase starting with the 1970s’ finan-
cial and economic crises and continuing with Structural Adjustment Programmes
(SAPs) in the 1980s, which gave added impetus to the local authorities’ preference
 Agrarian Social Change 39

for privileging the commercialization of ‘communal’ resources by private capital

and thereby restricting local capitalist expansion. Local government continued to
function as an instrument of policy implementation rather than formulation.
In addition to the racialized landholding structure, colonial land expropriation
resulted in a tripartite division of land, between black, white and land set aside for
wildlife (Mackenzie, 1988). As with land expropriated for the establishment of
capitalist white agriculture, the colonial conservation estate was created on land
taken from local communities. Local communities not only lost access to lands
and wildlife resources but now also incurred significant ongoing costs from wild-
life predation and destruction of property. Expropriatory conservation initiatives
were characterized by European ideological conceptions of nature which perceived
native populations as the ultimate threat to sustainable resource use (Anderson
and Grove, 1987). Conservation concerns in this legal context ultimately became
a significant element of ‘native policy’ (Bernstein, 2005) and led to more state
intervention in the communal lands, resulting in the substitution of state regula-
tions in place of local resource management institutions (Murombedzi, 1994).
Thus in addition to racialized agrarian structures, nature conservation was a key
component in the disempowerment of local communities in southern Africa.

Land tenure reform and the evolution of CBNRM

in contemporary southern Africa
Southern Africa today is thus characterized by grossly unequal and racialized
agrarian relations, particularly in the former settler colonies of South Africa,
Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe. The colonial landowning classes histori-
cally held up to 80 per cent of the best agricultural lands, with the bulk of the
indigenous populations confined not only to arid and semi-arid zones, but also
burdened with ‘customary’ land tenure and onerous land use regulations, ‘tradi-
tional’ authority systems and restrictions on their movement.
The central legacy of settler colonialism in southern Africa is the land question.
Except for Zimbabwe, this question remains largely unresolved within Southern
Africa. Even in Zimbabwe, fast-track land reform since 2000 has redistributed
significant amounts of land (Mamdani, 2009), but has not adequately addressed
the congestion in communal lands; nor have appropriate reforms for communal
land tenure been developed. With the possible exception of Zimbabwe, the histor-
ical structure of tenure dualism and grossly unequal land holdings inherited from
the colonial state has generally continued largely unchanged in the post-independ-
ence era. But even as Zimbabwe has developed a more complex and less polarized
agrarian structure, numerous issues remain unresolved, especially pertaining to
land and natural resource tenure (Moyo and Yeros, 2005).
A land tenure system cannot be understood except in relation to the economic,
political and social systems which produce it and which it influences (Bruce,
1988). Land tenure is fundamental to political structures and relationships in sub-
Saharan Africa; as Boone (2007, p566) notes, ‘the terms of land access remain the
hard core of the social contract between the post-colonial state and rural popu-
lations.’ Extant land tenure systems in southern Africa are the outcome of the
40 Introduction

establishment of sustained capitalist agriculture in the regions. The principal char-

acteristics of the agrarian structure of the colonial economies were tenure dualism
(i.e. the dichotomy between communal and freehold lands) and bimodalism
(meaning landholding patterns characterized by the concentration of land in a few
large estates with the majority of farmers consigned to very small holdings), and
with ‘communal’ tenure dominating the smallholder sector. This agrarian structure
has continued in the post-independence era, even despite numerous land reform
policies and initiatives. In this context, communal tenure continues to represent
patterns of legally guaranteed land and resource use, rather than constituting a
form of land ownership (Bruce, 1988).
Without exception, the post-independence political settlements of southern
Africa were designed to guarantee colonial land rights through constitutional limi-
tations on the expropriatory powers of the new governments, as well as through
market-based land reform programmes which protected the interests of the land-
owners and resulted in limited land transfers to the landless or land-poor majori-
ties. At the same time, the new governments did not implement any comprehensive
reforms of the prevailing communal land tenure and associated local government
systems. The result was that demands for land and tenure reform have remained
high among the rural poor, while the legitimacy of traditional authorities has been
challenged, at times by the state and at times by the communities themselves
throughout the region.
Communal tenure in most of east and southern Africa remains insecure. In
law, convention and practice, the communal lands of the region generally remain
state property, with local government bodies exercising legal authority over most
land and natural resources. The communal tenure regimes of these regions are
characterized by high levels of state intervention and interference with local and
private land use, ranging from land use planning to collectivization and other
settlement reorganization schemes and programmes (e.g. see Scott, 1998). But
tenure is also insecure in two other respects. First, there are few incentives to
invest in either individually held land parcels or communally held rangelands,
forests and other land types. Second, there are no land markets in the communal
tenure regimes. Land sales and transfers do occur, frequently disguised as sales
of permanent improvements to the land (Bourdillon, 1987), and such transac-
tions also extend access to communal resources to the purchasers, but there are
no markets in land titles.
With a few notable exceptions such as Botswana and Lesotho, the agrarian
structure characteristic of most southern African countries tends to be bimodal.
But even in unimodal systems such as in Botswana, there are distinctive patterns
of access to customary lands which indicate that the wealthy and powerful have
access to more land and natural resources than the poor (Peters, 2004).
The imposition of Structural Adjustment Programmes throughout the region
in the 1980s and 1990s (except South Africa, which was then going through the
throes of decolonization) exacerbated rural poverty, accelerated land demands
and led to increased tensions and sometimes open conflicts over land between
the landless and the landowners (Moyo, 2000). Structural adjustment resolutely
submerged the land question, but did not stem popular demand for land reform
and contestation between the market-based land reforms and land occupations
 Agrarian Social Change 41

(Moyo and Yeros, 2005). As in the numerous land occupations which occurred in
Zimbabwe during this period, the state continued to protect the property rights of
the landed classes and to repress the demands of the rural poor. This had the effect
of channelling land demands into other less densely populated communal lands,
such as state lands devoted to wildlife conservation (Murombedzi, 1994).

Contested rural lands and the emergence of CBNRM

in Zimbabwe
In Zimbabwe, one of the most significant of these rural mass movements of peas-
ants occurred in the Zambezi valley, in communal lands that had earlier been
cleared of tsetse fly. Tsetse fly eradication in the Zambezi valley, coupled with the
expansion of settlements mainly into communal and state lands in that region in
direct response to limited land redistribution opportunities elsewhere in Zimbabwe,
resulted in massive influxes of immigrants starting in the early 1980s, and culmi-
nating in formal large-scale resettlement schemes in the early 1990s.
It was in this context that CBNRM emerged as a policy response to ongoing
challenges related to the dominant patterns of rural capital accumulation within
the natural resources sector. The emergence of the CBNRM agenda in the 1980s
coincided with and indeed fit very well into the structural adjustment approach
which effectively replaced industrialization with export agriculture and tourism
as the principal engines of economic development. Marginalized communal areas
with wildlife resources offered an economic opportunity to be exploited, and indeed
were attractive to commercial enterprises in that the new CBNRM programmes
protected investments from extant challenges by the local communities. By and
large, these challenges have taken the forms of struggles to create new forms of
resource rights by local communities, through the expansion of agriculture into
wilderness and other hunting concession areas (Murombedzi, 1994), poaching,
or settlement and other destructions of wildlife habitat (Dzingirai, 1995). In
Zimbabwe, the genesis of the CBNRM policies and programme was stimulated in
part by large-scale and unprecedented settlements in previously marginal, remote
and relatively inaccessible communal lands. Because of their remoteness, and
especially because of the limitations placed on agricultural expansion by human
and livestock diseases as well as by the inaccessibility of markets due to limited
infrastructure, these ‘marginal’ communal lands had for decades been managed as
safari hunting areas with very low population densities and higher wildlife (espe-
cially large mammal) densities.
Because they are the legal custodians of all wildlife resources throughout the
region through the operation of the ‘King’s Game’ notion in the prevailing Roman
Dutch jurisprudence, which holds that the state is effectively the owner/trustee
of all wildlife, state wildlife authorities generally exercise a high level of interven-
tion in communal areas that have significant and commercially valuable wildlife
resources. Similarly, forestry authorities have legal authority over valuable indige-
nous trees in communal areas, even where these trees grow outside formally desig-
nated forest reserves. In such areas, concessions for the use and benefit of wildlife/
trees are given by those authorities, and until recently, without the participation of
local resident communities.
42 Introduction

The innovation of many CBNRM initiatives has been to ostensibly involve

communities, through their local government representatives, in natural resource
management decisions. Because most ‘communities’ in southern Africa are
not landholding entities and thus not clearly defined legal entities, they conse-
quently cannot enter into binding agreements regarding the use and exploita-
tion of resources, for example the allocation of hunting or tourism concessions.
For example, district authorities in Zimbabwe manage communal lands through
centrally-delegated powers and thus have the legal authority to contract for
such uses. By creating new yet limited rights to natural resources in essentially
unchanged communal tenure regimes, with no reference to the wider issues of
land rights or regulation of access to high-value natural resources, credit markets
and changes in the local administrative structures, CBNRM in southern Africa
generally constitutes highly limited resource tenure reform.

CBNRM and private capital

As a consequence of the post-adjustment neo-liberal agenda supported by
governments and aid agencies, CBNRM initiatives throughout the region tend
to support private sector ecotourism and commercial wildlife utilization interests
rather than local resource proprietorship. Through CBNRM, the private sector is
able to expand its geographic operations beyond the leasehold and freehold tenure
regimes into the communal areas, while at the same time mobilizing state support
to ensure the security of this expanded access to natural resources. Hughes (2001,
p575) demonstrates how ecotourism is undermining black smallholders’ entitle-
ments to land in Zimbabwe:

Based on economic and ecological arguments, CAMPFIRE has redefined the black
entitlement as merely a claim competing with those of other ‘stakeholders’. No guar-
antees exist for residents and cultivators. Indeed, government and NGOs are fast
transforming the lowland reserves into privileged and subsidized investment zones.
Held in check for a century, a new kind of settler colonialism is sweeping down from
the highlands.

The principal objective of many CBNRM initiatives, at least in practice if not

always in theory, is to create financial incentives for sustainable use of natural
resources. Often this is equivalent to establishing a more stable environment for
greater capital investments in wildlife in the agriculturally marginal communal
lands. This places high emphasis on so-called joint venture partnerships between
the private sector (i.e. private capital operating the safari industries), and the
communities whose putative wildlife resources are made available for investment
and exploitation. However, the power imbalances between the communities and
their private sector partners, and the absence of clear or strong community rights
to the resources in question, frequently are not raised. CBNRM is thus in practice
often more a vehicle for advancing private capital interests rather than rural land
and resource tenure and governance priorities.
One of Zimbabwe’s initial pre-independence efforts to enhance local involve-
ment with wildlife conservation was a scheme developed by the Parks and Wildlife
 Agrarian Social Change 43

Department designed to redistribute some of the safari hunting revenues to African

District Councils adjacent to safari hunting areas in communal lands. The rationale
was that because wildlife is a fugitive resource, its mobility led to the residents
of communal lands neighbouring parks and reserves incurring costs of wildlife
predation and crop destruction. To manage the resultant conflicts, it was neces-
sary to extend some benefits of wildlife management to those who bore the brunt
of these costs. Known as WINDFALL (Wildlife Industries New Development for
All), this initiative did not however propose new tenure arrangements regarding
the wildlife resources, and shared the financial revenues from safari hunting with
district authorities and not their constituent village-level communities.
The links between ‘wilderness capital’ and the freehold capitalist settlers of the
region is an important component of the history of CBNRM. The safari hunting
industry was given impetus by legislative reforms which extended property rights
in wildlife to landowners in Zimbabwe in the 1970s (see Chapter 1, this volume).
The same landowners subsequently converted vast quantities of land in marginal
ecosystems to wildlife and other tourism uses, and as the industry grew and the
demand for the safari experience expanded, the investment demands also tran-
scended the limitations of extant wilderness and wildlife assets contained in state
and freehold lands.
As the safari hunting industry expanded, so too did the need to expand the
hunting areas into new and secure territories. However, since the communal lands
did not enjoy the same tenure status as the private and leasehold lands, a device
was developed to enable safari operators to negotiate concessions directly with
the local authorities, circumventing the inertia of central government bureauc-
racy, and at the same time providing incentives for local authorities to regulate
interactions between their constituencies and the wildlife industries. This legal
device, called ‘Appropriate Authority’ in the Zimbabwean context (see Murphree,
1993; Dzingirai, 1994), is a limited reform of the wildlife laws which transfers to
local authorities the right to enter into wildlife use agreements and benefit directly
from wildlife use on communal lands. The revenues accruing to local authorities
are typically a percentage of the total revenues generated from concession and
hunting fees from hunting concessions on communal lands.
‘Appropriate Authority’ was the legal basis for the Communal Areas Management
Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) CBNRM programme that
developed in Zimbabwe in the 1980s and subsequently influenced CBNRM
throughout the rest of southern Africa. Thus CBNRM initiatives across the region
originated in central government policies, supported by an array of international
donors and national and international NGOs, and driven by private (usually white)
capital investments. This state–capital alliance functions to protect existing prop-
erty rights and helps deflect attention away from the struggles of rural communi-
ties for land and property rights by providing limited access to financial benefits
from resource use (Murombedzi, 2001).
Because of limited rights to land and natural resources under many regional
CBNRM programmes, communities have little discretion to determine actual
resource uses and only rights to revenues generated from natural resource exploi-
tation by external interests, and often cannot participate in that exploitation them-
selves (Murombedzi, 2001). Such limitations are a function of CBNRM initiatives’
44 Introduction

failure adequately to address or reform extant communal tenure regimes in

southern Africa. These limitations are recognized by some new initiatives, such
as recent tourism joint venture models being developed in South Africa that are
based on enabling communities to gain equity at all the levels of the game lodge
tourism industry, on the basis of secure rights to the land on which game lodges
are developed (Massyn, 2004).

CBNRM and the politics of land reform

in southern Africa
CBNRM programmes tend to narrowly focus on the devolution of property rights
in wildlife and other natural resources, typically those with high exchange values
and therefore high external commercial interests. CBNRM initiatives generally do
not engage with broader issues concerning land reform, understood to mean ‘the
redistribution of landholdings and changes in the agrarian structure’ (Bruce, 1998),
nor confront the historical legacies of ‘indirect rule’ in relation to local government
structures. Alliances of international and local capital combine to support certain
forms of community participation, and limited rights and economic benefits, and
thus regional framings of CBNRM. This framing involves the co-optation of local
community élites (Dzingirai, 1995), local government and other policy élites
(Murombedzi, 1994)) into the CBNRM project, shifting attention away from the
peasantry’s redistributive agenda (Magome and Murombedzi, 2003), and in the
process guaranteeing commercial rights of access to valuable natural resources in
agriculturally marginal communal areas without necessarily improving the liveli-
hoods of the communities themselves (Bond, 1993; Murombedzi, 2001).
CBNRM programmes and the associated discourse in much of southern Africa
are decidedly apolitical. The struggles of the participating communities for land and
resource rights are glossed over in two important ways in the prevalent discourse.
First, rural peasants are generically treated as ‘communities’, thus imputing the
absence of internal class divisions and antagonisms. This also implies that the
different strategies employed by the different strata within these communities to
fight against or collaborate with capital are typically unrecognizable in the discourse.
By failing to recognize and understand ongoing rural struggles for resource rights
in the communal tenure regimes of the region, CBNRM remains incapable of
addressing local rural tenure reform demands, let alone engaging the broader land
reform challenges of the agrarian context in which it is firmly situated. To be sure,
there have been calls for tenure reform within the CBNRM discourse, but these
have largely focused on devolving greater rights over wildlife or trees to communi-
ties rather than local government authorities. Such calls do not perceive municipal
governments as currently structured to be part of the governance dynamic of an
imperfect communal tenure system. Consequently, this discourse does not call for
an overhaul of the land tenure system and its attendant authority structures, but is
limited to lobbying for the devolution of greater rights to benefit from the use of
resources under state control, and managed through local governments. This allows
the CBNRM discourse to avoid confronting the land and resource endowment
inequalities characteristic of the bimodal agrarian structures of the region.
 Agrarian Social Change 45

By addressing only tenure reform issues and ignoring the historical structural
asymmetries in land ownership in the bimodal agrarian structures of most of
east and southern Africa, the discourse surrounding CBNRM (and ‘community
conservation’ or ‘community-based conservation’) has also failed to identify the
struggles of the rural populations in these regions for greater equity in land owner-
ship and participation in local governance. Only insignificant attempts have been
made to engage the land reform programmes of the region.
Land and land tenure reform has been a development priority at various times
in both colonial and post-colonial Africa. The impetus for these reforms origi-
nated in the need to extend state control over the countryside, commodification
of land for export crop production, and alienation of land by the state for agri-
business and other large-scale investments in ecotourism and other resource-
based enterprises (Amanor, 1999; Peters, 2004; Hughes, 2006). The focus of
these reforms has thus changed at various moments in history, and in response
to the changing priorities of governments and foreign aid agencies, from the
creation of communal tenure systems (early colonial times), privatization (late
colonialism), the ‘abolition’ of colonial communal tenures and replacement with
various forms of state control over the countryside (immediate post-independ-
ence period), and more recently, the reorganization of communal tenures after
the failures of individualization, collectivization and other forms of state control.
All of these interventions have, in turn, generated various reactions within the
rural populations. The impact of these reforms and responses is that the label
‘traditional’ rarely reflects existing land relations in rural Africa. In general, the
impact of the various tenure reforms has been to provide new means of élite
appropriation of land and natural resources, and CBNRM initiatives often have
functioned as another such avenue.
To take one regional example, land tenure struggles have proliferated in
Mozambique since independence in 1975. These struggles have given rise to a very
sophisticated civic movement which has represented the rural poor (successfully
at times) in the conceptualization and implementation of various land reforms,
notably the policy and legal reforms of the mid-1990s. Yet this movement, which
has emerged and grown out of concerns with land and resource rights, has gener-
ally not bought into the CBNRM agenda. The União Nacional de Camponese
(National Peasants Union) (UNAC) of Mozambique is perhaps the largest organ-
ized peasant movement in the region. Founded to establish and defend peasant
land rights, the union has continued to engage with national policy in the imple-
mentation of the country’s reformed land laws, as well as to assist members with
food security, water rights and related issues. However, the Union has not been
involved in the CBNRM movement, and appears not to consider the CBNRM
movement to be essential to the evolving context of land rights in the country (D.
Nhampossa, pers. comm.). In addition, although national CBNRM policies have
been developed, only a few CBNRM initiatives are being implemented despite
the obvious potential in Mozambique. Despite the elaboration of provisions for
local natural resource governance in forestry and wildlife policy and legislation,
CBNRM programmes are being implemented only in the Tete province (Tchuma
Tchato), Maputo Province and in Niassa Province (Chipanje Chetu) in northern
Mozambique (Anstey, 2001).
46 Introduction

The South African government recently decided not to honour any further land
claims in the Kruger National Park because of their potential implications for the
national conservation estate (Whande, this volume). Significantly, this decision was
celebrated by the tourism industry and many conservation organizations. By refusing
to recognize the historical rights of communities to lands in the conservation estate,
and in direct contravention of its own policies (trumpeted globally through for
example the Makuleke land claim), the South African government in fact demon-
strated that land claims would only succeed when they are relatively uncomplicated
and pose little threat to existing property relations between capital, the state and local
communities. As the claims become more complex, so too does the likelihood that
they will be resolved in favour of the state and/or commercial interests.
Although Zimbabwe’s private freehold wildlife conservancies have been
presented as creating increased financial opportunities for wildlife-based land
uses (de la Harpe, 1994), they are also a stark example of how wildlife conser-
vation has become a mechanism to consolidate landholdings and thus change
the dynamics of land contestations. The establishment of wildlife conservancies
entailed the creation of private companies to hold and manage groups of farms as
single consolidated units, and thus attract financial investment to capitalize large
expenses of land with more wildlife, tourist infrastructure and basic machinery and
equipment. They thus became a focus of attracting national, regional and interna-
tional capital in the tourist sector (Mombeshora, 2005). In essence, conservancies
remove the visibility of the human face of individual land ownership from the
struggles over land and shift these to abstract legal entities of ubiquitous domicile
(Moyo, 2000).
Given the limited power exerted by local communities in current manifestations
of CBNRM in the region, it seems unlikely that these provide communities with
sufficient motivation and organization to resist or negotiate accelerating land use
changes in the near future. Such changes are driven by international agribusinesses’
search for cheap investment destinations in Africa, and supported by national govern-
ments. An example of these is the complex interplay within the Great Limpopo
Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA) between Mozambique, South Africa and
Zimbabwe, and the proposed ProCana investment in a 30,000-hectare bio-ethanol
sugar cane plantation in the Mozambique part of the TFCA, which is threatening
the very existence of the region’s largest and most heralded TFCA.

The contested terrain of ‘CBNRM’

The experiences and lessons of CBNRM could certainly be applied to developing
appropriate, secure and more dynamic systems of communal land and resource
tenure which transcend the limits of the region’s extant systems.To do this, however,
CBNRM would need to transcend its own managerial preoccupation with ‘projec-
tizable’ natural resource management systems that are based on creating conditions
for capital expansion into communal lands. This is unlikely to happen if CBNRM
continues to be championed by the current alliances of international conserva-
tion NGOs, private tourism interests, government wildlife departments and foreign
donors which have been the dominant CBNRM actors in southern Africa to date.
 Agrarian Social Change 47

These groups have had clear historical and political reasons not to include broader
objectives related to agrarian social transformation and land tenure reform in the
CBNRM agenda. CBNRM has thus been shaped according to these dominant
players’ interests, rather than those of rural peasantries. These allied interests may
continue to work against the transformation of the CBNRM agenda.
Without exception, all the CBNRM programmes in the region are top-down
initiatives. Many of them originate in wildlife and forestry departments, and are
closely linked to conservation and protected areas management agendas. While
governments put in place the policies for devolution, NGOs have become the
main drivers of CBNRM in southern Africa. Many of the programmes and poli-
cies are developed by donors and NGOs with the collaboration and support of
central government. Many of the demands for policy reform to facilitate CBNRM
are made by NGOs, with donor funding, rather than by the local communities that
would benefit from the implementation of these programmes.
To be sure, some communities have attempted, unsuccessfully, to resist CBNRM
in their areas because they perceive the programmes as extending the interven-
tionist strategies of the state rather than supporting their land and resource tenure
contestations (Dzingirai, 1995; see also Ngoitiko et al, this volume). There have
been many instances of local resistance to this increased interventionism, in the
form of immigration and settlement in designated conservation and concession
areas (Murombedzi, 1994; Dzingirai, 1995) and investment in agricultural inten-
sification, which in many cases conflicts with wildlife conservation (Murombedzi,
2001). However, unlike smallholders in leasehold and freehold tenure regimes
who can choose not to participate in CBNRM initiatives, communities in southern
African communal tenure regimes are not allowed to exercise this option because
land use decisions are largely outside their control. In this regard, CBNRM consti-
tutes an imposition, and in some cases an entrenchment, of externally determined
land use decisions and an extension of the states’ interventionist strategies in
communal tenure regimes throughout the region.
Where individuals have more secure tenure rights, they have in fact been
able to resist CBNRM programmes. Yet little has been made of their struggles
in the regional CBNRM discourse to date. For instance, attempts to implement
CAMPFIRE in a range of formal resettlement areas during the market-based land
reform era in Zimbabwe failed to take off, yet these failures have remained largely
unanalysed. It would appear, however, that in such instances the costs of CBNRM
were locally perceived as being greater than the benefits, and thus because of their
stronger tenurial position those smallholders had the option of refusing to partici-
pate in CBNRM programmes.

Conclusion
Dualistic land tenure structures continue to define agrarian relations in contem-
porary southern Africa. Communal tenure in this system provides very little
control over land to local communities, who can only exercise rights of usuf-
ruct and limited discretionary control over land use. Rural transformation will
depend heavily on an organized and functioning peasantry, with strong and
48 Introduction

enforceable rights to land and natural resources, with enhanced influence over
political and policy processes. Thus far, CBNRM efforts across the region
have focused principally on developing usufruct rights to exchange access to
natural resources for financial benefits, although the local ability to regulate
this exchange is often limited in practice. The actual land use decision-making
process remains in whole or in part under the control of the central state,
through land use and other land management plans which guarantee wildlife
management, usually on increasing land areas, while at the same time criminal-
izing or otherwise restricting the expansion of peasant agriculture and other
locally controlled land uses into designated tourism concession, wildlife conser-
vation or game management areas. The parochial focus on wildlife user rights
has restricted the capacity of regional CBNRM programmes to respond to or
support the land and property rights of the communities that are co-opted into
CBNRM, and in many cases function to actually demobilize – at least for certain
sections of those communities – those land and property rights contestations.
Further, by creating hunting and other wildlife concession areas, typically with
only token consultation with the communities (who in any case have limited
means to refuse), CBNRM further constitutes a form of land alienation, espe-
cially since the opportunity costs of land use change associated with CBNRM
– particularly for the poorer members of communities who are more dependent
on various strategies of accessing multiple natural resources – are often higher
than the undifferentiated benefits generated from CBNRM.
Because of this parochial focus, CBNRM has not been a critical factor in the
transformation of agrarian relations in the region, but has rather constituted an
extension of capital penetration into new landscapes and an entrenchment of élite
interests in natural resources in communal tenure regimes. Broader agrarian trans-
formation has generally not been on the formal regional CBNRM agenda, and
CBNRM initiatives were not designed and have never functioned to respond to
the tenure dualism characteristic of post-colonial southern Africa. Because of its
origins in a non-redistributive agenda, CBNRM generally does not provide target
communities with new opportunities to organize against the existing limitations of
‘communal’ tenure in post-colonial southern Africa. At the same time, communi-
ties do understand that ‘communal tenure’ in the dualistic tenure context in fact
constitutes one of the main structural causes of their enduring poverty.
Contemporary CBNRM discourse in the region generally fails to analyse local
socio-economic stratification in local communities. Yet it is clear that internal
contradictions and conflicts and specific class interests play an important role in
community organization and dynamics in the CBNRM programmes. In many
cases the peasantries of the region are relatively well-organized and highly mobi-
lized as an outcome of the liberation struggles of many countries of the region, as
in the rural-based liberation movements of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Angola.
CBNRM discourse needs to develop a more nuanced understanding of envi-
ronmental and conservation policy, through the location of policy processes in
national and global political economy. In addition to more detailed investigation
of local government and local institutional arrangements for resource tenure and
management, critical evaluation of ‘communal’ tenure and the search for more
enduring forms of resource ownership that coincide with the changing aspirations
 Agrarian Social Change 49

of rural populations as conditioned by the material conditions of reproduction

in post-colonial southern Africa is required. This calls for pro-active engagement
with land and agrarian reform processes, movements and scholarship.

Note
1 To be sure, natural resource tenure is an important consideration in the southern
African CBNRM narrative (e.g. Murombedzi, 1992; Rihoy, 1995). However, commu-
nity tenure and rights to natural resources tend to be completely divorced from the
broader land distribution and tenure context of the post-colonial transformation
agendas of the region’s countries.

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 Part 2

Political Economies
of Natural Resource
Governance
 3

The Politics of Community-Based

Natural Resource Management in
Botswana

Liz Rihoy and Brian Maguranyanga

Introduction
Botswana is widely known as the African ‘exception’, which refers to its unmatched
record of internal peace, economic growth and democratic governance since inde-
pendence in 1966 (Good, 1992; Samatar, 1999; Molutsi, 2005). The country
recorded the highest per capita GDP growth rates in the world in the 1980s and
now has a per capita Gross National Income of US$5,680, more than six times the
sub-Saharan African average (World Bank, 2009). With a geography dominated by
the Kalahari Desert in the centre and south of the country, and the unique inland
Okavango Delta in the north, the economy is dominated by mining, which consti-
tutes roughly 30 per cent of GDP and 90 per cent of exports as well as tourism
and livestock production. Transparency International’s Corruption Perception
Index (2008) ranks Botswana as the least corrupt country in sub-Saharan Africa,
and also places it ahead of industrialized non-African nations including South
Korea and the Czech Republic.
Wildlife remains widespread, particularly in the Okavango Delta which
supports most of Botswana’s approximately 150,000 elephants, constituting over
a quarter of the total estimated population for sub-Saharan Africa (Blanc et al,
2007). During the past two decades, Botswana has used its wildlife to successfully
compete with more well-established wildlife safari destinations such as Kenya; by
2005 tourism generated US$568 million in total income (WTO, 2007). Starting
in the late 1980s, Botswana began to develop approaches for increasing benefits
from wildlife to rural communities through a national community-based natural
resource management (CBNRM) programme, drawing on parallel efforts in
neighbouring Zimbabwe and Namibia.
An examination of CBNRM in Botswana reveals the extent to which policy
processes and management outcomes are determined by political contestation.
56 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

A focus on CBNRM policy highlights the importance of political choices in

natural resource management, demonstrating that policy-making is not a rational,
linear process guided by scientific knowledge but rather a political process where
ideology and individuals’ and groups’ interests interact. This chapter explores the
policy-making process because it represents the interaction of different, sometimes
competing, interests, and at the same time rationalizes them through narratives
used to advance particular interests. We examine the politics of CBNRM policy
and governance in relation to changes in local governance and macro-institutional
factors. The linkage between the local and macro levels is an important intersec-
tion because it sheds light on the opportunities and shortcomings of CBNRM in
changing power relations, strengthening democratic space, creating accountable
local governance institutions, and empowering communities to direct their destiny
and livelihoods.
CBNRM is premised on empowering local people so that they may leverage
existing social and natural resource capital in ways that enhance economic oppor-
tunities from resources such as wildlife. By changing the status quo in terms of
access to natural resources, CBNRM inevitably has implications for empower-
ment and broader political processes. To assume that these empowerment objec-
tives are inevitably welcomed by governments and the political élite is to ignore
the reality that governments are not necessarily committed to the economic and
political empowerment of rural communities, for a variety of reasons. The find-
ings presented here demonstrate that even in Botswana, which is upheld by many
analysts as sub-Saharan Africa’s foremost example of stable multiparty democ-
racy, such an assumption is far from safe. CBNRM is socially and politically
contested in Botswana, with resource rights and benefits subjected to struggles
amongst local communities and political economic élites.
Central factors in these struggles include processes of resource accumula-
tion – particularly land and livestock – and privatization in rural Botswana
and particularly amongst the country’s élites; the contested nature of wildlife
as a local versus a national resource; and a resurgent ‘protectionist’ wildlife
management paradigm championed by key political figures, notably the coun-
try’s current President, Ian Khama. Within Botswana, critics of localizing wild-
life benefits argue that it contradicts the fundamental nation-building ideals
of the country and the tenets upon which the Constitution of Botswana is
based, which treat all natural resources – and most importantly, diamonds – as
‘national resources’. In confronting these challenges, advocates of CBNRM,
which include local communities as well as foreign donors, have been limited
by the lack of a strong and diverse domestic political constituency that can
contest the centre’s attempts to reconsolidate control over wildlife and tourism
revenues. This roll-back of local benefits has also been enabled in part by unac-
countable local governance structures for CBNRM at the community level,
which have led to frequent charges of mismanagement of revenues, and lent a
technocratic justification for recentralization on the grounds of insufficient local
capacity. Thus a complex and evolving set of factors from local to central scales
of government, and incorporating important external influences, comprise the
political contestation of CBNRM in Botswana.
 The Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana 57

Methods
The material presented in this chapter is based on a qualitative study (Rihoy
and Maguranyanga, 2007; Rihoy, forthcoming) involving ethnographic-style
semi-structured interviews with approximately 150 individuals, including key
government officials (politicians and bureaucrats at national and local levels),
NGO staff, CBNRM experts and academics, community leaders and general
community members, donors and journalists covering CBNRM issues; as
well as analysis of official government and NGO documents, correspondence,
newspaper articles and academic publications. The research was carried out in
Botswana during three two-month periods from 2005 to 2008. The core analyt-
ical framework informing this work is the policy process framework (Keeley and
Scoones, 2003; see Chapter 1), which captures the dynamic interplay of forces
shaping CBNRM policy in Botswana as ‘a product of ongoing negotiations
and bargaining between multiple actors over time’ (Rihoy and Maguranyanga,
2007, p3). We explore these processes in the context of Botswana using three
overlapping approaches to understand policy change: structured political inter-
ests, the agency of actors involved in the policy-making process and power–
knowledge relations that discursively shape practice in particular ways. This
analytical framework attempts to capture the interaction between political
interests, discourse and networks of multiple actors in shaping the landscape
of CBNRM and affecting devolution and democratization of natural resource
governance in Botswana.

The emergence of CBNRM in Botswana

Botswana officially embraced CBNRM in 1989, and the Department of Wildlife
and National Parks (DWNP) became the government implementing agency
working with other relevant government ministries and NGOs. DWNP received
substantial funding through the USAID-funded Natural Resource Management
Program (NRMP), which ran from 1989 to 1999.The NRMP was underpinned by
the scientific rationale of sustainable use and political ideals of ‘small government’
and devolution. Botswana’s stable socio-political and economic climate appeared
to be an ideal context for successful implementation (Rihoy and Maguranyanga,
2007). Programme designers regarded wildlife management as an ecologically and
economically viable land use option in a country with a limited range of alterna-
tives, with only 5 per cent of its land suitable for productive agriculture, abundant
and high-value wildlife populations, and a low human population of approximately
1.5 million people with an average density of 2.4 per square kilometre (Whiteside,
1995; UNDP, 2005; Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007).
The small population size and relative ethnic homogeneity of Botswana’s rural
communities were also considered ideal for CBNRM initiatives. The Botswana
government’s record of democratic governance, commitment to citizen empower-
ment, and policies promoting sustainable development, sustainable use of natural
resources, economic diversification and decentralization all provided additional
impetus for implementation (Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007).
58 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

Within this national context, the basic institutional framework developed for
CBNRM in Botswana involves the creation of local trusts or ‘community-based
organizations’ (CBOs), since communities in rural Botswana have no pre-existing
corporate identity. Once they form a CBO, communities are able to apply to
DWNP for user rights to wildlife, in the form of a quota, and, at least until recently,
were entitled to keep 100 per cent of revenue from wildlife utilization. In addi-
tion, if communities wish to develop commercial ventures on their land, such as
tourism enterprises, the CBO must obtain a land lease from District Land Boards.
Leases are granted on 15-year terms and enable the CBO to enter into third-party
access agreements or ‘joint ventures’.
By 2003, there were 67 registered CBOs, which included 120 villages and 103,000
people (Swatuk, 2005). Some CBOs, particularly those located in Ngamiland,
which is situated in the Okavango Delta, were earning up to several hundred thou-
sand US dollars annually from commercial hunting and tourism ventures by this
time. Wildlife numbers were generally stable across Botswana in the 1990s, with
CBNRM given credit for creating more favourable incentives for conservation in
rural areas (Arntzen et al, 2003). Thus on economic and ecological fronts, many
have pointed to Botswana as an emblematic southern African example of CBNRM,
along with its neighbours Zimbabwe and Namibia. Despite this record of progress,
implementation of CBNRM in Botswana has proven extremely problematic and
the policy and political context ultimately highly constraining to the principles of
sustainable use and devolved resource management that CBNRM is premised on.

Challenges to CBNRM in Botswana

‘Foreign-grown’ CBNRM
CBNRM implementation during the past two decades has been constrained by
multiple factors, many of which can be traced to the conditions of emergence
of CBNRM in Botswana. CBNRM emerged in Botswana as a ‘foreign import’
and expatriate-driven programme. When USAID funding for the NRMP came
to an end in 1999, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and Netherlands
Development Organization (SNV) teamed to initiate a CBNRM Support Program.
CBNRM activities were later also funded by the European Union-funded Wildlife
Conservation and Management Program (2002–2007). The DWNP worked
with donor agencies and expatriate personnel in managing these programmes.
The high visibility and dominance of expatriate staff reinforced the perception
that CBNRM represented a foreign environmental management paradigm. This
perception compromised the relevance and local legitimacy of CBNRM. Such
founding circumstances stripped Botswana’s CBNRM programme of its national
identity since it was perceived to lack indigenous conceptualization and develop-
ment (Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007).
The result is a lack of cultural understanding, relationships, identities and
connection of CBNRM to social and political networks in Botswana, arising from
difficulties associated with embedding foreigners in the local institutional and
social landscape. In the absence of such connectivity, the CBNRM approaches
 The Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana 59

did not develop to reflect the unique social and political realities of Botswana
(Jones and Murphree, 2001; Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007). This foreign domi-
nance is reflected in the term informally used to describe CBNRM within the
DWNP: ‘Dilo tsa Makgoa’ which translates as ‘something for the white people’.
The following quote succinctly illustrates this commonly held view:

CBNRM is just one more approach introduced by well-meaning donors who are
following fashions. The history of development here is full of them and like those it
will fade away when all the donors and foreign experts have gone.1

This historical dominance of expatriates in these donor-supported CBNRM

support programmes inhibited the emergence of a strong, supportive national
‘actor network’ and key individuals who would act as advocates for CBNRM.
Even at the local level, CBNRM was perceived as externally imposed, with the
imposers being the DWNP and various NGOs. As one Member of Parliament
comments:

In theory, CBNRM is a great idea and just what we need. It promotes self-reliance
and self-sufficiency and makes people value and conserve resources. But it is being
imposed on people.The participatory elements are being ignored as they’re too diffi-
cult to implement. And this destroys the whole purpose.2

Such perceptions de-legitimized the national and local authenticity of CBNRM.

Whilst a viable political constituency of national advocates and ‘policy entrepre-
neurs’ briefly emerged in 2000 in response to the activities of the IUCN/SNV
support programme and was able to provide critical leverage for the programme
by building a case for its support among political leadership at the national level,
this too proved dependent on foreign support and financing, and as such was
not sustainable. Without any ‘politically salient constituency’ (Murphree, 1995) at
either the local or national levels which could anchor CBNRM in national polit-
ical discourse and policy-making arenas, the approach became subject to inter-
ests which were not necessarily supportive of CBNRM at both national and local
levels. In particular, CBNRM became vulnerable to capture or reversal by the
political economic élite whose interests are not served by this approach.

Realities of constituency-building in Botswana

Compounding the reliance of CBNRM on foreign influences and the lack of a
national-level support network is the challenge posed by Botswana’s relatively weak
and disorganized civil society. Civic organizations in Botswana have capacity chal-
lenges in terms of financial and human resources, skills and specialization (Molutsi
and Holm, 1990), and their dependence on government funding after donors with-
drew from Botswana in 20033 further weakened their ability to oppose govern-
ment’s positions and preferences. Many NGOs actively court government favour
by seeking representation of government officials or senior political figures in their
governance structures. For example, President Ian Khama is patron of all remaining
environmental NGOs operating at the national level in Botswana. By embracing
60 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

senior political figures within their governance structures, civil society organizations
weaken their ability to fashion and represent independent, alternative perspectives.
The absence of a vibrant civil society and dearth of effective national champions
and an influential actor-network rendered CBNRM vulnerable once the govern-
ment shifted its political support and donors withdrew financial support, which
both have occurred progressively since 2000, following the first decade of CBNRM
development. Donor withdrawal in 2003 significantly impacted the programme and
undermined the donor-dependent NGOs supporting CBNRM. Cracks appeared in
the CBNRM programme as funding dried up, and traditionally CBNRM-focused
NGOs refocused their activities on more general rural development activities. For
example, the CBNRM Support Program lost SNV funding, whilst BOCOBONET
– the national umbrella and networking organization for all CBNRM-related CBOs –
has since 2003 refocused on general rural development activities.4 Some NGOs active
in CBNRM, such as the Forestry Association of Botswana, collapsed and others such
as the Agency for Cooperation and Research in Development (ACORD) withdrew
from the country. The outcomes of this dwindling support network included an even
more depleted CBNRM constituency, as well as increased problems of account-
ability within local CBOs due to lack of institutional support and capacity building.

Recentralizing control
When the NRMP terminated in 1999, it became apparent that the sustainability
of CBNRM was questionable. USAID determined that there was a need to ensure
continuity and develop broader support for CBNRM through the creation of a
national-level organization capable of representing the interests of the growing
number of local CBOs, and consequently played an instrumental role in the
creation of the national CBO umbrella organization, BOCOBONET (Botswana
Community-Based Organizations Network). Subsequent donor support to
CBNRM made concerted efforts to develop an influential constituency and
well-organized stakeholder group between 1999 and 2003 in order to overcome
CBNRM’s political isolation. The IUCN/SNV CBNRM Support Program
invested in the development of a local interest group, the National CBNRM
Forum, representing all stakeholders including local communities. This Forum
initially grew rapidly, with the membership of 35 organizations in 1999 (IUCN/
SNV, 2000) expanding to 161 in 2003 (National CBNRM Forum, 2004).
The significant political influence of the CBNRM Forum was clearly demon-
strated in terms of its ability to shape policy when it effectively blocked the Ministry
of Local Government’s ‘Savingram’5 of 2001 which sought to divert revenues
from CBNRM activities to District Councils instead of local CBOs. A national
CBNRM review concluded that:

Through the efforts of BOCOBONET and the CBNRM Forum structures,

a significant proportion of wildlife-based CBOs have participated in the policy
dialogue and have played an active role in lobbying and advocacy on issues of
importance to CBNRM. Stakeholders have become a movement with different
interests but a common goal.
(Arntzen et al, 2003, p12)
 The Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana 61

The 2001 Savingram represented the government’s first overt attempts to reduce
local rights to wildlife benefits under the CBNRM framework on the grounds
of restraining problems of local corruption and mismanagement in CBOs, and
also demonstrated government opposition to the devolutionary processes under-
pinning CBNRM. However, the National CBNRM Forum steering committee
and BOCOBONET’s swift and well-orchestrated response of opposition to the
Ministry’s directive led to the eventual withdrawal of the Savingram.
The political influence that the stakeholder group wielded proved to be short-
lived, as government’s response to a similar effort by the group to another
Savingram in 2005 clearly demonstrates. Several events began to undermine the
stakeholder group’s ability to function as a lobbying/advocacy entity. While the
government had agreed to the National CBNRM Forum providing input into the
finalization of CBNRM policy in 2001, its position shifted drastically in 2005 as
the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Environment, Wildlife and Tourism
explicitly stated that policy-making was government’s prerogative:

It must be understood that policy is developed by government, taking the views of

all stakeholders into consideration not just of a special interest group such as the
National CBNRM Forum might represent.
(Gakale, 2005)

The Permanent Secretary’s response to the May 2005 National CBNRM Forum’s
submission reflects government’s growing unwillingness to accept civil society
inputs into the policy-making process and the corresponding closing of space
for non-governmental influence. The shift in response over the four-year period
reflects changes in the policy environment and shifts in the balance of power during
this period. In essence, it was about clipping the National CBNRM Forum’s wings
and marginalizing it in the policy-making arena. Central authorities became more
determined to control policy processes.
This process of reasserting central control over wildlife benefits culminated in the
CBNRM Policy released in 2008. This policy reversed the past gains by commu-
nities whereby they had received 100 per cent of revenues from wildlife-based
enterprises on their lands. The new policy indicated that CBOs may keep only 35
per cent from the sale of natural resource concessions and quotas for their use and
Trust operations, while up to 65 per cent of the funds could go to the National
Environmental Fund (NEF) for financing community projects nationwide.6

Undermined from above: CBNRM and political leadership

Whilst all the trappings and institutions of a liberal democracy are in place in
Botswana (Obeng, 2001; Rotberg, 2007), Good and Taylor (2005) demonstrate
how these are manipulated by the ruling élites, both through the Constitution
and through contemporary practices of the ruling party, based on the inherited
political culture.7 Swatuk (2005, p12) comments:

Politics in Botswana resembles African village democracy, where the kgotla (public
gathering) allows for the illusion of inclusion and open (though limited) expression
62 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

of opinion by the citizenry, but where the agenda is set and key decisions are taken
by the ruling class.

Such settings do not lend themselves to increasing public participation in the

policy-making process and public debate. This has shrunk the policy space for
consultation, transparency, dialogue, accountability and public engagement in
policy-making debates (Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007). In previous sections,
we highlighted the weakening of civil society’s influence and ability to create
independent, alternative perspectives to government. The government also
made clear its intolerance of the National CBNRM Forum’s expectations to
have strong input into the policy-making process (Rihoy and Maguranyanga,
2007) and its penetration of official policy-making structures. Without a voice
and forms of political leverage, civil society organizations’ influence on CBNRM
policy outcomes is limited.
President Ian Khama’s dominance and influence in contemporary Botswana
politics extends into many social and economic areas. Not only is he President,
he is also Paramount Chief of the Bamangwato8 and eldest son of the nation-
ally revered Sir Seretse Khama, securer of independence and first President of
Botswana. Thus to paraphrase from Mamdani (1996), Khama is simultaneously
the representative power in civil society whilst also the despotic power over native
authorities. An understanding of his role is best summed up in the words of a
senior government official.

…to understand what’s going on you have to understand about Khama and the
effect his name has on people. He is feared like a lion. No Batswana will contradict
him. Now that he has made his position known everyone, whether they agree or not,
will fall in line.9

Whilst this statement may be exaggerated, there is little doubting the influence
that President Khama wields within the conservation sector where is he widely
upheld and revered as the ‘Father of Conservation in Botswana’, in which role
films have been made (e.g. Wildlife Warriors) and much media space devoted to
him. This dominance of one individual on conservation throughout the country is
unique to Botswana within the southern African region. Khama’s reputation stems
from his days as Commander of the Botswana Defence Force when he deployed
military personnel on anti-poaching missions to curb poaching of species such as
elephants. For this act he received international awards and acclaim. This included
mass recognition and accolades from private sector tourism operators, the vast
majority of whom independently recognize President Khama on their websites as
‘the unsung hero of conservation’ (a significant serenade for one who is ostensibly
unsung).
Today President Khama is the dominant figure behind all significant conser-
vation-oriented organizations and initiatives within Botswana (Rihoy and
Maguranyanga, 2007). He is on the board of one of the world’s most well-financed
NGOs, Conservation International (CI), which is also one of the few international
conservation NGOs operating in Botswana, and active within the board of the
Peace Parks Foundation. He is widely rumoured to have interests in a leading
 The Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana 63

tourism company and has personal relationships with many of the larger tourism
operators, all of whom make their opposition to some of the principles underlying
CBNRM, notably sustainable use (i.e. hunting), well known (Rihoy, forthcoming).
President Khama’s open adoption of coercive conservation tactics in using the
army to engage in anti-poaching activities, and public anti-hunting statements
that he has made subsequently, leave little doubt as to his belief in a protectionist
conservation paradigm. The conservation organizations with which he is associ-
ated adopt a ‘protectionist’ approach to conservation and it is these influences and
networks with which he interacts as a result of his relationships with CI, Peace
Parks and the tourism industry (Rihoy, forthcoming). As one ex-senior govern-
ment DWNP official notes:

Khama will probably get another international conservation award if he under-

mines sustainable use in Botswana, including CBNRM, and returns us to exclu-
sively protectionist conservation. He’s working towards that.10

Khama’s allegiance to a protectionist conservation paradigm and the tendency that

he has already demonstrated (Rihoy, forthcoming) to personally dictate conserva-
tion policy in Botswana will lead to further shrinkage of policy space. His political
dominance and influence throughout the country ensure that his conservation
ideals permeate policy and have facilitated recent policy changes towards recen-
tralization and ‘nationalization’ of wildlife revenues.

The ‘diamond debate’

CBNRM has generated recent debate in Botswana focusing on the status of wild-
life as a ‘local’ as opposed to a ‘national’ resource. This question has far-reaching
political ramifications for the manner in which the government manages other
natural resources, particularly the revenue from diamonds that accounted for 33
per cent of the country’s GDP in 2007 (World Bank, 2009) and as such draws
CBNRM into the midst of one of the most controversial political issues in the
country. This debate has significant implications for the nation-building approach
upon which the ruling party, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), has based its
political strategies since independence (Poteete, 2007).
The Constitution of Botswana states that all natural resources are national assets,
and the proceeds from their exploitation should be managed centrally through
national coffers to ensure transparent and equitable distribution. CBNRM prin-
ciples call for wildlife resources and benefits to be localized, with local commu-
nities being the primary beneficiaries since they bear the cost of living with
wildlife. By delineating resource rights locally, CBNRM activities contradict the
constitutionally implied ‘national citizenship’ that entitles all citizens to benefit
from minerals, land and other natural resources. Therefore, CBNRM appears
to undermine the principle that all natural resources be national resources. As a
result, CBNRM represents a divergent strategy which is politically controversial
as it reinforces local political identities through its localization of benefits, thus
undermining one of the cornerstones upon which the Botswana state was estab-
lished (Poteete, 2007).
64 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

Politicians and communities from diamond-rich areas have seized upon the
precedent of localization set by CBNRM and have argued for exemption from
the constitutional rule that all natural resources are national resources so that their
locales may benefit directly from diamonds in the same manner that CBNRM
communities are benefiting from wildlife. As a matter of principle, they argue, their
communities should have similar rights to benefits accorded wildlife-rich commu-
nities involved in CBNRM. This ‘diamond debate’ has brought to the fore politi-
cally contested claims to resource management in the country. The government
has been forced to re-examine the implications of devolution of wildlife resources
and benefits as regards decentralization and/or recentralization of CBNRM bene-
fits in line with the principle of all natural resources being ‘national resources’.
The diamond debate brings into sharp relief the policy contradiction that
CBNRM represents in the Botswana context. It makes a politically compel-
ling case that all revenues from natural resources should be pooled in a national
coffer and then redistributed for community development nationwide as well as
to cross-subsidize communities living in resource-poor areas. The distributional
struggles that emerge in the ‘diamond debate’ have to be understood in terms of
their political implications, and the political stance of the ruling party. The BDP
government’s call for centrally managing CBNRM funds is an attempt to address
questions raised about its coalition-building strategy (Poteete, 2007) and discrep-
ancy in the treatment of mineral and wildlife resources. It has used the diamond
debate to recentralize CBNRM benefits and dictate the future of CBNRM based
on its political agenda. This dynamic was a central element of the 2008 CBNRM
Policy’s provisions for reaffirming central control by allocating up to 65 per cent
of the revenue generated by local wildlife-based enterprises and joint ventures to a
National Environmental Fund which would ensure at community projects nation-
wide are financed. Under the leadership of President Khama, the BDP govern-
ment seems to have succeeded in nationalizing wildlife-derived revenues in ways
that address the diamond debate, making all natural resources benefit the nation
rather than the ‘local.’
This recentralization of wildlife revenues fails to recognize that wildlife and
minerals present different management challenges. Recentralizing wildlife benefits
removes the incentives for local communities to sustainably manage their natural
resources. Minerals do not impose the same types of costs on rural communities as
wild animals do, and therefore do not represent the same management challenges.
As others in Botswana have noted, ‘diamonds don’t eat goats’ (Mmegi, 2002).

Livestock and land use policy

Another important constraint on CBNRM efforts in Botswana is the country’s
political economic élites’ bias towards livestock production, which is the dominant
form of land use in Botswana. Approximately 80 per cent of the rural population’s
livelihoods are dependent on livestock farming, and it provides one-third of the
country’s foreign currency earnings (White, 1998). As such, livestock producers’
interests intersect with development policy, resource use policy and national
politics. Livestock commands a central cultural role, and reflects the health of
the agro-pastoral community and the power of its dominant members (IIED,
 The Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana 65

2004). Its centrality in society has led to the privatization of grazing lands, the
shrinking of communal lands as fenced ranches and exclusive use of boreholes
on rangelands expand (Taylor, 2000). This policy approach has been partially
driven by the belief within the Ministry of Agriculture that communal rangelands
were degraded by overgrazing as a result of open access (the classic ‘Tragedy
of the Commons’ scenario) linked to communal land ownership. Consequently,
privatization was considered a viable solution (IIED, 2004), and the Ministry
of Agriculture used the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ narrative to advance priva-
tization within communal areas (Alden Wily, 2003). According to Peters (1994,
p218), ‘there is no doubt that some highly placed members of the government
and party [ruling Botswana Democratic Party] who promote the policy benefit
directly as wealthy cattle and borehole owners.’ They promote subsidies and poli-
cies that create strong incentives for the livestock farming sector as well as encour-
aging land accumulation for cattle pasturage. This policy bias makes livestock
farming artificially more attractive than wildlife or other land use options (Alden
Wily, 2003; IIED, 2004). Government has focused on the livestock sector at the
expense of wildlife and tourism despite the rhetorical commitment in national
development plans to diversify the economy. Ultimately the social and economic
interests of Botswana’s political élite do not fit comfortably with the principles of
common property management, wildlife management and sustainable use which
underpin CBNRM, focused as the former are on cattle ranching and rangelands
privatization.

Institutional shortcomings of CBNRM implementation

Until April 2008, CBNRM in Botswana was implemented without an officially
existing policy or legislative framework. It was informed by a draft CBNRM
policy, but local-level implementation outpaced policy-making and legislation for
more than 15 years.
CBNRM had been implemented in a fragmented institutional context, and
depended on a variety of policies associated with wildlife to guide its operation
and implementation. The fragmented pieces of policy included the 1986 Wildlife
Conservation Policy, 1990 Tourism Policy, revised 2002 Rural Development
Policy, and 2004 draft CBNRM Policy. Such fragmentation opened up CBNRM
to manipulation, incoherence in application and accountability problems. Without
an overarching favourable policy framework, conflict and competition between
ministries and government departments involved in CBNRM activities under-
mined the development of coherent CBNRM implementation. The mandates of
some ministries and departments, such as the powerful Ministry of Agriculture,
contradicted the spirit and method of CBNRM (Rihoy and Maguranyanga,
2007). In addition, implementation was subject to the changing whims of different
administrative systems, and local resource governance practices could be under-
mined easily since CBNRM rights were not entrenched in legislation. In essence,
CBNRM lacked specific legal provisions, and was at the mercy of senior politi-
cians and bureaucrats.
Notwithstanding this fragmentation, DWNP has been the lead agency for
CBNRM policy development and implementation, and other government
66 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

departments and ministries, notably the Agricultural Resource Board, Land

Boards and District Councils have been formally limited to roles on the district-
level Technical Advisory Boards. This compartmentalized approach to implemen-
tation has resulted in the failure of implementers to engage and integrate CBNRM
initiatives with relevant sector initiatives of other departments or ministries (Taylor,
2000; Arntzen et al, 2003; Jones, 2004).
The decision to limit District Councils to a marginal role was deliberately
taken in an effort to avoid what where perceived to be the pitfalls of Zimbabwe’s
CAMPFIRE programme (see Murombedzi, this volume). As noted by the former
head of the USAID-funded NRMP:

Decentralizing to councils, as in Zimbabwe, was seen by us as using wildlife to

provide a subsidy to local government which then passed on a percentage, under
imposed terms and conditions, to communities.
(N. Winer, pers. comm.)

This decision has subsequently been recognized as a tactical error (National

CBNRM Forum, 2004). In the context of Botswana, where District Councils have
a long and credible history of effective and representative local governance, district
authorities could have been important vehicles for empowering local communi-
ties to shape local governance and democratize resource management. Greater
involvement on their behalf would have significantly improved the capacity for
technical implementation at the local level; provided checks and balances to prevent
the capture of benefits by local political élites and provided neutral arbitration
services when community polarization stalls momentum; whilst ensuring that the
politically influential District Councils provided political support to CBNRM and
facilitated interaction with national policy-making structures and processes.

Enterprise and accountability: Problems with local

governance
Effective devolution of powers to local institutions has to be matched by
accountability and representation at the local level (Murphree, 2000; Ribot,
2002). In Botswana, CBOs are marked by low levels of accountability and poor
representation of local constituencies’ interests (Arntzen et al, 2003; Habarad,
2003; Zuze, 2004; Thakadu, 2005), and hence constituent accountability is
frequently lacking.
This section briefly examines CBNRM dynamics at the local level, and high-
lights the challenges of constituent accountability in CBOs with concessionary
joint venture partnerships (JVPs) in relation to corruption, mismanagement
of funds and poor governance (Habarad, 2003; Thakadu, 2005). As the cases
presented below demonstrate, weak accountability has frequently enabled local
élites to capture CBNRM benefits in Botswana. Arntzen et al (2003, p19) argues
that because of these accountability challenges, ‘real empowerment is yet to be
achieved. The transfer of power has by and large been to the Boards or governance
structures of organization.’ Given the substantial amount of money generated by
CBOs through JVPs, the stakes are high, and flawed accountability mechanisms
 The Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana 67

increase exposure to corruption. In Table 3.1 we offer an overview of account-

ability challenges in six CBOs engaged in wildlife-related JVPs in Ngamiland
and provide a more detailed analysis with the two case studies of the Okavango
Community Trust and Khwai Development Trust. The period covered in this
table is that from inception of each CBO until 2007.

Table 3.1 CBOs with joint venture partnerships in Ngamiland

Name of Population Income Accountability Comments
Trust (pula) of CBO
Cgaecgae 372 1,497,281 Yes Accountable trust ensures
Tlhabololo participation; no reports of financial
Trust irregularities. However, CBO unable
to work with private sector, and is
no longer able to market its quota,
resulting in no income.
Khwai 395 5,500,728 No Mismanagement of funds (over
Development P2,000,000 unaccounted for);
Trust no community benefit; lack of
planning and priority setting.
Okavango 6,431 8,589,766 No Co-option by élites; unconfirmed
Community misappropriation of P430,000;
Trust no community involvement
or benefit; high administrative
overheads; lack of planning and
priority setting.
Okavango 2,000 6,486,568 No Misappropriation of P12,500
Kopano (est.) in 2002; limited community
Mokoro participation and benefit; high
Community administrative overheads; lack of
Trust planning and priority setting.
Sankuyo 372 4,966,666 No Misappropriation of P20,000
Tshwaragano 1995–2003 in 2002; limited community
Management Yes participation or benefit prior
Trust 2003–2005 to this. Since 2002 the new
leadership and a new constitution
have improved the situation.
Ongoing controversy with JVP.
Mababe 157 3,305,263 No P99,461 misappropriated in 2002;
Zokotsama 1998–2003 limited community benefit or
Community Yes participation prior to this. Since
Trust 2003–2005 2002 the new leadership has
improved the situation.

Note: One pula was equivalent to approximately US$0.15 throughout this period.
Source: Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007
68 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

Okavango Community Trust (OCT)

In March 1995, the OCT was the first CBO in Ngamiland to be registered,
representing the five villages granted rights over the established hunting and
tourism concession areas (ACORD, 2002) in the north of the Okavango Delta.
The establishment of OCT was politically motivated, and as a result community
participation was marginalized from the start in order to expedite the registra-
tion process (ACORD, 2002). The Member of Parliament (MP) for Okavango
North, in collaboration with a local safari operator, approached the DWNP
with a demand that CBNRM projects be established in his area. The DWNP
directed NRMP staff to proceed immediately and undertake community
briefing and mobilization meetings (O. Thakadu and N. Winer, pers. comm.). A
month later, on returning to the area to complete the process prior to the regis-
tration of OCT, the NRMP staff learnt that OCT had already signed a contract
entering into a joint venture with a safari operator, and a constitution had been
drawn up for OCT by a lawyer in consultation with the MP (Hartly, 1995). The
community had not been consulted on these processes. This set a weak founda-
tion upon which to build a community-driven organization. ACORD (2002,
p9) states:

…it was, as it were, driven to them…locals did not readily accept the trust as
theirs, neither were they fully aware of its functions, nor did they participate in its
activities.

The project itself emerged as an imposition and external initiative driven by polit-
ical interests and expediency:

…the establishment of the OCT was for two purposes and driven by two indi-
viduals.The purposes were to gain votes for the MP while lining his pocket because
of the favourable terms of the agreement with the operator – it never even went out
to tender – and not surprisingly the individuals pushing it were the MP and the
operator, who got on board a few powerful local residents. Local participation and
needs had nothing to do with it.11

The OCT was effectively established by the local MP, the safari operator and a
lawyer. The OCT became the owner of wildlife resources in its jurisdictional area,
and its natural resource management activity has involved subleasing its hunting
quota to the same operator who was involved in establishing the Trust. This raises
questions about transparency and favouritism in OCT’s deals. According to a
DWNP (2000, p3) report:

…there is apparently strong private sector and political influences over the board
activities and decisions and in the process of establishing this, members have been
excluded from any meaning[ful] participation in the trust’s activities.

In view of these problems, ACORD, in partnership with the government bodies

DWNP and the Tawana Land Board, undertook initiatives in 2001 to institu-
tionally strengthen the OCT and raise general community awareness. Increasing
 The Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana 69

awareness of the communities’ rights was necessary to enable communities to

demand accountability and question decisions of the OCT board members. This
resulted in a delegation of disgruntled community representatives approaching
the District Commissioner to express dissatisfaction with the way things were
run (ACORD, 2002). The delegation was dissatisfied with the Trust’s decision to
renew the joint venture agreement with the existing safari operator without going
through an open tender, a procedure which the broader community preferred.
The District Commissioner sought the support of the Minister of Commerce and
Industry, who issued a directive to OCT to have an open tender. Acting upon its
lawyer’s advice, the OCT then invoked its legal rights to make decisions on behalf
of the community as stipulated in its constitution (ACORD, 2002). The Minister
withdrew her directive in face of this legal interpretation of the Trust’s constitu-
tion. The OCT remained in full control of the local concessionary process.
The district authorities did not directly intervene, and became resigned to the
extant situation and process. Local village representatives had approached district
authorities as their legitimate, democratic representatives with the objective of
seeking resolution on problems of non-accountability of the Trust.12 District
Council staff, in collaboration with local DWNP officers, had undertaken a
comprehensive consultative process and negotiations in five villages over several
months (ACORD, 2002). They sought the Minister’s support in addressing the
problem but were rebuffed on legal grounds since they had no formal right to
intervene (Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007).
Meanwhile the appropriation of funds by the OCT Executive Committee has
continued unabated as of 2008. The income from OWS that accrues to OCT
every year is Pula 2.5 million (~US$400,000). Of this amount P166,000 is paid
on a monthly basis and P508,000 as a lump sum.13 Of this, the general running
costs of the trust average P160,000–170,000 per month in 2008 – the first year in
which such figures have been available – or 80 per cent of the income from conces-
sion fees (OCT, 2008). The most significant expenditure items include salaries for
the 54 staff equaling approximately P80,000 per month, vehicle running costs
of approximately P50,000 and costs associated with Village Trust Committees
(VTC) and OCT meetings.14 Financial mismanagement is rife within the OCT.
The year 2006 provides a typical example. According to the draft auditor’s report,
P1,595,768 (~US$255,000), or over 65 per cent of total income, could not be
accounted for (DSVG, 2007).
The total income for OCT between 1995 and 2007 is estimated at approximately
P13,500,000 (~US$2.16 million). From this, P6,000 has been disbursed to each
VTC on two occasions, totalling only P30,000 (~US$4,800) over 12 years. Funds
have, however, also been used to support various village-level projects, although
these have not proved sustainable. These include projects requiring significant
capital expenditures, such as ‘supermarkets’ in each village, boats for transport
and construction of a funeral parlour. However, the majority of such projects were
abandoned midway through construction and none remained operational as of
June 2008. In early 2008 the board decided to disburse P100,000 annually to
each village. This has been achieved by issuing the chairperson of each VTC with
a personal cheque for P100,000. In the three case study villages, these funds still
remained with the VTC chairperson as of June 2008.
70 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

This brief review of the financial situation makes it clear that OCT has been
characterized by mismanagement and personal appropriation of funds and that
significant financial benefits have accrued to a few powerful individuals within the
villages and their external allies. The institutional factors and relationships under-
lying this situation are succinctly stated:

Members of the OCT trust are in alliance with national politicians and local coun-
cillors and have formed a power block. They are in control and able to circumvent
any procedures. They’ve shown they can beat the minister and tell her to stay out
of their affairs, so all government personnel now stay away. The same operator has
recently renewed the contract, although now there are new problems. We just had
another delegation from the community, but we can’t do anything. We are only
allowed to advise through our role on the TAC [Technical Advisory Committee]. If
the trust chooses to ignore our advice they can do so.15

Mvimi et al (2003) conducted research in two OCT villages to explore commu-

nities’ perceptions and understanding of CBNRM projects. In 2002, when this
research was conducted, five villages of OCT with a total population of 6,431
had received approximately P7 million (approximately US$1,000,000) from
CBNRM initiatives. At this time, 86 per cent of respondents indicated that
they had heard about CBNRM in the consultation meetings but had lost track
of matters as the clashes between the DC, MP and lawyer advanced. Only 14
per cent indicated having any relationship with the project since its inception.
Results showed that 32 per cent felt that the community had benefited from the
project, and only 2 per cent felt that it had benefited in terms of social services or
infrastructural development. These findings question the trickle down effect of
CBNRM benefits and the extent to which they have permeated into the commu-
nity. It is therefore not surprising that in 2008 approximately 90 per cent of
respondents interviewed regarding their expectations of CBNRM indicated that
they had not been met, blaming mismanagement and poor leadership for prob-
lems (Rihoy, forthcoming).
We have presented the OCT case study to illustrate the local accountability and
governance challenges in CBNRM enterprises in Botswana. These problems were
not confined to OCT, with other CBOs experiencing similar challenges but on a
different scale.

Khwai Development Trust (KDT)

Khwai village consists of 395 people of the Babukakhwae or ‘River Bushmen’
ethnic group. It is situated next to the Moremi Game Reserve in the Okavango
Delta. The Khwai village was among the first villages encouraged to participate
in CBNRM in the early 1990s but it was among the last to implement it. The
delays resulted from the villagers wanting a concession for the Babukakhwae only,
which the government considered unacceptable and discriminatory. As a result,
the Khwai Development Trust (KDT) was not registered until 2000.
The KDT’s natural resource management activities include marketing hunts,
subsistence hunting on part of their quota, grass and crafts marketing, and
community campsites. Between 2000 and 2003, KDT generated over P3,000,000
 The Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana 71

from commercial wildlife-based joint ventures. However, problems emerged in

managing such large CBNRM funds (National CBNRM Forum, 2004), and
huge sums of money were not accounted for. Mismanagement was pervasive, and
over P2,000,000 remained unaccounted for in 2003.
When the KDT failed in 2003 to present its audited annual financial accounts
to DWNP for the third year in a row, the DWNP withheld the 2004 quota pending
an investigation (National CBNRM Forum, 2004). The KDT’s initial appeal was
denied but the course of events changed with the oncoming national elections. In
July 2004, just a month before the national elections, the Minister of Environment
and Tourism and the new BDP parliamentary candidate for Kasane District (in
which Khwai is situated) held a political rally in Khwai. At the political rally, the BDP
candidate MP produced the quota and ‘returned’ it to the people. Political influ-
ences prevailed, and the candidate MP successfully won his bid for the Kasane seat.
Notable is that the Khwai community had in the previous 15 years supported the
opposition Botswana Alliance Movement, and somehow switched its support to the
BDP in this particular election. While there might not be definitive causal links, the
story highlights overt tactics used by politicians to manipulate wildlife resources for
political gain. The politicians used the wildlife quota to dispense patronage to a local
political clientele. As a consequence, the Khwai community and MP are beholden to
each other at the local level whereas at the national level the MP would have a sense
of obligation and loyalty towards senior level politicians who delivered the quota to
the MP (Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007). In this case, the lifeline of CBNRM was
connected to electoral politics and the ability of politicians to extract political mileage
from it. The politicians used their political clout to ‘bring’ back the quota despite
KDT’s failure to meet the technical, bureaucratic requirements of DWNP.
The gross financial mismanagement and abuse of earlier years have been
brought under control with the election of new KDT trustees and introduction of
an external accountant. However, limited financial abuses and mismanagement of
resources still exist, and the clean-up has impacted the community:

I can’t speak for the people of Khwai, but I spend a lot of time there and in my
experience the majority of those within Khwai who aren’t on the board of trustees
would tell you that CBNRM should be scrapped. It’s brought nothing but trouble,
fighting and arguments within what was previously a cohesive community; now
their sons and daughters face jail and public disgrace, and in return for all this they
have nothing.
(I. Hancock, pers. comm.)

Despite management shortcomings, the Khwai village of 395 people has had
CBNRM income exceeding P4,000,000 for the period 2000 to 2004, which
represents a potential per capita income of P10,126 (~US$1,519).

Cgaecgae Tlhabololo Trust (CTT)

The Cgaecgae Tlhabololo Trust (CTT) offers a positive example of a CBO that
evaded problems of mismanagement or financial accountability controversies (see
Table 3.1). The majority of community members indicated that they had benefited
from the CTT projects and were involved in decision-making (Mvimi et al, 2003;
72 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007). Instead of using the traditional kgotla forum
for consultation, CTT avoided it because of concerns for democratic participa-
tion and effective decision-making (Mvimi et al, 2003). It was felt that the kgotla
meetings would marginalize segments of the community, and often were poorly
attended. Therefore, they did not serve as democratic decision-making institutions
(Taylor, 2000; Habarad, 2003). However, the DWNP equated the representation
and accountability of CBOs with elections conducted in kgotla meetings, which
were deemed ‘transparent and democratic’ (Thakadu, 2005, p203).
The CTT has generated relatively low annual income of P342,262, which is
considerably less than those of other CBOs. Rihoy and Maguranyanga (2007)
argue that the low financial performance of CTT activities could be explained
by the paucity of its wildlife resource base. Such a wildlife resource base has been
shunned by operators who often are unwilling to enter into commercial agreement
with CTT. As a result, CTT fails to realize the value of its quota. In 2000, CTT
earned P342,262 but has had no income since 2003.

Central responses to local mismanagement

The Botswana government drew attention to problems of local CBOs’ misman-
agement to justify the return to a more centralized wildlife management system.
Previously, the DWNP had not increased its staff and resource commitments to
enhance the organizational capacity and monitoring of CBOs but rather focused its
effort in mobilizing communities to form trusts so that they could acquire quotas
and enter into joint ventures with the private sector for photographic tourism and
safari hunting (Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007). According to Rozemeijer and
Van der Jagt (2000, p6):

DWNP does not have the resources for long-term facilitation and at times endorses
the establishment of a trust with a quota knowing that it will not be able to provide
the necessary follow-up, leaving behind a resource-rich but institutionally puzzled
community.

The government effectively blamed the CBOs which they had established without
initially building their organizational capacity. In this way, the CBOs were set up
for failure given the limited attention paid in addressing low local organizational
capacity. It is unrealistic to expect communities without organizational capacity
to meet the management and technical bureaucratic requirements of complex
contracts and financial accountability associated with CBO activities.These institu-
tional design flaws of CBNRM in Botswana contributed to CBO mismanagement
and accountability shortcomings. Unfortunately, such shortcomings provided
the central government with reasons to recentralize management of revenue and
‘transform wildlife into a national resource, and thus redistribute wildlife benefits’
rather than ‘to solve problems of institutional design or local capacity’ (Poteete,
2007, p11). We would suggest that CBO problems were a ‘blessing in disguise’
from the central perspective since they legitimized government’s re-centraliza-
tion of wildlife revenue in line with Botswana’s constitutional principle of natural
resources as national resources (Poteete, 2007; Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007).
 The Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana 73

Conclusion: Revisiting the politics of

CBNRM policy in Botswana
Natural resource policy and governance depends on the relative political influence
of different interest groups; this relative influence shifts over time. In Botswana,
we argue that the dearth of a vibrant civil society and influential actor network has
prevented the development of CBNRM policy supportive of grass-roots interests
and CBNRM ideals related to localized resource tenure. We also explained the
implications of the overwhelmingly influential President Ian Khama’s preferences
for a ‘protectionist’ conservation paradigm and his reservations on the concept
of sustainable use. The ‘diamond debate’ over national versus local control over
natural resource revenues has provided a powerful political argument for recen-
tralizing wildlife-derived revenues and to roll back earlier measures to devolve
rights to the local level. The perceived foreign origins of CBNRM helped under-
mine its legitimacy or acceptability since CBNRM did not manage to develop an
indigenous identity supported by a strong politically-salient constituency in the
country. In the absence of these conditions, central government actors were able
to drive policy in a way that ultimately reversed the gains of the previous 15 years
as well as undermining CBNRM ideals. The 2008 CBNRM Policy emerged in
the context of limited resistance since the government has succeeded in restricting
the democratic space for rural communities and civil society to participate in the
policy-making process.
At the local level, unaccountable governance structures have facilitated
concentration of benefits in the hands of local élites and inhibited local attempts
to address mismanagement of revenues. These problems of accountability and
mismanagement have been used by some national politicians and bureaucrats
to justify the re-centralization of wildlife revenues. It should be pointed out that
rather than focusing on the problems and using visible stories of fraud, misman-
agement and abuse of CBO funds to recentralize those funds, it would have
been plausible to build the organizational capacity of CBOs as well as investing
institutionally in accountability and governance structures. The 2008 CBNRM
Policy recentralized control over revenue as an ostensive response to local corrup-
tion and mismanagement; however, this does not deal with the organizational
capacity deficit and poor governance mechanisms on the part of CBOs. Politics
prevailed and favoured the transfer of financial power to the centre, thereby
contradicting the aspirational CBNRM principle of devolving financial benefits
to the local ‘producer communities’. While it is a plausible argument that, as
Ribot (2002, p3) contends, ‘transferring power without accountable represen-
tation has proven dangerous’, the problems of mismanagement of CBO funds
have to be understood within the context of CBO organizational incapacity and
institutional design flaws which facilitate élite predation. The politicized nature
of CBNRM implementation ensures that such teething challenges receive scru-
tiny from national politicians and élites opposed to the concepts of sustainable
use and devolution.
Initial advocates of CBNRM did not pay close attention to the political dimen-
sions of natural resource policy-making processes. We argue that inattention to
74 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

socio-political processes of empowerment and the potential of CBNRM to alter

levers of power proved costly to CBNRM. CBNRM strengthens social empow-
erment, capital and community development, which could be leveraged into
political capital. The Khwai and OCT case studies reveal how politics intersect
with CBNRM at the local level and interact with outcomes of electoral politics.
The ‘diamond debate’ invoked political questions and contradictory impulses of
CBNRM and nation-building or national development. Natural resource politics
permeates policy, making it imperative that CBNRM implementers and policy
advocates understand the power dynamics and levers that shape natural resource
governance.
In southern Africa, CBNRM practitioners and policy-makers have sought to
create strong feedback between local investments in wildlife management and
benefit capture through devolved institutional arrangements. As noted earlier, one
of the main lessons regional practitioners took from Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE
programme was that insufficient devolution of property rights over wildlife to local
communities, as opposed to upwardly accountable District Councils, undermined
local incentives and economic returns from natural resources. Murphree captures
this perspective which frames ‘decentralization’ as effectively a mechanism for
states to maintain control over valuable resources, in contrast to ‘devolution’ as the
desired means of local empowerment:

States, even when they grasp the importance of local management and steward-
ship, thus prefer decentralisation to devolution. This tendency, more than any other
factor, is responsible for the failure of programmes ostensibly designed to create local
natural resource management jurisdictions.
(2000, p6)

In Botswana, such concerns contributed to a focus on devolving control over wild-

life benefits and led to the marginalization of District Councils in CBNRM imple-
mentation. With the benefit of hindsight, this was a tactical error since District
Councils could have bridged the gulf between local communities and central
government, and also could have brought natural resource governance closer to
democratically-elected local government structures. Instead, district authorities
viewed CBOs as rival single-purpose authorities, and such perceptions under-
mined opportunities for collaboration between CBOs and district governments
to challenge national political interests. This prevented local CBOs and other
CBNRM advocates from bringing district governments into collaborative efforts
to contest national government’s preferred policy directions as reflected in the
2008 CBNRM Policy. With central authorities currently having prevailed in the
struggle over wildlife governance and benefits in Botswana, the future ability of
locally-based natural resource governance regimes to contribute to conservation
and rural development goals will depend largely on the ability to construct more
influential constituencies for CBNRM.
 The Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana 75

Notes
1 Interview with Senior DWNP official, Gabarone, February 2005.
2 Interview with P. Buteti, Gabarone, February 2005.
3 In 2003, Botswana was formally reclassified by the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund as a ‘middle-income’ country, resulting in the withdrawal of many
donors from the country.
4 Interview with A. Mabei, CEO of BOCOBONET, Gabarone, February 2005.
5 A Savingram is a directive issued by the Government of Botswana. See Savingram
(2001) ‘Management of funds realised from the Community Based Natural
Resources Management Project’, Ministry of Local Government, 30 January 2001,
Ref: LG/3/6/2/1 IV (46).
6 However, how this will play out at the local level is as yet unclear. Implementation
guidelines have yet to be developed, leaving local-level technical staff unclear on how to
proceed.
7 They identify the shortcomings of the state of democracy in Botswana as the centrali-
zation of constitutional and political power in the Office of the President; the lack of
free speech and curtailment of the freedom of the media; the pervasiveness of secrecy
in government decision-making; and the inability of government to accept or engage
with criticism.
8 Wylie (1990) writes persuasively about the ‘God-like’ status of a Tswana chief in the
20th century.
9 Interview with Senior DWNP official, Gaborone, February, 2005
10 Interview with ex-DWNP official, Gaborone, February, 2005.
11 Interview with former DWNP/NRMP field officer, Maun, February 2005.
12 Interview with Ngamiland District Council Officer, Maun, February 2005.
13 Interview with OCT accountant, Seronga, June 2008.
14 These include sitting allowances of P900 per person for each of the four mandatory
OCT meetings per year, P400pp for each of the mandatory 4 VTC meetings per year
and P100pp for each of the 4–5 special meetings by VTCs held each month and related
food and accommodation costs. To put these sitting allowances into some perspec-
tive, full-time unskilled District Council personnel, such as cleaners, earn P800 per
month. Such expenditures can amount to P30,000 per month. Additionally Executive
Committee members make monthly all-expense-paid trips to Maun, costs for which
amount to several thousand Pula (see OCT, 2008).
15 Interview with Senior District Council Officer, June 2008.

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 4

Peasants’ Forests and the King’s

Game? Institutional Divergence and
Convergence in Tanzania’s Forestry
and Wildlife Sectors

Fred Nelson and Tom Blomley

Introduction
Tanzania is one of Africa’s most richly endowed nations in terms of natural
resources. The country’s economy and the livelihoods of its 38 million citizens are
heavily reliant on natural resources and ecological services. Because of the impor-
tance of natural resources to local livelihoods and national economic activity,
debates revolving around the use, control and management of these resources
are central to issues of governance and political accountability in Tanzania.
Natural resource management has been heavily centralized during the colonial
and post-colonial periods, but the economic crisis of the 1980s contributed to the
promotion of more locally-based, decentralized approaches to the management
of natural resources such as forests and wildlife. With central government agen-
cies facing greater resource pressures in an uncertain and changing national fiscal
and political context, foreign donors and entrepreneurial individuals were able
to influence reforms, as reflected in new wildlife and forestry policies released in
1998 that called for a much greater level of direct involvement in natural resource
management by local communities.
Since the late 1990s, institutional changes have continued in both wildlife and
forestry sectors, but not necessarily in ways forecast or intended by donors or local
proponents of reform. Formalized local rights over community forests, managed by
elected Village Councils, have expanded rapidly, supported by reformed national
forest legislation and continued strong support from an array of European donor
agencies and local and international NGOs. By contrast, wildlife sector reforms
have been much more curtailed, with limited opportunities for communities to
secure legal rights to manage and benefit from wildlife. New wildlife legislation
80 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

drafted in 2008 and passed by Parliament in early 2009 virtually reproduces the
established centralized regulatory and management framework, and even expands
it in some notable respects.
Thus Tanzania’s wildlife and forestry sectors, which underwent parallel reform
processes during the 1990s, appear to have diverged onto very different institu-
tional tracks since 1998. Despite this divergence, however, certain commonali-
ties persist. Despite the success of forestry reforms in fostering the emergence of
locally-managed forests, and providing a relatively clear and supportive policy
and legal framework for community-based forest management, little progress has
been made in enabling local communities to add value to these forests through
timber harvesting or other commercial activities. By contrast, much of the value
of Tanzania’s booming timber trade in recent years, driven by surging demand
from Asia, has been controlled by networks of traders operating informally or ille-
gally, and often through links to public officials (Milledge et al, 2007). Tanzanian
communities have seemingly secured rights over their forests but captured few
of the economic benefits derived from ‘their’ resources, which calls into question
the impact and sustainability of the national community-based forestry reform
effort. Thus in forestry, as is more self-evidently the case with the overtly central-
ized wildlife sector, Tanzanian villagers effectively continue to be excluded from
capturing the economic values of the resources on their lands.
This chapter examines the key factors that have driven institutional change in the
management of Tanzania’s forests and wildlife during the past 20 years. We seek to
account for the nature of policy change in both sectors in the 1990s, the reasons for
divergence between forestry and wildlife reform patterns since 1998, and the political
economic factors that continue to exclude local communities from capturing more
of forests’ and wildlife’s economic values. This comparison highlights the importance
of commercial patterns of natural resource use in shaping the interests, choices and
levels of influence of key actors such as central government policy-makers, foreign
donors and local communities, as well as the importance of the macro-political
context in shaping natural resource reforms. We conclude with some recommenda-
tions for future natural resource reform efforts based on the Tanzanian experience.

Tanzania’s political economy:

From socialism to liberalization
Tanzania’s first two decades after independence in 1961 were characterized by
the consolidation and extension of the state’s control over the economy and the
lives of its citizens as the country embarked on a project of socialist development
and nation-building. Political authority was monopolized by the ruling party (the
Tanganyika African National Union prior to 1977 and the Chama cha Mapinduzi
or CCM thereafter) and alternative forms of social organization such as trade
unions and co-operative societies were either prohibited or incorporated into
state/party structures (Coulson, 1982). The party, through its national execu-
tive committee and central committee, effectively centralized decision-making
and policed internal dissent. As Mallya notes (2006, p51), ‘public policy making,
particularly policy debates, ceased to be “public”’.
 Peasants’ Forests and the King’s Game? 81

By the early 1980s the country was in a period of economic collapse and fiscal
crisis brought on by economic mismanagement, particularly of the parastatal
corporations which had become the proprietors of much productive activity
during the previous decade, as well as the 1978–79 war with Uganda and external
shocks in oil and commodity prices. The structural adjustment policies which were
accepted as the condition for the donor rescue package agreed to in the mid-1980s
were themselves a considerable socio-economic shock and forced a radical break
with the policies of the prior 20 years. The new liberalization discourse promoted
foreign direct investment, privatization of parastatal corporations, a reduction
in government provision of social services, civil service reform, and a shift from
central economic planning to promotion of market-based forces (Campbell and
Stein, 1991). These economic reforms also led to a return to political pluralism
after nearly 30 years of formal single-party rule.
In terms of changing national governance dynamics, the post-structural adjust-
ment era in Tanzania is best understood by two largely contradictory trends
(Kelsall, 2002). On the one hand, political space has expanded substantially with
the re-introduction of pluralist politics and the proliferation of non-governmental
forms of social organization. An independent media was allowed from 1988 and
the number of NGOs has grown rapidly since the early 1990s, with important
implications for associational life and the flow of information to citizens, including
those in rural areas. With the return to pluralist politics, government institutions
from local to national level are no longer formally fused with the structures and
membership of the ruling party, as they had been during the socialist era.
Simultaneously, the loss of the state monopoly on decision-making power and
the deterioration of governmental patronage resources, such as a downscaled civil
service, have created both opportunities and incentives for the spread of private
accumulative behaviours within government:

Generally speaking, economic liberalisation increased the desire and ability of

members of the political elite to enrich themselves…lucrative areas were to be found
in land grabbing, urban real estate, and the exploitation of tax loopholes. Divestiture
of parastatals also introduced a spoils character into Tanzanian politics, as politi-
cians positioned themselves to receive kickbacks or to become part-owners of the
newly privatised companies.
(Kelsall, 2002, p610)

While the one-party state of the 1970s enjoyed a high degree of popular legitimacy,
by the late 1980s the state ‘began to resemble a racket for the protection of corrupt
and acquisitive public officials’ (Kelsall 2003, p56). Following the replacement of
Tanzania’s home-grown socialist policies with a liberalization discourse that has
generally had limited local legitimacy or popular support, governance processes
have increasingly come to revolve around these acquisitive interests. Tanzanian
governing élites have sought to shape institutional reforms in ways that maintain
or expand key discretionary powers and rent-seeking opportunities. For example,
Cooksey (2003) describes how narratives portraying the liberalization of controls
over key export crops contrast with administrative and regulatory measures that
have expanded discretionary authority over this agricultural trade. Despite over
82 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

20 years of nominal reforms, the country’s political institutions remain heavily

centralized with power strongly concentrated in the hands of the executive
(Lawson and Rakner, 2005). As Tanzania’s public institutions have been colo-
nized by private commercial interests and activities, various forms of corruption
have spread and become institutionalized (URT, 2005).

The local institutional context

In 1975, at the height of Tanzania’s collectivist ujamaa villagization project, the
government passed legislation providing for the creation of Village Assemblies, which
comprise all the adults in a registered village, and Village Councils, which are elected
bodies of up to 25 representatives headed by a Village Chairman. Village Councils are
corporate bodies capable of owning property and entering into legal contracts with
other parties. Initially, these village-level institutions were intended mainly as mecha-
nisms for modernizing rural populations according to the transformative objectives
of ujamaa, such as by transmitting central development plans to the grass roots
(Shivji and Peter, 2000). The establishment of these village institutions helped to
extend the ruling party’s reach to the grass roots, and the Village Council Chairman
was by definition the village party Chairman. At the district level, elected District
Councils were abolished in 1972, and central government functions were decentral-
ized to administrators at the district level. In 1982, local government reforms were
passed that reintroduced elected District Councils and strengthened the corporate
powers of elected Village Councils. These reforms also empowered Village Councils
to propagate their own bylaws, subject to approval by the District Council.
The importance of village governance institutions is enhanced through their
legal responsibility for management of customary village lands according to the
1999 Land Act and Village Land Act. Village Councils manage land on behalf of,
and subject to approval for most transactions by, the Village Assembly, and this
includes demarcating land that is to be allocated to individuals and land which will
remain statutorily collective in its use and management (Alden Wily, 2003). The
result of this local governance and land tenure structure is that the boundaries of
common property regimes both with respect to the community, as defined by the
membership of the Village Assembly, and the physical resource base as defined by
the area of a given village’s lands, are relatively clearly delineated in rural Tanzania.
Consequently, Tanzania is considered to have one of the strongest local institu-
tional frameworks for community-based natural resource management in sub-
Saharan Africa (Alden Wily and Mbaya, 2001).

The evolution and impacts of community-based

forest management
Tanzania contains an estimated 34.6 million hectares of forests and woodlands.
The main forest types are the extensive miombo woodlands that cover the central
and southern parts of the country, the Acacia woodlands in the northern regions,
the coastal forest mosaic in the east, mangrove forests along the Indian Ocean,
and closed canopy forests on the ancient mountains of the Eastern Arc, along
 Peasants’ Forests and the King’s Game? 83

Lake Tanganyika in the west, and on the younger volcanic mountains in the north
(White, 1983). Of these various forest types, 14.3 million hectares are found
within gazetted Forest Reserves, and the remaining 15.8 million hectares of forest
lie on village and general (or unowned) land (Akida and Blomley, 2006).
In 1998, Tanzania released a National Forestry Policy, the first new forest policy
since the colonial era, which promotes substantial change in the way forests are
managed (MNRT, 1998a). The policy aims to promote community-based forest
management (CBFM) through the establishment of Village Land Forest Reserves
(VLFRs), where communities are both managers and owners of forests, as well as
through Joint Forest Management (JFM), where local communities co-manage forests
with the designated authorities of National or Local Government Forest Reserves.
The policy is being implemented through the Forest Act of 2002, which provides
the basis in law for communities to own, manage or co-manage forests under a
wide range of conditions. The Forest Act embraces the principle of subsidiarity,
stating as its aim ‘to delegate responsibility for the management of forest resources
to the lowest possible level of local management consistent with the furtherance of
national policies’ (URT, 2002, p1170). The Forest Act allows village governments
to declare and gazette their own Village Land Forest Reserves or Community Forest
Reserves. Several key points about the policy and legal framework for CBFM in
Tanzania bear emphasizing. First, policy-makers have been explicit in the devo-
lutionary intent of these reforms, and the importance of granting local communi-
ties secure rights to use, manage and own forests on village lands. Guidelines for
CBFM published by the Forestry and Beekeeping Division (FBD) in 2001, and
revised in 2006/07, state as follows:

CBFM is a power-sharing strategy. It builds upon the national policy to

enable local participation in forest management and the real need to bring control
and management to more practical local levels. It aims to secure forests through
sharing the right to control and manage them, not just the right to use or benefit
from them. Therefore CBFM targets communities not as passive beneficiaries but
as forest managers.
(MNRT, 2007, p2, emphasis in original)

Second, local rights to forests and forests’ economic values are secured within
the law, not merely advocated by policy. The Forest Act secures statutory rights
to forest benefits for local communities that establish VLFRs by including the
following specific legal provisions (see URT, 2002).

• Waiving official royalty fees on forest products. This means that villages do
not have to follow government timber fee schedules but can sell their produce
at prices of their own choosing.
• Exemption from benefit-sharing arrangements. As forest managers, Village
Councils may retain all of the income from the sale of forest produce from
VLFRs.
• Levying and retaining fines and proceeds from confiscated timber and equip-
ment. Fines imposed on violations occurring in VLFRs are retained by the
village.
84 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

• Exemption from the ‘reserved tree species list’. The Forest Act protects
commercially important or endangered tree species (reserved tree species) on
general land, and places their management with the District Forestry Officer.
Once under village management, decisions about harvesting of these species
in VLFRs are controlled by the village government.

A third important characteristic of the CBFM framework established by the

Forest Act is that the procedures for communities to establish VLFRs are rela-
tively straightforward and build on existing village government institutions and
land tenure arrangements. Villages must only form a natural resource or envi-
ronment committee under the Village Council, demarcate the boundary of the
proposed VLFR, and draft village bylaws and a basic management plan for the
forest, including different use and user zones. Then the VLFR is declared by the
Village Assembly, which formalizes the forest’s status under the Forest Act. Policy-
makers in the forestry sector sought to produce a framework for CBFM which did
not duplicate local governance structures but rather builds upon and takes advan-
tage of the existing village governance framework (MNRT, 2007, p3).

CBFM implementation progress to date

CBFM has spread quite rapidly since the initial experiments with different models of
local forest management were piloted in northern Tanzania starting in the early 1990s.
A national survey undertaken in 2008 established that over 2.2 million hectares were
within established VLFRs and that 1,448 villages were participating (Table 4.1).
CBFM tends to be concentrated in the miombo woodlands, much of which lie
outside government forest reserves and on village land. Montane evergreen and
mangrove forests show a disproportionately small coverage under CBFM as the
total area under these forest types is smaller and the majority are classified as central
government forest reserves due to their higher economic or biodiversity values.

Table 4.1 Current coverage of CBFM across Tanzania

Area of forest under CBFM 2.27 million ha 11.6% of unprotected forest
estate
Forest types covered by CBFM Miombo woodlands 68% of total area covered
Coastal forests 15% of total area covered
Acacia woodlands 16% of total area covered
Mangrove 0% of total area covered
Montane forests 1% of total area covered
Number of declared or gazetted 383
village land forest reserves
Number of villages engaged in 1,448 13.8% of villages in the country
CBFM
Number of districts engaged in 65 68% of rural districts in the
CBFM country

Source: MNRT, 2008

 Peasants’ Forests and the King’s Game? 85

Where forests have been formalized under community management, signs from
available data are that forest condition is improving. In a study (Blomley et al,
2008) that compared growth characteristics of 13 forest areas under varying
management regimes, forest condition appears to be better in those areas
managed either wholly or jointly by communities (as evidenced by higher basal
areas, mean annual incremental growth and stems per hectare), than areas under
exclusive state control or under open access regimes. This study, supported by
other recent assessments (Pfliegner and Moshi, 2007; Persha and Blomley, 2009)
would suggest that by providing incentives for local communities to enforce rules
governing forest use, VLFR establishment is able to reduce levels of exploitation,
thus reversing pro­cesses of forest degradation in these areas.
Thus the impacts of CBFM during the decade that has passed since the release
of the 1998 forest policy include the rapidly spreading establishment of VLFRs,
securing and formalizing local collective rights over 2.2 million hectares of forests
and woodlands, and in many instances spurring the recovery of these forests in
terms of their biophysical condition. We now take a step back to examine the
historical and institutional roots of CBFM in Tanzania, in order to understand
what factors led to these changes in Tanzanian forest governance.

Drivers of reform
Up until the 1970s, forestry in Tanzania remained rooted in colonial era institu-
tions and a technocratic belief in scientific management, with government efforts
principally focused on industrial timber production. This involved investing in
government parastatal operations, such as sawmills, in order to meet growing
demand for timber and increase production. The industrial forestry model was
strongly supported by foreign donors, with aid constituting 90 per cent of the
non-recurring government forestry budget by the late 1970s (Hurst, 2004).
The economic crisis of the early 1980s was a key driver of institutional
change in the forestry sector, as with Tanzanian economic policies more broadly.
Deteriorating fiscal circumstances forced foresters to cope with reduced resources
and new challenges to their established professional and bureaucratic role as
managers of natural resources and landscapes. The industrial forestry model
underwent a financial collapse, casting doubt upon the future role of state forestry
authorities as parastatals such as sawmills were divested and civil service reforms
initiated.
Simultaneously, growing international interest in the biodiversity values of
Tanzania’s forests, particularly the Eastern Arc range, led to pressure to reduce or
cease timber harvesting in these forests and concomitantly improve their protec-
tion for conservation purposes. This pressure had external origins, being rooted
in global environmental values ascendant during the 1980s, and influenced the
foreign donors that were financing Tanzania’s forestry sector during this time of
fiscal crisis (Hurst, 2004). These values were also given organizational form and
agency within Tanzania, as one of the country’s first domestic conservation NGOs,
the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group (TFCG), was established in 1984 in
order to campaign for conservation of the Eastern Arc forests. TFCG played a
major role in this and later forest conservation campaigns.
86 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

In 1985, following initial proposals from TFCG and supported by international

conservation organizations (such as WWF) and donor agencies, the govern-
ment agreed to establish the first forest-based national park in Tanzania in the
Udzungwa Mountains. This move transferred one of the country’s largest high-
land forests from the FBD to Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA). This repre-
sented a tangible threat to government foresters that they would lose their lands,
role and influence unless they became more aligned with the aims of the growing
global biodiversity conservation movement (Hurst, 2004).
These trends, coupled with the collapse of industrial timber production,
established a strategic and instrumental basis for the FBD to re-position itself
as the guardian of Tanzania’s high-biodiversity forests (Hurst, 2004). A ban on
logging in highland catchment forests was introduced in the mid-1980s. By the
mid-1990s the FBD was increasingly focused on protecting the national forest
estate, and its commercial functions had significantly contracted. Indeed, today
Tanzania has very few formal timber concessions, compared to other African
nations with high levels of forest cover (Table 4.2). For example, neighbouring
Mozambique, which also has mostly miombo woodlands making up its forest
estate, has more than seven times as much land under timber concessions as
compared with Tanzania (Sunderlin et al, 2008). Forestry officials in the central
FBD bureaucracy are not the overseers of any large-scale centralized system of
forest exploitation.

Table 4.2 Area of forest land under timber concessions in select African countries
Country Central African Cameroon Gabon Mozambique Tanzania
Republic
Area of forest lands 3.40 4.95 6.98 4.55 0.61
under timber concession
(millons of hectares)

Source: Sunderlin et al, 2008

It was in this changing context that CBFM emerged in the early 1990s. In
the late 1980s the FBD had attempted to create several new forest reserves
in degraded miombo woodland in northern Tanzania (Alden Wily et al, 2000;
Hurst, 2004). Government officials cleared and demarcated the boundaries
of these forests, prompting villagers to protest and to accelerate clearing of
the forest so as to secure their lands before the new reserves were gazetted. As
this transpired, a combination of district foresters and donor-paid technical
specialists1 developed a counter-proposal to place the forests under improved
local management rather than gazetting a central reserve. Donors also had
to be convinced, initially, that community-based management was a viable
option (L. Alden Wily, pers. comm.), but eventually the Swedish International
Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and other northern European
donors became influential advocates of this new approach. Sweden provided
Tanzania with a total of $227 million in forestry sector support from 1973
to 1998 – over 50 per cent of foreign aid to forestry in Tanzania – and thus
 Peasants’ Forests and the King’s Game? 87

had a substantial influence over policy decisions (Hurst, 2004, p91). SIDA
was supporting a Land Management Project (LAMP) in Babati and Singida
Districts that played the key role in developing CBFM pilot initiatives, and
thereby later provided the basis for crafting CBFM rules and procedures in the
new forest policy and law.
Importantly, the initial CBFM pilot initiatives occurred in forests which were
relatively dry and degraded miombo woodlands, and thus not particularly valuable
forests from a commercial perspective. The FBD’s motivation in trying to estab-
lish forest reserves in those areas was primarily rehabilitative, seeking to bolster
protection and enforcement. There was little or no fiscal rationale for the govern-
ment to establish its own direct control over those areas.
An additional factor in the adoption of CBFM during the 1990s was the role
played by certain individuals, both within government and on the part of donors.
The director of the FBD during the 1970s and 1980s was strongly supportive of
community participation in forestry, which partly stemmed from his belief in the
national socialist development ideology of the time (Hurst, 2004). From 1992
to 1996, a new director of FBD assumed power who considered community-
based forestry an abridgement of the technical responsibilities and mandate of
government foresters, and who worked to counter the earlier steps towards greater
local involvement (Ibid.). His removal, following strong pressure from donors
and internal departmental tensions, brought in as director Professor Said Iddi, an
academic who was a strong supporter of CBFM and ultimately oversaw propaga-
tion of both the new forestry policy and the Act.
In summary then, we can identify a fairly complex set of interacting factors that
collectively account for the adoption of Tanzania’s strong policy and legal frame-
work for CBFM.

• The fiscal crisis of the 1980s, which greatly enhanced the influence of donor
agencies and limited the options of bureaucratic decision-makers, as well as
greatly curtailing central capacity for direct forest management in rural areas
• Growing international awareness of the importance of biodiversity in
Tanzania’s highland forests and international pressure to stop logging in these
areas and adopt more preservationist management strategies
• Linked to the above two factors, a shift within the forestry sector from indus-
trial modes of forest management to a much greater focus on protection of
biodiversity values and ecosystem services
• Local resistance to expansion of state protected forests in the early 1990s
which, in concert with increased donor influence and declining state capacity,
catalysed the first experiments with CBFM
• Low commercial values of degraded forests, particularly miombo woodlands,
which were the site of early CBFM experiments on community lands
• Key individuals working both for government and donors who promoted
CBFM and devolution as a new paradigm for forest management, and who
ensured that the initial field experiments were effectively translated into
sweeping revisions of Tanzanian forestry policy and legislation
• Lastly, the existence of a pre-existing framework for local governance and
ownership of common pool resources, in the form of Tanzania’s elected village
88 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

governments, was a key factor in enabling early CBFM experiments to take

place without having to create new institutions or change local government or
land tenure legislation.

Rights but not revenues? Institutional struggles over

forest use
Despite the general success of CBFM in Tanzania in terms of enabling communi-
ties to secure rights over a considerable area of forested land under a clear and
simple set of institutional arrangements, recently CBFM outcomes have come
under greater scrutiny as it is increasingly apparent that communities have not
been able to capture the full range of economic values from the forests over which
they ostensibly have legal control (Blomley et al, 2009). Even while commu-
nity revenues from VLFRs have been very limited, a boom in Tanzania’s timber
trade has greatly increased the commercial value of forests, including previ-
ously marginal timber species from miombo woodlands. Despite the existence of
a forestry and land tenure framework that gives villages clear opportunities to
control and benefit from forest uses on their lands, commercial forest exploitation
has largely by-passed rural communities thus far.
Local communities that have established VLFRs are legally entitled to capture
a wide range of local products from their forests, including building materials
and fuelwood from trees, food, traditional medicines, livestock forage and
sources of water. Local benefits from these subsistence uses can be significant.
For example, a study of forest products utilization across 377,000ha of commu-
nity-managed forests in Shinyanga Region estimates the total per household
monthly value of these products at the equivalent of US$14, in comparison
to average per household monthly expenditures across Tanzania of US$8.50
(Monela et al, 2005).
In addition to these important but largely subsistence uses, forest resources
on village lands hold substantial potential for commercial timber production. As
noted above, there is no centralized concessionary system for commercial timber
harvesting on village lands in Tanzania. Timber harvesting licences are sold by
District Forestry Officers, with a proportion of royalty payments accruing back to
FBD; once VLFRs are established, districts may not authorize harvesting in those
areas. Table 4.3 provides an illustration of a sample of four areas with significant
potential for local revenue generation from timber harvesting which are currently
under village management.
Despite the scale of potential from many VLFRs and as-yet unprotected forests
on village lands, and the growth of the Tanzanian timber trade during the past five
years, very few communities are currently harvesting timber from their VLFRs
as a source of collective income. The only VLFRs engaged in commercial forest
products utilization are several in Iringa Region which earn income from the sale
of charcoal and some very limited timber sales, amounting to around US$720 per
village as of 2005 (Lund, 2007).
 Peasants’ Forests and the King’s Game? 89

Table 4.3 Selected areas of forest under village management

and their revenue generation potential
Forest name Size (ha) Status Estimated annual Number Potential
and location revenue from of villages revenue
sustainable managing per village/
harvesting forest annum (US$)
Angai Forest, 141,000 VLFR US$784,000 13 60,300
Liwale District
Suledo Forest, 164,000 VLFR US$213,000 9 23,700
Kiteto District
Mtanza Msona 10,713 VLFR US$57,900 2 28,950
Forest, Rufiji
District
Ipole Wildlife 247,500 Wildlife US$730,000 4 182,500
Management Area, Management
Sikonge District Area

Source: IUCN, 2004; Mellenthien, 2005; Mustahalti, 2007; Nelson and Blomley, 2007

Until recently the country’s extensive miombo woodlands had limited commercial
value save for a few highly prized species, but this is rapidly changing. China
has emerged as the fastest growing importer of hardwoods from Tanzania, repre-
senting a major shift in trade dynamics when compared to the 1980s, when the
vast majority of sawn hardwood exports were destined for Western Europe. This
increase in demand has coincided with improved road networks – such as the
opening of the Mkapa Bridge over the Rufiji River – which greatly increased
access to southeastern Tanzania. This part of the country is characterized by high
levels of poverty but it possesses some of the largest areas of unutilized coastal
forests and miombo woodlands in Tanzania. Lindi Region, for example, is one of
Tanzania’s poorest rural areas and has an estimated 3.75 million hectares of unre-
served forests, virtually all of which falls on village lands (Milledge et al, 2007).
Tanzania’s growing timber trade is almost entirely informal; Milledge et al
(2007) estimate that in recent years over 95 per cent of the trade has been carried
out illegally, for example depriving the state of an estimated $58 million in lost
taxes and fees in 2003. This research also documents how this trade is carried
out along a value chain involving public officials within local and national govern-
ment institutions, village leaders, logging operators and political élites (Milledge et
al, 2007; Mustahalti, 2007). Arising quickly in an institutional context character-
ized by government resource shortages and lack of effective controls, this timber
trade became very profitable and many people entered the business with a view to
exporting round-wood to lucrative overseas markets (Milledge et al, 2007). Local
communities which should legally be able to exclude outsiders from harvesting on
their lands have, in practice, little knowledge of the actual market values of forest
products and equally limited awareness, in many places, of their legal rights to
manage forest resources. Without external support, villagers in forested rural areas
are unable to carry out the relatively simple set of steps required to close access to
90 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

forests through declaration of a VLFR. In addition, some village leaders, having

become involved in illegal timber harvesting, possess disincentives to channelling
forest revenues to the collective community or to enabling formation of a VLFR.
As a result, communities that are the legal proprietors of many of the forests on
village lands are only capturing about 1 per cent of the value of the timber trade
(up until the point of export) in southeastern Tanzania (Milledge et al, 2007). The
system of informal trade based on patronage relationships between private traders
and public officials, having been established, creates strong profit-based incentives
for its own perpetuation and the continued marginalization of local communities.
The existing informal system of commerce thus creates incentives at a number
of different institutional scales that work against local communities capturing a
greater share of the value of forests on village lands.
The role, capacity, and interests of district governments are also relevant
because CBFM generally relies on district-level forestry officers to facilitate the
process. Despite significant decentralization and local government reforms over
the past two decades, many districts are still highly constrained by human and
operational resources, which restrict them from effectively implementing forest
laws and policies at the local level. In addition to capacity constraints, district
governments, both individual officials and District Councils as a whole, may also
possess disincentives to enabling village-level formalization of rights over forests.
For District Councils administering large land areas with significant areas of unre-
served forest, forest revenues, levies and taxes constitute an important source of
local income which can be used without the conditions attached to much central
government funding. For example, the Kilwa District Council collected 33 million
Tshs (~US$30,000) in 2003, which comprised about 18 per cent of its total local
revenue receipts (DANIDA, 2004). The transfer of large areas of unreserved
forest to village management may undermine higher level goals to boost district
level revenue generation.
In addition, the conversion and transfer of effectively‘open access’ forests on
village lands to forests managed by mandated village governance institutions with
clear roles and responsibilities may undermine some of the corrupt networks that
perpetuate illegal logging, also leading to declining benefit flows to those higher
up the chain, which often includes district-level forestry officials. In such cases,
district staff and councillors often find that they face a clear conflict of interest
– over the continued benefits they enjoy from illegal harvesting in unreserved
forests, but also their responsibilities to assist communities in securing tenure and
forest management rights under CBFM (Persha and Blomley, 2009). This conflict
of interest often manifests itself through the slowing down (and often halting) of
key stages in the legal process of CBFM establishment, such as District Council
approval of village bylaws and management plans (Mustahalti, 2007).
Capacity at the community level plays a pivotal role in how actors at district
and national governmental levels, as well as amongst the private sector, influence
CBFM outcomes. Where communities are aware of their rights and the returns
available under CBFM, experience suggests that they are ready and able to defend
them, through active patrolling of forest areas, arresting and fining of illegal forest
users, and the confiscation and sale of forest produce and equipment. Similarly,
attempts by government staff at higher levels to capture and monopolize forest
 Peasants’ Forests and the King’s Game? 91

benefits are more strongly resisted in areas with higher levels of legal literacy as
villagers are more able to appreciate and defend their rights (Blomley, 2006).

Wildlife sector reform

Tanzania’s wildlife populations represent perhaps the most extraordinary assem-
blage of terrestrial large mammals left on the planet. These animals support a
tourism industry worth over $1 billion in annual revenue and which has been
one of the most important sources of national economic growth during the past
20 years.
Tanzania’s wildlife sector was progressively centralized through establishment
of regulations governing hunting and state protected areas during the colonial
era and into the post-independence period (Nelson et al, 2007). By the 1980s
the wildlife sector faced a state of crisis, as Tanzanian civil servants’ wages had
declined by over 90 per cent in real terms since 1970 (van de Walle, 2001), and
the dramatic reduction in state law enforcement capacity facilitated a boom in
illegal use. As ivory and rhino horn prices soared and commercial poaching
intensified, the country lost half of its elephants and nearly all of its black rhinos
(WSRTF, 1995).
These crises drove a range of changes, as donor involvement increased markedly
and the traditional protectionist management discourse lost much of its legitimacy.
New donor-government partnerships were forged to increase investment in the
wildlife sector and to address rampant illegal wildlife use and management short-
falls. An important partnership between the German and Tanzanian governments,
the Selous Conservation Programme, arose in the late 1980s and soon became
a lead mechanism for promoting community involvement in wildlife manage-
ment (Baldus et al, 2003). A range of other local projects seeking to improve
local participation and benefit-sharing in wildlife management emerged, nearly
all supported by foreign donors (Leader-Williams et al, 1996). TANAPA began a
formal programme of sharing revenues from parks with surrounding communi-
ties as a way to improve relations and enlist local support in stopping poaching
(Bergin, 2001). All of these programmes reflected the greatly enhanced influence
of foreign donors in Tanzania in the 1990s, as well as the emerging enthusiasm
amongst donor agencies for projects combining natural resource conservation and
rural development goals.
The government and its donor supporters initiated a review of the country’s
wildlife management policies and institutions in order to develop a policy that
would address existing challenges and adapt to Tanzania’s changing political and
economic environment. This process resulted in adoption of a new wildlife policy
in 1998 which gave community wildlife management a prominent role. Although
this policy stated clearly that the central government would maintain ownership
of wildlife, and that National Parks and Game Reserves, as the ‘core protected
areas’, would continue to be the foundation of conservation efforts, it called for
a new approach on village lands. The policy aimed to allow rural communities
to manage wildlife on their land for increased local benefits (MNRT, 1998b).
The policy described community-managed Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs)
92 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

as the mechanism for implementing these reformist aims: ‘The Government will
facilitate the establishment of a new category of PA [protected area] known as
WMA, where local people will have full mandate of managing and benefiting from
their conservation efforts’ (MNRT, 1998b, p31).
In the years following the issuance of the 1998 policy, very limited actual devo-
lution of rights to manage wildlife and capture the resource’s economic value has
occurred. Rural communities have invested substantial resources in establishing
the WMAs, in some instances spending nearly two decades prior to establishing
a gazetted WMA, and have set aside an estimated 16,000km2 of village land
as WMAs. At least ten WMAs have been gazetted and some of them are now
receiving revenues shared out by the Wildlife Division.
The institutional design of WMAs has limited implementation of the initial
reformist policy aims. The basic conceptual framework for WMAs that was devel-
oped in the 1990s involved villages zoning a portion of their land as a wildlife
conservation area where agriculture and settlement, and perhaps livestock grazing
as well, would be excluded (Leader-Williams et al, 1996). The rules governing
WMAs would be enforced through locally-appropriate village land use plans and
bylaws. In return, the Wildlife Division would grant a wildlife utilization quota
which the communities could either hunt themselves or alternatively sell to a tourist
hunting operator. The economic potential of tourist hunting played a central role
in the logic of this framework, by providing the revenues that would translate into
incentives for local conservation measures in these rural areas.
The regulations that define how WMAs will actually operate were released in
December 2002, nearly five years after the policy was produced. These and subse-
quently modified regulations have two salient features (see MNRT, 2002). First,
they statutorily establish a long set of prerequisite conditions which communi-
ties must fulfil in order to create a WMA. In order to form a WMA and start
earning revenue from wildlife uses therein, the communities are required to fulfil
at least a dozen procedural requirements (Nelson, 2007). These include preparing
a strategic plan, village land use plans and a general management or zoning plan
as prerequisites to applying for WMA gazettement. After the WMA is gazetted,
the communities still must request the Director of Wildlife to designate a tourist
hunting block in the WMA (if they wish to earn revenue from tourist hunting
activities), develop an investment plan and investment agreements and have
Environmental Impact Assessments carried out on the proposed investments.
Second, the regulations do not devolve secure or long-term wildlife use rights
to communities that are able to establish a WMA. The regulations do not allow the
communities to allocate their hunting block to hunting outfitters, but rather retain
hunting concession allocation authority at the ministerial level. The user rights to
wildlife granted commensurate with WMA gazettement are short-term, limited to
renewable three-year periods, and are revocable. Of critical importance, the WMA
regulations do not specify what proportion of the revenues generated by commer-
cial activities in the WMA will be retained by the local community; this has been
one of the most problematic provisions of these regulations in terms of clarifying
the rights that WMA establishment confers at the local level (Nelson, 2007).
A final issue that has affected the implementation of WMAs is that rather than
empowering existing village governance organs, WMA formation requires the
 Peasants’ Forests and the King’s Game? 93

creation of a new supra-village organization to manage wildlife. Because WMAs

are envisioned as comprising multiple adjacent villages, the regulations require
communities to establish a community-based organization (CBO), which becomes
the legal holder of wildlife user rights and the manager of the WMA. While the
CBO is supposed to report to the Village Councils, its governing membership is
distinct from the Village Council and Village Assembly structures. Village govern-
ance institutions are given the role of holding the CBO accountable but are no
longer directly involved in managing the resources placed within the WMA. In this
way, the WMA framework creates an additional layer of governance institutions
for natural resources on village lands, rather than building on existing structures
as forestry measures have done.
Some local communities have actively resisted implementation of WMAs
promoted by central and district government officials, foreign donors and the
international conservation NGOs that have been given the role of WMA facil-
itation in most areas (see Nelson and Ole Makko, 2005; Igoe and Croucher,
2007; Sachedina, 2008). The main reasons for this resistance have been local
concerns about allocating large areas of village land in return for the unspecified
benefits and weak levels of local control defined in the WMA regulations. Village
leaders in Vilima Vitatu village, one of seven villages in the Burunge WMA, were
threatening to pull out of the WMA two years after it was formally gazetted,
alleging that the process for establishing it was top-down and not participatory
(Luhwago, 2008; see also Igoe and Croucher, 2007). In many of these locales
historical tensions between communities and protected area managers present a
barrier to effective collaboration, and the top-down WMA framework provides a
poor mechanism for building trust and overcoming local concerns (see Nelson
and Ole Makko, 2005).
In addition, a number of the communities that have rejected WMAs as the formal
state-sanctioned form of community wildlife management had already developed
their own independent means of capturing economic benefits from wildlife. In the
early 1990s, tourism operators in northern Tanzania initiated several joint venture
agreements with local villages through contracts with the Village Council. These
operator-village contracts have spread widely in northern Tanzania, with revenue
to villages increasing over the past decade as tourism numbers and investment
have increased (Nelson, 2004). For example, seven villages in Loliondo Division
adjacent to Serengeti National Park earned more than US$300,000 in total in 2007
(Ngoitiko et al, this volume). Some of these contractual agreements have been in
place for nearly 20 years, surviving repeated renegotiations of pricing and terms
between operators and villages. However, for the past ten years these ventures
have faced a fairly constant state of conflict with centrally-issued tourist hunting
concessions situated in the same areas on village land but issued at the ministerial
level. Villages have sought to maintain their incomes from tourism, while central
government has sought to ensure its ability to lease community lands out as fairly
lucrative commercial hunting concessions, as we describe further below.
In sum, rather than devolving authority for wildlife to the local level as called for
in the 1998 policy, institutional reforms over the past decade represent a general
expansion of centralized authority over wildlife use and management (Nelson et
al, 2007), as characterized by the following developments.
94 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

• In 2000 the Ministry released regulations for tourist hunting management

which declared that any tourism activities occurring in any hunting blocks
without the express permission of the Director of Wildlife are illegal (MNRT,
2000). Because about half of all hunting concessions in Tanzania are located
on village lands, these regulations represented the first time that the Wildlife
Division had claimed explicit jurisdiction over non-consumptive tourism
activities being carried out on village lands and according to village agree-
ments with tourism operators. Because local government legislation and
land legislation effectively provide local communities with jurisdiction over
access to land, and the rights to enter into contracts with commercial enti-
ties, local communities and civic activists argued that the Wildlife Division
lacks the regulatory power to control these agreements (e.g. Nshala, 2002).
This conflict of jurisdictional authority has persisted in a functional stalemate
since 2000, with numerous local conflicts emerging, some community-tour
operator ventures being restricted or eliminated, but no legal clarity emerging
to resolve the issue.
• In 2007 the Ministry released regulations under the Wildlife Conservation Act
of 1974 to regulate non-consumptive tourism, both inside Game Reserves and
in unprotected areas or village lands. These regulations contain a fee structure
that will displace much of the revenue earned locally from tourism ventures
by forcing operators to pay the Wildlife Division, effectively taxing (at a rate
of over 50 per cent) the direct local income from tourism that villagers had
been earning from these ventures. These regulations have once again caused
tensions between villagers and state authorities to rise, and their implementa-
tion is currently being debated and negotiated (TNRF, 2008).
• In 2008 a new overarching Wildlife Bill was released for comment and then
tabled in Parliament by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism.
The main changes made by this Bill, in comparison with the extant 1974
Wildlife Conservation Act, involve creating new types of protected areas to
regulate local land use on community or private lands, such as ‘corridors’ and
‘dispersal areas’, and placing a range of restrictions on village land uses in areas
where wildlife is found. The Bill includes provisions for establishing WMAs,
but does not secure any rights to benefits from wildlife in those WMAs or
provide clarity on key issues, or otherwise grant communities any new rights
to manage and benefit from wildlife. Local communities widely criticized the
Bill in public meetings with government officials (e.g. Ihucha, 2008).

Institutional change in Tanzania’s wildlife sector over the past two decades is thus
characterized by the contrasting trajectories of the devolutionary policy reform
process of the 1990s and subsequent regulatory and legislative measures that serve
to consolidate and reinforce centralized control and authority over wildlife on
village lands. This pattern of nominal decentralization followed by re-assertion of
bureaucratic control has been described in Tanzania for other sectors such as agri-
culture (Cooksey, 2003) as well as the regulation of civil liberties such as freedom
of association (Lissu, 2000). In the wildlife sector, the observed patterns of institu-
tional change have been critically influenced by the political economy of commer-
cial wildlife utilization, particularly the country’s lucrative tourist hunting industry.
 Peasants’ Forests and the King’s Game? 95

The wildlife sector reforms of the 1990s were spurred by similar factors to
those that drove change in the forestry sector: the fiscal implications of economic
crisis and structural adjustment in relation to bureaucratic capacity; the greatly
expanded influence of foreign donors within that fiscal context; and new neo-
liberal discourses based on decentralization and market-based incentives.
All wildlife outside national parks2 and the unique Ngorongoro Conservation
Area falls under the jurisdiction of the Wildlife Division of the Ministry of Natural
Resources and Tourism. The main functions of the Wildlife Division are:

• to oversee and implement general wildlife policy; and

• to manage all forms of wildlife utilization.

The most commercially important form of wildlife utilization administered by

the Wildlife Division is tourist hunting, which occurs both inside Game Reserves,
in which people are not allowed to reside, and outside state protected areas on
village lands, where much wildlife in Tanzania persists. Today there are about 140
hunting concessions and over 40 different hunting companies holding them, with
the total area used for hunting about 250,000km2 (Baldus and Cauldwell, 2004).
Tourist hunting was originally organized under a system of centrally managed
concessions in the 1950s. From 1973 to 1978 all hunting was banned, and when
hunting was re-opened it was controlled directly and monopolistically by the
parastatal Tanzania Wildlife Corporation. In 1988, the hunting industry was opened
up to other operators, and administrative responsibility for hunting concessions
was placed with the Wildlife Division. Since the industry’s liberalization, the total
annual value of hunting concessions has increased dramatically. Direct govern-
ment income increased from about US$1.5 million in 1988 to over US$10 million
by 2001 (Baldus and Cauldwell, 2004; Barnett and Patterson, 2006). Government
figures for 2006 estimate revenue earned by wildlife utilization at about Tshs 15.2
billion, or around US$14 million, with most of this coming from tourist hunting
activities (URT, 2006).
Tourist hunting concessions are allocated administratively; Tanzania is one
of the few countries in southern Africa which does not employ any competi-
tive tendering or auction procedures in the management of its hunting industry
(Barnett and Patterson, 2006). As a result, Tanzania’s hunting industry has long
been characterized by low levels of transparency, in terms of public access to infor-
mation, and very little external oversight. Local communities have no formal role
in determining which companies hunt on the village lands that Village Councils
administer. The amount of money involved in the growing tourist hunting
industry, the lack of mechanisms for public transparency or accountability, and
the strong discretionary authority central bureaucrats have over concessions all
create substantial opportunities for rent-seeking and private–public collusion
in the process of hunting concession allocation. These opportunities are further
enhanced by hunting concession prices and fees which have been kept artificially
low, reducing government income by an estimated US$7 million annually and
leading to allegedly widespread albeit nominally illegal sub-leasing of conces-
sion blocks (Baldus and Cauldwell, 2004; World Bank, 2008). More recently,
public debate over allegedly ‘institutionalized corruption’ in the wildlife sector
96 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

has increased calls for reform of wildlife sector governance and tourist hunting
administration (e.g. ThisDay, 2007).
Transferring authority over wildlife and hunting revenues to the village level,
as called for by the 1998 policy, presents clear conflicts with the instrumental
interests of government policy-makers, including both well-placed individuals and
bureaucratic institutions at the ministerial level as a whole. Wildlife is a valuable
resource to these key actors for rent-seeking and the construction of patronage
relationships. These hunting revenues are far easier for officials to ‘privatize’ than
donor project funds, and have provided the financial leverage for policy-makers to
marginalize the reformist policy adopted in the 1990s and to resist pressure from
donors to carry out more far-reaching changes during the past decade.
This changing balance of power between foreign donors and the wildlife bureauc-
racy was readily apparent by 2003–2005. During this period, the GTZ community
wildlife advisor, who had played a key role in design of the WMA framework and
adoption of the 1998 policy, became increasingly critical of what was perceived as
government refusal to devolve greater powers to local communities (Baldus and
Cauldwell, 2004). By 2005, these disagreements led to the end of 17 years of GTZ
support to the Tanzanian Wildlife Division, with the advisor in question concluding
in frustration that ‘the government does not intend to share’ wildlife benefits with
local communities (Baldus, 2006). Other wildlife sector donors active during the
1990s, such as the Norwegians and the British (DfID), had already phased out
support to community wildlife management projects, leaving USAID as the only
significant long-term supporter of the Wildlife Division.

Divergence or convergence? Commercial values,

governance choices, and local rights
The trajectories of institutional reforms in the wildlife and forestry sectors in
Tanzania demonstrate how different sectoral contexts, particularly political
economic patterns of resource exploitation, can contribute to divergent patterns of
reform even within the same Ministry. In both sectors, reforms emerged following
Tanzania’s economic crisis in the early 1980s and the loss of resources and capacity
within the central bureaucracy. Policy-makers were forced to adapt to the changes
brought on by this period of fiscal crisis and sweeping policy change, including
the collapse of the socialist state and its ideological underpinnings. Bureaucratic
officials needed to attract resources from foreign donors, who consequently came
to play a much more prominent role in policy formulation. The process of formu-
lating new policies in the wildlife and forestry sectors during the 1990s was domi-
nated by a handful of donor and NGO technical advisors and their government
counterparts within the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism. Both poli-
cies reflect the neo-liberal global development discourse of the time, promoting
a reduced role of the state in productive economic activities and an emphasis on
decentralization and privatization.
From the late 1990s, however, the institutional paths of forestry and wildlife
reforms diverged considerably, as illustrated by the differences between WMAs
and VLFRs summarized in Table 4.4.
 Peasants’ Forests and the King’s Game? 97

Table 4.4 A comparison of key aspects of the governance frameworks for community-
based management of wildlife (WMAs) and forests (VLFRs) in Tanzania
Wildlife Forestry
Management Authority Community-based Village Natural Resource
organization (CBO) Committee of the Village
Council
Benefit Sharing Revenue divided between Villages may retain 100% of
CBO and government; revenue earned.
proportions never formally
defined to date.
Utilization Rights User rights limited to 3 year Utilization of all forest
terms products according to village
Government grants hunting management plans and
concession allocations bylaws.
Resource Tenure State Village

Source: Nelson, 2007

The two sectors’ divergence since 1998 is largely a function of institutional incen-
tives linked to bureaucrats’ discretionary authority over commercial resource values,
but is also influenced by historical factors and the agency of individual leadership.
By the 1980s, Tanzania’s forestry sector was sharply reducing its involvement in
industrial forest production. The most valuable highland forests were set aside for
strict biodiversity preservation at that time, and other commercial enterprises were
either closed down or privatized. Some commercial utilization continued through
licensed harvesting of valuable hardwoods found in miombo woodlands, but these
areas are relatively vast, licence fees were low, and, unlike in most forest-rich
African nations, harvesting was not organized into any formal centralized conces-
sion system. It is telling that even as of 2004, the FBD’s expenditures exceeded its
revenues by more than 30 per cent, and those revenues were 40 per cent less than
annual earnings in both the Wildlife and Fisheries Divisions (World Bank, 2008).
When initial CBFM projects emerged in the late 1980s, they did so primarily
in relatively low-value miombo woodlands. Although the FBD had initially sought
to gazette these areas as reserves, when foresters encountered local resistance
and donor pressure it was relatively costless to adopt an alternative locally-based
management approach, and in fact served the bureaucracy’s interests. Individuals
such as SIDA advisor Liz Alden Wily and the Director of FBD, Said Iddi, played
key roles in catalysing the initial pilot projects and translating them into fairly
radical policy and legislative changes. Hurst (2004) argues that, rather than threat-
ening bureaucratic interests, the establishment of VLFRs as a statutory mecha-
nism for communities to gazette their own forest reserves served to expand the
protected forest estate, formally vested locals with responsibility for the costs of
forest protection, and enabled central officials to leverage critical new forms of
donor support as external investment in Tanzanian CBFM grew rapidly. Forestry
officials have thus lost little and gained much through their adoption and support
of CBFM during the past 20 years.
98 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

While the FBD had greatly scaled down its commercial forestry activities by the
late 1980s, the Wildlife Division only became the overseer of a centralized tourist
hunting concession system in 1988. Since then, direct government revenues from
tourist hunting have increased about ten-fold. While the area under centralized
timber concessions in Tanzania is much less than in comparable nations (Table 4.2),
Tanzania has the largest land area used for tourist hunting of any African country,
with about half of this area falling on community lands (Lindsey et al, 2007). The
tourist hunting concession system has few checks on administrative discretionary
power, and no competitive pricing or tendering procedures, and thus presents
wide rent-seeking opportunities which have expanded in line with the growing
value of the tourist hunting industry. By keeping concession prices lower than
their market value, Tanzania’s system of wildlife management has created what
Bates (1981) terms ‘administratively derived rents’, which in sum are estimated at
about US$7 million annually in terms of the difference between the real market
value and the administrative pricing of Tanzania’s hunting concessions. Because
so little documentation exists on these informal value chains, however, the real
value of these rents may be considerably higher. The devolutionary changes called
for by the 1998 wildlife policy conflict directly with the interests of key policy-
makers, given the value of the numerous hunting concessions that overlay village
lands. Policy-makers have consequently maintained discretionary central control
over tourist hunting, limiting the devolutionary content of the WMA regulations,
and simultaneously expanded control over other forms of wildlife utilization such
as community joint venture tourism agreements on village lands.
The variant political economies of the wildlife and forestry sectors also account
for the relative ability of other actors to influence institutional processes. Foreign
donors have been strong and sustained supporters of reform in both sectors.
In forestry, donors have had a great deal of leverage as a result of the FBD’s
lack of alternative sources of political and financial capital and hence patronage
resources.3 In the wildlife sector, by contrast, the rents from tourist hunting have
provided policy-makers with financial assets that have effectively enabled officials
to deflect donor pressure for reform. Donors have consequently had very little
influence over the past decade and the recent trend has been for foreign agencies
to exit involvement in Tanzania’s wildlife sector as a result of their inability to bring
about the reforms required for wildlife to have a more positive direct impact on
rural livelihoods.
Despite the considerable differences in formal legislative and regulatory reforms
exhibited by the forestry and wildlife sectors, there are nevertheless some impor-
tant points of convergence. Even though communities have greater opportunities
to secure rights over forests on village lands, translating these rights into collective
income from forest products such as timber has generally proven elusive. Informal
timber harvesting networks in Tanzania, often operating through various forms
of private–public collusion, have in recent years proliferated and dominated the
timber trade. While rent-seeking in the wildlife sector is effectively institutional-
ized, corruption in the forestry sector is more disorganized and decentralized, and
not solely the province of the forestry bureaucracy. In the wildlife sector, the entire
reform process has been shaped and largely undermined by informal political
economic interests in controlling wildlife use. In forestry, despite the much greater
 Peasants’ Forests and the King’s Game? 99

impact of formal reform processes in restructuring legal rights, those formal meas-
ures have increasingly been subverted by prevalent patterns of informal trade,
which have in turn influenced the actions of forestry officials at local and national
levels. Ultimately, in both sectors powerful public and private actors are effectively
able to capture the vast majority of resource rents and to exclude local communi-
ties from lucrative economic value chains.

Reforming natural resource governance in Tanzania:

Future trends and strategic directions
Natural resource governance reform processes in Tanzania during the past 20
years have been dominated by central government agencies and foreign donors,
and in some cases international NGOs that effectively serve as the agents of
those donors (Sachedina, 2008). In contrast to widespread notions regarding
the overwhelming influence of foreign donors and their neo-liberal narratives in
shaping policy processes in Tanzania and other sub-Saharan African countries,
our analysis demonstrates that the leverage of these foreign actors depends on
the alternative resources that bureaucrats possess, and the distribution of costs
and benefits they face in adopting a given set of reforms. In the case of forestry,
donors have had a great deal of leverage where the costs of reforms to policy-
makers was relatively low, but in the wildlife sector donors have had limited
influence as a result of the high costs of reforms to bureaucratic interests and
the availability of alternative sources of financial resources from hunting reve-
nues. In both sectors, donors have had limited success in influencing patterns
of implementation and greater local control over economic benefits, which are
largely captured within highly informal value chains or ‘hidden’ economies (see
World Bank, 2008).
In Tanzania, the influence of centralized bureaucratic policy-makers is enhanced
by historical factors such as the concentration of power in the executive branch,
the dominance of a single political party and the weakness of the media and
civil society organizations. These are all macro-political factors which enhance
the ability of bureaucratic actors to maintain control over and extract rents from
valuable natural resources. Donors appear to be relatively influential in Tanzania
largely because political power in the country has been so heavily concentrated
in state and party organs, and alternative voices in society from rural commu-
nities, organized labour, the private sector or civil society organizations have all
been marginal at best for most of the time since independence. With the lack of
domestic challenges to political élites, foreign influence has been the main source
of non-state influence within the policy-making realm. But as we have shown, this
foreign influence is conditionally limited and has had limited success in promoting
locally accountable forms for natural resource governance. The emergence of
more democratic systems of resource governance in Tanzania requires change on
the domestic front.
It is therefore of great significance that Tanzania’s political environment is
currently undergoing a process of significant political change. Over the last
several years there has been marked increase in public demands for more
100 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

accountability and transparency on the part of government. Public scandals

have come to light involving the alleged large-scale embezzlement of public
assets, highlighting the long-simmering economic gap between the political and
economic élites and the rest of the population (e.g. Parliament of Tanzania,
2008). Importantly, the ruling party discipline that has characterized Tanzanian
politics since the return to pluralism in 1992 has become fissured, with parlia-
mentary debates as much between ruling party members as between ruling and
opposition party members. The opposition, however, while still small numeri-
cally, shows a higher degree of unity, coordination and sophistication than it
has during its fractious past. This public discourse is also being catalysed by an
enhanced role of the media and civil society organizations. Tanzania appears
to be reaching a threshold in its contemporary political evolution whereby the
monopoly on power by a small group of ruling party élites is giving way to
more pluralist forces. In contrast to the reformist period of the late 1980s and
early 1990s, change today is not driven by sudden formal institutional changes,
but rather by changes in the behaviour and power of different actors within the
existing institutional environment.
The increasingly open public policy debates in contemporary Tanzania often
focus on natural resource management. Mining has become a particularly promi-
nent subject of debate, with the focus on the terms and procedures for granting
state mining concessions to commercial firms. Forestry and wildlife manage-
ment issues are raised in newspaper headlines and in parliamentary debate with
increasing frequency as well. Publication of a major report on illegal logging in
southern Tanzania (Milledge et al, 2007) has brought new public prominence to
forestry issues, and the institutionalized corruption in the tourist hunting industry
has been described in the media with increasing openness (e.g. ThisDay, 2007).
There is emerging evidence of this changing political environment affecting
important policy decisions. After several years of public debate, in late 2007 the
President eventually removed the long-serving Director of Wildlife from office.
This individual had been the subject of long-running and increasingly acrimo-
nious debate in parliament and in the media. Another notable recent change was
a decision in the 2007/08 budget, made by the Ministry of Natural Resources and
Tourism, to substantially raise the fees paid to the government by private outfit-
ters for hunting concession leases. This decision did not devolve any authority
to local communities – by contrast, it sought to raise central government income
from hunting – but by raising the fees payable for long-underpriced concessions, it
does have the impact of potentially reducing the value of rent-seeking opportuni-
ties within the concession allocation process. This, in turn, may substantially alter
the value of maintaining centralized control over wildlife and make future reform
efforts more acceptable.
A significant factor in the changing tenor of policy discourse in Tanzania is
the growing influence of the media and civic organizations. With growing public
space for debate and public demands for accountability, the importance of these
civic organizations in producing accurate and timely information, and working
to build the knowledge and capacity of local communities, becomes critical to
shaping public debate and taking advantages of new opportunities to influence
policy. For example, the Tanzania Natural Resource Forum, a coalition of various
 Peasants’ Forests and the King’s Game? 101

organizations, local communities and private companies, which was formalized

only in 2006 and aims to improve the governance of natural resources in the
country, has recently initiated a collaborative campaign to improve forest govern-
ance based on the recommendations made by Milledge et al (2007) in their widely
cited report. This aims at changing the relative bargaining power of local commu-
nities in coastal forest areas by increasing their awareness of their rights and legal
opportunities to capture the benefits of forests and to exclude outside exploitation
(TFWG, 2007). Such public campaigns targeting forest governance issues have
become a conventional part of civil society activities in other parts of Africa, but
are unprecedented in contemporary Tanzania.
The expansion of public debate around natural resource management issues
and the increasing capacity of media and civil society organizations are essential
in terms of increasing the political space for wider participation in policy formu-
lation in Tanzania. By reducing the ability of central actors to monopolize power
in order to pursue accumulative interests, these broad political changes provide
new opportunities for local communities and civic activists to challenge existing
practices and promote alternative institutional arrangements. The growth of this
political space is fundamental to enabling institutional changes in natural resource
management, and will need to be a central strategic element in how reformist
efforts are supported in the future.

Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Liz Alden Wily, Tor Benjaminsen and Geir Sundet for reading
earlier drafts of this chapter and providing numerous helpful comments and
insights. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the eighth biennial global
conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, held in
Cheltenham, UK, with support to attend the meeting to F. Nelson provided by the
International Forestry Resources and Institutions programme.

Notes
1 Key among these was Liz Alden Wily, an expatriate expert on land tenure and advisor
to these local SIDA forestry projects. Wily played a key role in promoting CBFM
during the 1990s, including in the drafting of the 1998 National Forestry Policy and
2001 CBFM guidelines.
2 National Parks in Tanzania are managed by a semi-autonomous parastatal agency,
Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA), and the sole use of wildlife is through non-
consumptive (eco-) tourism. These areas have driven Tanzania’s tourism boom.
3 However, donor influence in the forestry sector has been far from absolute. The FBD
has successfully resisted donor initiatives for improving revenue collection systems
and transformation of the Division into an autonomous parastatal authority (Tanzania
Forest Service).
102 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

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 5

The Evolution of Namibia’s

Communal Conservancies

Brian Jones

Introduction
Namibia’s communal ‘conservancy’ programme is widely considered the leading
example in southern Africa of community-based natural resource management
(CBNRM) (Roe et al, 2009). Legislation enacted in 1996 enables rural commu-
nities to apply to government to gain rights over the use of wildlife and tourism
on communal land. In order to gain these rights the community must form a
‘conservancy’ – a local common property resource management institution which
has a defined membership, defined area of land and a governing constitution.
Since the registration by government of the first three conservancies in 1998, the
conservancy programme has grown considerably. In 2007, 50 registered conserv-
ancies together earned a total of N$20,582,789 (~US$2.9 million) in direct cash
income from various sources including different types of hunting and photographic
tourism (NACSO, 2008). The value of other forms of non-cash benefits to the
conservancies such as meat from hunting and culling of game was approximately
US$1 million. The conservancies included a total of about 220,600 residents.
Since 2007, five more conservancies have been registered, bringing the total to 55
and now covering close to 15 per cent of Namibia’s total land area, which is about
equal to that covered by state protected areas. This chapter describes the political
processes that led to the development of Namibia’s communal conservancy policy
and legislation and examines why the Namibian government has gone further
than others in the region in devolving rights over wildlife to local communities.

The Namibian political context

Namibia, a former German colony, was placed under South African administration
as a League of Nations Mandate Territory after the First World War. South Africa
increasingly ruled Namibia as in effect a fifth province, ignoring United Nations
 The Evolution of Namibia’s Communal Conservancies 107

resolutions calling for South Africa to lead Namibia to independence according to

the terms of its mandate. During the 1960s South Africa introduced an apartheid-
style system of ethnic ‘homelands’ that formalized the division of the country into
white-owned freehold land (43 per cent of the land), black communal land (about
41 per cent), protected areas for conservation and other state land. It was not until
1990, due to increased international pressure and the economic drain of a libera-
tion war, that South Africa granted Namibian independence.
Since independence, the wider Namibian governance context has been broadly
democratic, with regular multi-party elections. The ruling party is the South West
Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) which led the liberation war and was elected
in the country’s first elections with an overwhelming majority, which it still retains 20
years after independence. However, Namibia’s emerging democracy appears to be
fragile. SWAPO has reacted nervously to the emergence of new parties from within
its own ranks and meetings of these parties have been violently disrupted. A new
‘Spy Bill’ under consideration in the National Assembly would reportedly provide
government with wide-ranging powers to spy on private email and internet traffic.
The overall approach to policy development is characterized by openness
and transparency, and recent policy changes have been accompanied by exten-
sive stakeholder consultation as part of an overall commitment by government
to transparency and democracy. However, within the ruling party and within the
higher echelons of the civil service there are competing ideological tendencies
representing, on the one hand, liberal democracy and decentralization, and on the
other, command and control through centralization and the dominance of party
ideology throughout all branches of government. Policy outcomes, and the extent
to which public participation in the policy process is achieved, often depend upon
the prevailing ideological tendencies within a particular ministry at a particular
time and the influence of individual ministers or senior civil servants.

Post-independence policy change

in the wildlife sector
In 1996 the Namibian National Assembly passed legislation that gave rights
over wildlife and tourism to local communities on communal land. The Nature
Conservation Amendment Act provides for communities to acquire these rights
through the formation of a common property resource management institution
called a conservancy. According to the Act, any group of persons residing on
communal land may apply to the Minister of Environment and Tourism to have
the area they inhabit declared a conservancy. The Minister will declare a conserv-
ancy in the government gazette if (see Long and Jones, 2004):

• The community applying has elected a representative committee;

• The community has agreed on a legal constitution which provides for the
sustainable management and utilization of game in the conservancy;
• The conservancy committee has the ability to manage funds;
• The conservancy committee has a method for the equitable distribution of
income from the sustainable use of wildlife and from tourism;
108 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

• The community has a defined membership;

• The conservancy has defined boundaries agreed by neighbouring
communities;
• The area concerned is not subject to any lease or is not a proclaimed game
reserve or nature reserve.

Once a conservancy has been declared in the government gazette, in terms of the
legislation it automatically acquires rights to use wildlife and to conduct commer-
cial tourism activities on its land. These rights are the same as those conferred by
pre-independence legislation passed first in 1967/68 that applies solely to white
freehold farmers. In the case of freehold farmers, the use rights are conditional on
adequate fencing of a farm so that game animals are contained within the farm. In
the case of communal farmers, the condition is the formation of the conservancy
and fencing is not required.
Through the 1996 legal reforms, conservancies that are gazetted gain ‘owner-
ship’ over what the legislation calls ‘huntable game’ species (oryx, springbok, greater
kudu, warthog, buffalo and bushpig). Ownership means that the conservancy can
use these species for its own purposes (e.g. subsistence hunting and consumption)
without permits, quotas or hunting seasons being imposed by government authori-
ties. In addition, the conservancy can carry out trophy hunting based on govern-
ment approved quotas, can apply for permits for the use of protected and specially
protected species, and buy and sell game animals. The legislation enables communal
conservancies to carry out commercial tourism activities within the conservancy
and, if the conservancy wishes, to enter into contracts with private companies for
the development of commercial tourism activities. The legislation enables conserv-
ancies to earn income directly from their own use of wildlife and their own tourism
activities, to retain all of this income and to decide how to spend the income.
An important feature of Namibia’s institutional framework for the communal
conservancies is that local rights over wildlife and tourism are entrenched in legis-
lation and are not administrative privileges that can be arbitrarily removed. Once a
conservancy is declared in the government gazette it acquires rights clearly defined
in legislation which can be defended in the law courts. This is one of the main
differences between the Namibian approach and the approach of other southern
African countries where in some cases there is a written policy but no legisla-
tion that provides clear rights (e.g. Botswana); where legislation provides vague
and undefined management rights (e.g. Zambia); or where legislation provides for
rights at decentralized district government level but not directly to local communi-
ties (e.g. Zimbabwe).

The enabling conditions for institutional change

A number of factors created a set of enabling political conditions that favoured the
changes in wildlife governance on communal lands described above. These include
the existence of a coalition or network of like-minded individuals in NGOs and
government; the policy space opened up by Namibian independence; and the low
commercial value attached to wildlife resources on communal lands at the time.
 The Evolution of Namibia’s Communal Conservancies 109

A network of like-minded influential actors

At independence there existed in Namibia a general consensus around sustain-
able use as a legitimate wildlife management strategy. The pre-independence
government and conservation authorities had in the late 1960s and early 1970s
provided consumptive use rights over wildlife to white freehold farmers. However,
the pre-independence apartheid government did not countenance giving the same
rights to black communal farmers. A crucial change in approach that came after
independence was to extend the ambit of sustainable use of wildlife to include
black communal farmers. Newsham (2007) draws attention to the importance
of a network of like-minded actors in Namibian conservation at the time of inde-
pendence that was able to drive policy reform. He links the development of the
discourse around sustainable use in Namibia to the emergence of international
debates about sustainable development and the role of local communities in
conservation (Newsham, 2007, p145):

The increasing credibility invested, at the global level, in the concept of sustain-
ability led to changes in thinking on conservation and development in Namibia
from the 1970s onwards. The notions of using natural resources carefully as a way
of conserving, of seeing all manner of people as capable of conserving biodiversity,
of tackling the question of sufficient incentive for conservation outside the protected
areas are all found … in global debates about sustainability.They underscore policy
and legislation for the conservancy programme, from the mid-1970s onwards on
private land and the mid-1990s in Namibia’s communal areas. Communal land
inhabitants, from being viewed as incapable and excluded from conservation efforts
therein, are now seen as actors of vital importance…

The Namibian ‘actor network’ drew inspiration from the changes in thinking inter-
nationally that challenged what has been called the narrative of ‘fortress conserva-
tion’ – meaning conservation based on game reserves and national parks protected
by paramilitary guards and emphasizing the exclusion of people from these areas
and a separation of people and nature (Adams and Hulme, 2001). The develop-
ment of ‘community conservation’ as a counter-narrative linked conservation with
the notion of sustainable development and provided conservationists concerned
with human and social aspects of conservation with a framework within which to
explore these links.
In addition, the Namibian actor network was influenced by emerging thinking
in common property resource management that suggested there was empirical
evidence for successful collective sustainable management of natural resources
based on certain design principles (e.g. Berkes, 1989; Ostrom, 1990). The influ-
ence of this emergent global scholarship is seen in the institutional form for
conservancies adopted in the 1996 legislative reforms.
The Namibian actor network was also part of a wider network of conservation-
ists within southern Africa experimenting with community-based approaches
in Zambia (the Administrative Management Design for Game Management
Areas: ADMADE), Zimbabwe (the Communal Areas Management Programme
for Indigenous Resources or CAMPFIRE) and Botswana (the Natural
110 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

Resources Management Programme or NRMP). The most influential of these

programmes was CAMPFIRE which was underpinned by a considerable
body of research and analysis on common property resources management
theory and practice based within the Centre for Applied Social Sciences of
the University of Zimbabwe and led by Professor Marshall Murphree. Indeed,
Murphree applied common property resource management theory specifically
to wildlife management on communal lands in southern Africa and developed
a set of principles for collective wildlife management (Murphree, 1993) which
also significantly influenced the development of the Namibian conservancy
policy and legislation.
This actor network that promoted these changes in Namibia consisted of
government officials in the then Ministry of Wildlife, Conservation and Tourism
(MWCT) and the Directors of the Namibian NGO, Integrated Rural Development
and Nature Conservation (IRDNC). In some respects this network can be
thought of as including the first SWAPO Minister of Wildlife, Conservation and
Tourism, Niko Bessinger, and the Ministry’s first post-independence Permanent
Secretary, Hanno Rumpf. Officials and others approached Bessinger and Rumpf
to explain their vision for a new inclusive form of conservation in Namibia based
on sustainable development principles and including black communal farmers.
This vision drew partly on the positive results of work carried out by IRDNC
in the northwest of the country. IRDNC had helped local communities establish
a network of community ‘game guards’ and established a pilot project to bring
tourism revenue to a local community as an incentive for conservation of local
wildlife. Further, the vision drew on the early experiences of CAMPFIRE and the
NRMP in Botswana.
The ideas suggested to them provided Bessinger and Rumpf with a concrete
platform for reform within the fledgling Ministry. It was useful to be able to
demonstrate to the new Permanent Secretary and Minister the empirical
evidence based on devolved wildlife user rights on freehold land, which had
led to a widespread recovery of game species on those private lands, as well as
from the early work of IRDNC with Namibian communities, that incentive-
based approaches to conservation could work. In addition it was important to be
able to demonstrate that other independent, neighbouring states had developed
similar approaches.
The first opportunity for this actor network to put its ideas into practice as
part of a formal government programme came with the withdrawal of the South
African Defence Force (SADF) from the Caprivi Game Reserve in northeastern
Namibia prior to independence in 1990. Conservation officials working with
NGOs carried out a ‘socio-ecological survey’ which investigated the status of
plant and animal biodiversity in the park as well as the development aspirations
and attitudes to conservation of the 3,000–4,000 inhabitants of the area who were
mostly San people, many of whom had worked for the SADF as soldiers or civil-
ians. The survey led to the identification of problems and issues shared by the
people and the conservation authority, identification of joint solutions and a pilot
project to integrate community aspirations with conservation objectives, elabo-
rated in a strategic community-based environment and development plan (Brown
and Jones, 1994).
 The Evolution of Namibia’s Communal Conservancies 111

The participatory processes, akin to participatory rural appraisal, used during

the socio-ecological survey in the Caprivi Game Reserve were used in several
other surveys in Namibian communal areas over the next four years. The surveys
confirmed two things. First, Namibian communities in northern Namibia did not
want to see wildlife disappear, although they wanted something done about preda-
tors that killed livestock and elephants that ate crops or destroyed water installa-
tions. Second, the black communal farmers wanted the same rights over wildlife as
had been given to white freehold farmers. The communal farmers were aware that
the white farmers were able to use wildlife and earn income from it and wanted
to benefit in the same way. Essentially this meant that in Namibian communal
areas there was a political constituency that was interested in wildlife as a form of
land use that could contribute to local development. The result was that officials,
backed by Minister Bessinger and Permanent Secretary Rumpf, began working on
a new conservation policy for communal areas that would ultimately lead to the
1996 legislation.
The process of policy formulation began in 1992, and by 1993 the Namibian
CBNRM initiatives were being supported by donor funding from the United
States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Living in a
Finite Environment (LIFE) Programme. LIFE was implemented by World Wildlife
Fund (WWF)-US, which provided grants and technical assistance to Namibian
NGOs working with local communities.
LIFE was expected by USAID to engage in policy reform to create an enabling
environment for CBNRM in Namibia. However, the WWF Chief of Party realized
that such reform was being led by government officials and that a more strategic
approach would be to support the officials in the reform process. LIFE therefore
supported the CBNRM actor network in developing a specific set of activities to
help create a positive political climate for the policy to be accepted (Jones, 2000).
An extensive media campaign highlighted the problems faced by local communi-
ties living with wildlife and the existing attempts to promote CBNRM. Policy briefs
were developed for politicians. A large amount of economic data was collected and
the benefits of community-based approaches to natural resources management to
the national economy were demonstrated. Opportunities were taken by officials to
feed this information into speeches made by politicians including the President.
A video was made and presented at a cocktail party for directors and Permanent
Secretaries of key government departments. Opportunistic use was made of a theatre
production designed by the Southern African Sustainable Use Specialist Group
(SASUSG) for performances at international venues portraying the conservation
issues faced by local communities and the costs they bear from living with wildlife. A
gala performance was provided for Cabinet Ministers, Permanent Secretaries and
donor representatives, including a speech by the President promoting CBNRM.
Presentations were given to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Land and
Natural Resources and the Chair of this committee attended a regional CBNRM
conference, gaining exposure to a wide range of issues. The same conference was
attended by a prominent Regional Councillor whose approach to CBNRM and
conservancies changed as a result of the conference.
This early information and publicity campaign in support of policy reform
helped lay the foundation for the development of a Namibian CBNRM narrative
112 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

which has helped CBNRM gain acceptance beyond the original actor network
that first promoted it. This narrative has been supported by ongoing moni-
toring and presentation of data that provides empirical evidence of success (e.g.
NACSO, 2008), resulting in CBNRM being included as a government strategy
in National Development Plans and Namibia’s Vision 2030 development strategy.
The number of conservancies formed is formally used as an indicator for National
Millennium Goal 7 (Environmental Sustainability). In addition, CBNRM has
been included in the curriculum for the Nature Conservation Diploma at the
country’s Polytechnic. For the young conservation officials studying the diploma,
CBNRM is therefore presented as the way conservation in rural areas is carried
out. Indeed CBNRM has been accepted as a major component of the current
Ministry of Environment and Tourism Strategic Plan. The current struggles are
no longer about whether CBNRM should be implemented, but how (see sub-
section below on policy implementation).

Independence and policy space

Importantly, independence in 1990 provided the policy space for the Namibian
actor network to promote community conservation. There was a policy environ-
ment favourable to reform as part of Namibia’s transformation from apartheid
under what was effectively South African colonial rule. This new environment
allowed space for new and innovative ideas to be introduced in natural resource
management that resonated with the politics of transformation (Jones, 2000). The
new SWAPO government moved quickly after being elected to repeal race-based
legislation and remove institutional discrimination based on race. A National Land
Conference provided the foundation for developing policies aimed at redistrib-
uting land from whites to blacks. The country’s new Constitution provided for
basic human rights and outlawed racial discrimination.
Members of the actor network described previously had been instrumental in
working with SWAPO to include a clause in the Constitution that committed the
government to the maintenance of essential ecological processes and biodiversity
as well as the sustainable use of natural resources for the benefit of citizens. In
these circumstances, it was possible to introduce policies and legislation promoting
greater community involvement in decision-making and greater community
control over local resources as these could be seen as redressing inequalities of the
past. This window of opportunity existed for perhaps five or six years, after which
the government moved into a phase of consolidation in which the focus was on
implementing the transformative new policies and legislation.
Indeed the policy document that preceded the 1996 conservancy legislation
and which served to formally articulate the conservancy concept was specifically
framed as reforming apartheid conservation policies. This policy document on
‘Wildlife Management, Utilisation and Tourism in Communal Areas’ states as one
of its objectives:

To redress past discriminatory policies and practices which gave substantial rights
over wildlife to commercial1 farmers, but which ignored communal farmers.
(MET, 1995, p2)
 The Evolution of Namibia’s Communal Conservancies 113

The document goes on to state that although commercial farmers had been
given rights over wildlife leading to an increase in wildlife and the development
of a multi-million Namibian-dollar wildlife industry, such a system had not been
applied to communal lands. State control of wildlife resources on communal land
had alienated people from wildlife, resulting in poaching, a severe decline in wild-
life numbers in some areas and political pressure for land proclaimed as game
reserves to be returned to the people for grazing. The document noted that local
benefits from wildlife were marginal with minimal spin-offs from tourism activi-
ties on communal land, none of which were run or controlled by local residents. A
central conclusion of the policy document was that:

The discrimination of the past needs to be redressed, and people living on communal
land need to be afforded the same rights as were conferred on commercial farmers.
(MET, 1995, p5)

These sentiments clearly fitted the agenda of the post-independence Namibian

government. The reformist conservation agenda being proposed by certain offi-
cials was adopted by the MWCT Minister Bessinger and Permanent Secretary
Rumpf, who then championed it within government. The political legitimacy of
the approach was enhanced by evidence from the socio-ecological surveys that
communal area residents were themselves demanding the same rights over wildlife
as enjoyed by white freehold farmers.
The commitment of the Minister and Permanent Secretary in this process
was crucial because there was no consensus in the Ministry among officials that
providing rights over wildlife to black communal farmers was an appropriate
policy. The push for reform was being driven by a small policy and planning direc-
torate within the Ministry established by Bessinger. However, many officials in the
parks and wildlife directorate did not think that black rural farmers could manage
wildlife successfully and believed that law enforcement should be the primary
conservation mechanism in rural areas (Jones and Murphree, 2001). Officials
were also reluctant to give up control over wildlife. This was not because they
would lose control over the allocation of access to a valuable resource as has been
suggested for other community conservation programmes in the region (e.g. in
Zambia as related by Gibson, 1999). It was rather because of the natural bureau-
cratic impulse to hold on to power and authority (Murphree, 1991; Jones, 2000)
and a belief that without their active intervention wildlife could not be protected
and conserved.
The development of a new conservation policy formed part of a broader
reform process within the Ministry led by Minister Bessinger. A series of internal
Ministry meetings chaired by the Minister led to restructuring of the Ministry and
the production of a series of new policies on biodiversity conservation and land
use planning, all of which emphasized inclusion of local communities in planning
and decision-making and the provision of economic incentives for sustainable use
of land and natural resources. In order to develop the new conservancy policy,
Bessinger chaired a large national-level meeting of community leaders and tradi-
tional authorities to confirm some of the results of the socio-ecological surveys
and to hear directly how people viewed wildlife and conservation. Prior to Cabinet
114 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

approval of the conservancy policy document in 1995, Permanent Secretary

Rumpf and Deputy Minister, Ben Ulenga, accompanied by officials, embarked on
an extensive tour of northwestern and northern Namibia to promote the conserv-
ancy approach among local leaders in communal areas, against the backdrop of a
government election campaign.
This level of political support at the top level of the Ministry made it difficult
for dissenting government officials to openly oppose the new approach. It would
be too easy, however, to cast the events at the time as a simple contest between
reformists backed by the new Minister and conservatives wedded to the old
regime. Analysis that posts individuals into ‘interest groups’ and then interprets
all their actions as representing the interests of that group is simplistically one-
dimensional. Individuals often belong to different interest groups at the same time
and strategically switch allegiance between them. Within the Ministry, there was
a group that was ideologically led in its opposition to giving rights over wildlife
to black people on racial grounds. At the same time, however, there were officials
who had been working in the field in communal areas and who favoured reform.
There were others who saw and understood the logic behind the new approach
but were unsure how to implement it. And as indicated above, there was an under-
lying reluctance on the part of some officials to give up power and what they
saw as their mandate to protect wildlife. Whatever their motivations, a number
of senior officials in the parks and wildlife directorate worked with the planning
and policy directorate to develop new legislation once Cabinet had approved the
conservancy policy in 1995.

The fiscal dimension: Low centrally captured revenues

from wildlife use
Nelson and Agrawal (2008) argue that key factors enabling the conservancy reforms
in Namibia included relatively low levels of institutional corruption coupled with
relatively low centrally captured revenues from wildlife use on communal lands.
As a result there was little financial incentive for officials to hold on to control of
wildlife resources in order to fund Ministry budgets or in order to retain the power
of patronage with a view to possible rent-seeking.
At the time of independence in 1990, most income from consumptive use
of wildlife went to freehold farmers and there were a limited number of trophy
hunting concessions on communal land that generated relatively low income for
the state. For example in Kunene Region trophy fees to government amounted
to the equivalent of roughly US$45,260, in Caprivi they were about US$203,050
and in the former Bushmanland about US$51,770, while the MWCT budget
for 1993 was N$18 million (~US$5,580,000) (Yaron et al, 1993). In addition,
all trophy fees went directly to the central revenue fund and there was no link
between the fees generated and the Ministry budget. Strict government tender
procedures were adhered to in the auction of trophy hunting concessions. There
was therefore little income going to the state from consumptive use of wildlife in
general and in particular from the concessions on communal land over which the
state had allocative authority. Further, there was little opportunity for corrup-
tion in the allocation of hunting concessions. This situation is in stark contrast to
 The Evolution of Namibia’s Communal Conservancies 115

the post-independence wildlife sector in Zambia described by Gibson (1999).

He provides evidence that the more valuable wildlife resources were increasingly
used by government officials and ruling party members to reward their friends
and supporters, and as a result wildlife policy was shaped partly by the need of
officials and politicians to retain distributive powers of patronage (see also Nelson
and Agrawal, 2008).

The role of donor support in the Namibian CBNRM

programme
Large-scale donor projects such as the USAID-supported LIFE Programme
in Namibia have in other settings elicited considerable criticism. In some cases,
such as the Botswana NRMP, the project activities have been largely externally
imposed and have not been taken up by a strong national actor network (see
Rihoy and Maguranyanga, this volume). Policy is often developed by donor-
funded consultants and not adopted by the host government, while projects are
often driven by donor interests, agendas and time frames. The introduction of
USAID support to the Namibian CBNRM programme in 1993 had the potential
to lead to similar outcomes. However, the national CBNRM actor network was
successful in managing the USAID support and avoiding many of the negative
results seen elsewhere.
Local management of the LIFE Programme was facilitated by the nature
of the relationship between USAID and WWF-US, which was governed by a
Cooperative Agreement (CA). In contrast to a contract, the CA provided WWF
with much more autonomy in its decision-making and implementation approach,
partly because under the CA it was also providing a substantial proportion
of the funding for the programme. This higher level of discretion could have
resulted in WWF pressing its own organizational agenda in the implementation
of CBNRM in Namibia. However, the LIFE Chief of Party saw the need to work
in partnership with the Namibian NGOs in the CBNRM sector. As a result
WWF effectively became co-opted as part of the broader Namibian CBNRM
actor network.
Management of LIFE was guided by a steering committee that was composed
of a majority of Namibian organizations, including the Ministry of Environment
and Tourism (MET) as chair, as well as USAID and WWF. Decision-making was
by consensus, or by voting if consensus could not be reached. USAID and the
MET retained a veto right on any issue that contravened their own government’s
policies or laws. In all other respects USAID as a donor and MET had the same
level of power on the committee as any other member.
The structure and membership of the steering committee and its decision-
making processes promoted accountability of WWF and USAID to a Namibian-
driven implementation agenda (LIFE, 2000). This Namibian agenda had a
longer time horizon than that of the project phases, and the steering committee
was used by Namibians to ensure that the project did not pursue short-term
‘successes’ that would not be sustainable. The importance of this longer-term
vision was demonstrated during Phase 1 of LIFE when the emerging Nyae
Nyae conservancy was experiencing problems. The USAID Mission Director
116 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

advocated strongly for the redirection of funds from Nyae Nyae to another
community to speed up their conservancy formation process. A MET official,
a WWF technical assistant and Namibian NGO personnel carried out a survey
in the Nyae Nyae area among local residents. The survey team recommended to
the LIFE steering committee that support should continue, despite the misgiv-
ings of the Mission Director (Jones, 1996). The committee accepted this recom-
mendation and Nyae Nyae became the first conservancy to be registered by the
Namibian government.
At this stage of development of the Namibian CBNRM programme, the MET
played an important coordinating role through an official in the Directorate of
Environmental Affairs specifically tasked with programme coordination. The
MET CBNRM coordinator attended weekly meetings of LIFE Project imple-
menting partners, was vice chair of the steering committee and had regular liaison
with LIFE personnel, including joint field activities.
In addition, LIFE actively supported the expansion of the Namibian CBNRM
actor network. When the USAID support to CBNRM in Namibia began, the
actor network called itself a ‘collaborative group’ modelled on the CAMPFIRE
collaborative group in Zimbabwe comprising government officials, NGOs and
academics that guided the implementation of CAMPFIRE (Murphree, 2005).
With the establishment of the LIFE steering committee, the Namibian collabo-
rative group tended to meet less often, because the same people were part of
the steering committee. However, with the growth and geographical spread of
CBNRM, there was a need to re-establish a national coordination forum with
a separate identity to LIFE. WWF was also keen to ensure that appropriate
coordination at national level would take place once the project came to an
end. These considerations led to the formation of the CBNRM Association
of Namibia (CAN) which was later re-named the Namibian Association of
CBNRM Support Organisations (NACSO). LIFE funded the NACSO secre-
tariat, supported the establishment of NACSO thematic working groups and
handed over its grant-making activities to a Namibian NGO, the Namibia
Nature Foundation, which was a NACSO member. NACSO now includes 13
Namibian NGOs and provides the major forum for coordination of Namibian
CBNRM activities.
The USAID-funded LIFE Programme therefore avoided many of the pitfalls
of similar large-scale donor projects elsewhere in the region. It was designed
to support existing Namibian activities. The implementing agency, WWF, was
accountable to a steering committee composed of a majority of Namibian
organizations and which had decision-making authority.The steering committee
provided the mechanism for Namibians to actively manage the LIFE Project
and ensure that it was implemented in the interests of CBNRM in Namibia.
Further, WWF had a small implementation role and focused mainly on support
to existing Namibian organizations that implemented policy and legislation
developed by the Namibian government. The problem of local ‘ownership’ of
a donor project was never at issue. The Namibian CBNRM actor network,
of which WWF became a part, succeeded in managing the USAID donor
influence.
 The Evolution of Namibia’s Communal Conservancies 117

Implementing conservancy policy:

Contesting institutional change
Adams and Hulme (2001) suggest that government agencies and officials have
wide discretion in the interpretation of policy so that the link between policy and
action can take many different forms. In addition they note that past practice exerts
considerable influence over future changes. In Namibia there have been consid-
erable gaps between the implementation of policy and the original intent of the
policy-makers. By and large the way in which policy has been implemented reflects
an inherent distrust by officials that communities will use wildlife sustainably.
Corbett and Jones (2000) note several gaps between the conservancy policy’s
intention and implementation. While the intent was for communal area conserv-
ancies to receive the same rights over wildlife as freehold farmers, the Ministry of
Environment and Tourism (which had replaced the MWCT formed after inde-
pendence) placed additional administrative restrictions on communal conservan-
cies. For example, officials insisted that the conservancies have approved quotas
and obtain permits for their own use of huntable game. In addition the conservan-
cies are supposed to have a management plan before a quota for trophy hunting or
own use would be approved. In essence the officials administratively contested the
fuller devolution of ownership of huntable game by the conservancies envisioned
by the policy and provided for in the legislation. An internal Ministry memo of
July 2000 stated that because conservancies do not own land (or lease it from
government) they cannot have ownership of the huntable game on such land. Due
to pressure from conservancies and the actor network that had driven the develop-
ment of the reforms, the officials sought a ruling from the Office of the Attorney
General on this issue. The resulting legal opinion was very clear. The Office of the
Attorney General in its response wrote that the crux of the matter was whether
or not game on an area declared as a conservancy belonged to the state. Quoting
sections of the legislation, the opinion went on to state:

The above-mentioned provisions are not open for ambiguous interpretation and it
is clear that conservancy committees do in fact have ownership of huntable game
in that conservancy.

Despite this ruling, the MET continues to insist on approving quotas for own
use by conservancies of huntable game even while there is no legal provision on
which this is based. In general, however, this administrative insistence on quotas
has not significantly hindered the activities of conservancies but illustrates the way
in which officials try to maintain control over wildlife use.
The years since the conservancy legislation was passed in 1996 and the estab-
lishment of the first conservancies in 1998 reflect several contradictions in the
way that MET has implemented the legislation. Again, it would be easy to depict
the events since 1996 as a struggle between MET officials trying to hold on to
control and power over wildlife and communities trying to wrest more control
from MET. On the one hand MET has indeed tried to restrict the powers of
conservancies under the legislation as noted above, suggesting that officials do not
118 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

trust conservancies with the management of wildlife. On the other hand, MET has
embarked on an official programme of re-introducing wildlife to many conservan-
cies, often with wildlife being donated by the state from protected areas. MET has
a custodianship programme where state-owned black rhino are provided to free-
hold farmers deemed to be able to provide security for the rhino. This programme
has been extended to communal area conservancies, several of which have been
trusted by MET with re-introduced black rhino.
MET has over the past few years been carrying out a review and revision of
existing policy and legislation. Some headquarters officials have blocked the devel-
opment of new policy and legislation that promotes co-management of protected
areas between MET and local communities. Yet in fact MET officials in the field
are already implementing the very activities the headquarters officials are blocking.
In the Caprivi region, protected area officials cooperate with local communities
in joint antipoaching patrols, game counts and fire management in an area known
as the Mudumu North Complex, consisting of part of the Bwabwata National
Park, the Mudumu National Park and neighbouring conservancies and commu-
nity forests. Wildlife has been reintroduced by MET to the conservancies in the
Mudumu North Complex.
Government agencies are not monolithic organizations with a consistent and unified
set of interests pursued by all officials. In the same way that communities consist
of different interest groups, often competing for control over natural resources, so
government agencies can consist of individuals with different ideologies and factions
based on ideology or even ethnicity. Governance outcomes often depend upon the
ascendancy of individuals or such factions within government agencies, particularly
in the absence of clear policy directives from above. In contrast to the situation at
independence, there is currently an absence of policy direction from the Minister.
As a result, policy revision and development of new legislation take place through
competition between individuals and factions within the Ministry. This results in
stalemate, evidenced by the fact that new legislation to replace the pre-independence
conservation law has been in the development stage for the past ten years with little
sign that it will reach the National Assembly, at least as of 2009.
In recent years there have been more indications that wildlife was being
perceived by elements of the ruling élite to have significant economic value. The
MET is awarding new concessions in protected areas and individual politicians
and even the youth wing of the ruling party, the SWAPO Youth League, are
reported to be interested in gaining access to these concessions. The Namibian
conservancy approach will be severely tested if Ministry officials bow to external
pressure regarding the allocation of concessions and interfere in the choosing of
joint venture partners by conservancies.
There are also signs, however, that conservancies themselves form an impor-
tant political constituency which has some power to protect its own interests. In
2004 the Namibian Cabinet decided that a national park should be established
consisting of three tourism concessions on communal land in the northwestern
Kunene Region. Due to initial resistance by conservancy leaders and traditional
authorities, government began negotiations with the communities neighbouring
the concessions. The conservancies and traditional leaders set a number of condi-
tions for their acceptance of the proposed park. These conditions included the
 The Evolution of Namibia’s Communal Conservancies 119

stipulation that the protected area should be established not by government proc-
lamation under existing legislation but by contract between the communities and
the government in terms of new legislation being developed. The conservancies
and traditional leaders have sought their own legal advice and are determined to
retain some control over their land, in contrast to the proclamation of protected
areas in the past which deprived people of access to land and resources. This
process helps to illustrate that conservancies are institutions whose legitimacy
regarding land and resources issues has been recognized by government and
which have developed sufficient strength and resilience to stand up to new chal-
lenges that could potentially undermine their interests.

Conclusion
Namibia’s conservancy programme has become a global model for CBNRM and
devolved wildlife management based on sustainable use. The origins of Namibia’s
communal conservancies lie in a range of historic, political and socio-economic
patterns and trends. Namibia’s unusual history involving earlier devolution of
wildlife use rights, early community conservation experiments in the 1980s, and
the need to redress inequalities between freehold and communal lands, and black
and white citizens, in the post-apartheid era all played a central role in shaping the
reforms adopted in the 1990s. At the global level, ideas related to communal resource
management and the integration of conservation and development through sustain-
able use played a formative role. CBNRM initiatives elsewhere in the region, partic-
ularly Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE programme, also were an important influence on
the evolution of ideas in Namibia and the emergence of an actor network of govern-
ment officials and conservationists committed to devolving rights to manage wildlife
to residents of communal lands. These factors have all shaped a national CBNRM
narrative that places devolved institutional arrangements based on sustainable use at
the centre of rural conservation and development practices and policies.

Note
1 Euphemism at the time for white freehold farmers.

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Corbett, A. and Jones, B.T.B. (2000) ‘The legal aspects of Governance in CBNRM in
Namibia’, Paper delivered at the CASS/PLAAS Second Regional Meeting on the legal
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Namibia, The World Bank, Washington, DC
 6

Historic and Contemporary Struggles

for a Local Wildlife Governance
Regime in Kenya

Ngeta Kabiri

Introduction
The governance of natural resources should ideally be based on efficient and
sustainable production. In Africa, though, natural resource management institu-
tions are largely shaped by political processes that reflect the interests of competing
actors. Within this context, the question of how institutional change occurs cannot
be approached as if it is a technical issue. This chapter describes both longer-term
historical and more recent contests amongst different actors with divergent inter-
ests and claims in Kenya’s wildlife sector. The history of wildlife governance in
Kenya suggests that institutional change needs to be considered within the context
of the balance of power in a society. In Kenya, dynamics surrounding institutional
change in wildlife governance are also related to the interests and influence of
external actors with leverage over those who exercise public authority.
The influence of external interests in Kenya’s wildlife policy arena does not
negate the agency of local communities, but highlights elements of competition
between local, national and transnational actors and forces. Local communities
have long endeavoured to advance their interests in spite of various structural and
institutional barriers. But local groups’ influence has always been limited, partly
because their antagonists benefit from a war of attrition between them and the
locals on the biodiversity that the bureaucracy presides over. The failure by the
bureaucracy to share public authority over wildlife with local communities, in
spite of the adverse implications this failure has had for biodiversity conservation,
has to be conceptualized within the broad framework of the crisis of governance
in Africa, and is not specific to the wildlife sector. Rather, these governance issues
run like a pervasive thread through the entire gamut of Kenyan society amidst a
ruling clique prepared to pursue power for power’s sake.1 The nature of govern-
ance in Africa prior to the 1990s, and limited tendencies towards democratization
122 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

since then, was such that pursuit of narrow private interests was the principal
motive of African leaders (Ake, 1996). To a large extent, decisions on economic
policies and programmes were not driven by technocratic (efficiency) imperatives
but by political pressures (e.g. Krueger, 1990). This chapter explores the way that
different actors’ powers and influence over wildlife governance in Kenya have
changed during different periods of time from the colonial era to the present.
Although the dynamics of wildlife policy formulation have changed radically,
barriers to increased local control over wildlife have persisted and evolved in a
complex manner.
The material presented here draws on both primary and secondary data; the
former was collected during dissertation field-work carried out in the 2002–2004
period (Kabiri, 2007). Such data involved collecting published and unpublished
reports of both governmental and non-governmental organizations, attendance of
seminars and meetings held by various groups and networks, and interviews with
individuals from local to national level involved in the conservation sector.

On public authority in Africa, and Kenya

in particular
Public authority is not a contract resultant from circumstances like those to be
found in market settings; it is imposed on the losers by winners, and losers may
have their say but not their way and must largely live with the imposed authority of
the winners (Moe, 1990; 2005). Nowhere is this characterization more apparent
than in the case of governance in post-colonial Africa. A key to understanding
institutional change is the question of what drives the formulation of public policy
(and specifically natural resources policy).
Three forces are central to an understanding of the context in which public
policy is constructed in African countries. There is the tendency towards rent-
seeking informed by a rentier psychology,2 which has taken root because of the
evolution of an ‘imperial’ presidency operating within a political economy of
underdevelopment. A rentier psychology, imperial presidency and socio-economic
underdevelopment interact to create a dysfunctional public policy environment
that accounts for the failed natural resources governance regimes which are now
the subject of reform efforts. In Kenya, for example, this dysfunction is evident in
the lopsided distribution of land starting from the colonial era to the present. The
post-independence political élite accumulated lands acquired from the departing
British colonial landholders and lands that had been Crown lands (Odinga, 1967).
In subsequent years, forest reserves were excised and doled out as patronage goods
(KFWG, 2006; Agutu, 2009). With respect to wildlife, during the peak of wildlife
decimation in Kenya during the 1970s and 1980s, it was difficult for conservation
actors to arrest the situation because the prime movers of poaching had strong
links to the central state (Gibson, 1999).
The tendency of public office holders to enrich themselves using opportunities
provided by proximity to state power demonstrates how, at least to those exer-
cising this power, the state was conceptualized and used not as an arena to render
public service but as a tool to appropriate state largesse at the earliest opportunity.
 Historic and Contemporary Struggles for a Local Wildlife Governance Regime 123

Sometimes such appropriation was so crude that it assumed the dimension of

a roving bandit unconcerned about the merit of reproducing the state (on the
general question of institutions and economic performance, see for example,
North, 1981; 1990; Olson, 2000). For these actors, apart from selling public
service to the highest bidder, appropriating natural resources was considered a
matter of course. In this pursuit, they were enabled by institutional arrangements
that vested overwhelming powers in the presidency.
Through a process of revising the negotiated independence Constitution that some
say was a fairly good Constitution for the emerging nation, the presidency came to
control all three branches of government such that both the legislature and the judi-
ciary were as demobilized as the executive of which the President was supposed to
be in charge. The President, for example, appointed the head of the judiciary and
could initiate his dismissal without recourse to, for example, Parliament. A belief
was popularized to the effect that holders of public office do so at the pleasure
of the President. On the other hand, the President held constitutional powers to
dissolve the legislative assembly even before its term expired. The popular approach,
however, was to invoke his powers to consign to detention without trial individuals
considered to be a threat to state security; in this case recalcitrant members of the
legislature could be controlled (see for example Nyong’o, 1987; Widner, 1993)
While public actors are notionally accountable to society, such accountability is
a function of the way a society’s institutions distribute authority. Public officials
may conceptualize their professional loyalty in terms of the appointing authority
instead of fidelity to public service. In such instances, public officials serve either
their personal interests or those of the appointing authority. The concentration
of public authority in the hands of the presidency facilitates this orientation in
public service. Even when a group of bureaucrats embody an esprit de corps, poli-
cies adopted and/or implemented are those sponsored by agents enjoying a close
proximity to State House. In practice, the presidency becomes synonymous with
policy. In Kenya, the doctrine of separation of powers that in advanced democratic
polities constrains the executive from acting unilaterally has for the most part
been merely a nominal construct.3 However, despite the fact that the presidency
is the repository of public authority, it is not invariably the case that the presi-
dency can obtain its desires even when its power is not being overtly contested.
There is always the possibility that implementing agents can decide to interpret
policy in their own ways.4 Thus the principal–agent problem implies that even if
the presidency intends good public policies, the entire environment within which
public policy evolves does not guarantee sound public policy-making or imple-
mentation. This state of affairs, particularly in the context of natural resources,
is compounded by the challenges of the political economy of underdevelopment,
especially its balance of payment dimensions.

Fiscal constraints and policy implications

The balance of payments circumstances typical of underdeveloped countries put
immense pressure on natural resources in diverse ways. Capital deficits, inter-
acting with the rent-seeking orientation of public officials, expose public insti-
tutions, and by extension, public policy formulation and implementation, to
124 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

manipulation by vested interests. Consequently, interest groups find it easier to

influence what is finally pronounced as policy.5 This influence may take diverse
forms, such as annexation of resource flows, or emasculating departments respon-
sible for managing these resources, not necessarily for material gains but to serve
partisan ideological preferences. In cases where these departments are often cash-
strapped, their benefactors can have undue influence in the way bureaucratic agen-
cies conduct business. The objectives of dominant interest groups do not always
converge with the public good, resulting in a situation where natural resources
management ends up serving narrow interests. Under circumstances where
local communities are not well-organized, they are unable to present a credible
force that would enable them to emerge as an influential pressure group (Bates,
1989). Consequently, their interests in natural resources are marginalized. This
is the context within which struggles for institutional reforms in natural resource
governance in Kenya occur.

Historical roots of centralized wildlife policy:

The colonial era
The restructuring of local communities’ relationship with natural resources, and
especially with respect to wildlife, began with the intervention of British imperial
rule in Kenya in the late 19th century. During that time, the Imperial British East
African Company (IBEAC), imposed a licence on ivory hunters, but initially this
regulation only affected the white hunters (Kelly, 1978, p93). This imposition is
one of the earliest manifestations of centralized institutional control over wildlife
in Kenya. In 1893, the IBEAC also prohibited the killing of female elephants in
an endeavour to provide for the replenishing of the depleted herds. It is significant
to note that the impetus to these new institutional dynamics dates back to as early
as the 1870s, when fears of the extermination of elephants in the East African
Protectorate were being voiced, particularly by hunters who were interested in the
preservation of species for sport hunting (Kelly, 1978; Maforo, 1979).6
The protectorate government also had vested interests in imposing regulations
governing wildlife use for at least two other reasons. First, decimation of game,
particularly elephants, would deprive the state of a steady source of income given
that the government saw the ivory trade as one easy way of securing the revenue
needed to administer the protectorate (Meinertzhagen, 1957; Kelly, 1978). Second,
centralizing control over wildlife was tied to controlling the influx of guns into the
protectorate. This was because some ivory traders were giving their porters guns
to hunt elephants and yet some of these porters were prone to desertion, meaning
that from the administration’s perspective, weapons of violence were falling into
African hands at a time when the protectorate sought to tilt the balance of military
power against the natives (Kelly, 1978).
In 1896, Lord Salisbury instructed the protectorate chief, Hardinge, to impose a
closed season, quotas, fees and reserves for the purposes of checking the imminent
decline of big game in the protectorate (Kelly, 1978). This initial centralization of
authority over wildlife did not, however, affect the Africans. As Hardinge’s reports
(1897/8) show, Africans were excluded from the game laws because it was difficult
 Historic and Contemporary Struggles for a Local Wildlife Governance Regime 125

to enforce the law among them and also because their use of rudimentary hunting
tools meant that they were less destructive than the white hunters who used guns
(Ibid.). By 1900, though, hunting by Africans was brought under the control of
district officers (Ibid.). Thus, while initially Africans had space for manoeuvre in
their access to wildlife, even though not for commercial use, their counterparts
among the white communities were beginning to face what would develop into a
struggle over wildlife governance institutions and local rights.
Early wildlife governance regulations, exemplified in prohibitions on shooting
game without a licence, were felt more directly by Kenya’s white settler commu-
nity. The settlers complained of damage done to farms by wildlife, and in addition
to this, they had grievances against the setting up of the initial game reserves. The
latter were viewed as limiting access to fertile land needed for agriculture. Within
this context, a debate over landholder compensation for wildlife damage to agricul-
tural crops found its way into the wildlife governance discourse. The settlers called
for compensation for damage done by wildlife to settler property but the colonial
state refused. Explaining the fear that the state had with regard to compensation
claims, the acting Game Warden in 1935 argued that acknowledging any liability
by government would be dangerous because claims from Europeans, Indians and
natives would occur at the rate of thousands per week and it would be impossible
to investigate them (Kelly, 1978). It is against this background that the state’s
initial moves towards devolution of authority over wildlife to the local level began
to take shape, soon after or simultaneously with the initial imposition of central
regulations.
In an attempt to mollify settler grievances, the state ceded some authority over
wildlife to the settler community. In a 1909 ordinance, for example, the state intro-
duced a traveller’s licence that allowed the holder to shoot game on private lands
with the permission of the landowner. The settlers sold shooting rights and also
charged fees to shoot certain species (Kelly, 1978; Maforo, 1979). Thus the settlers
were able to extract concessions for some authority over wildlife on the basis of the
costs wildlife imposed on them at a time when the state lacked the fiscal capacity to
compensate them. The state was therefore being forced to balance central claims
of wildlife ownership with its production costs.
Settler representation at the legislative council level also accounts for the
success of settlers in securing limited rights to manage wildlife. This can be
inferred from the fact that other groups in colonial Kenya, such as Africans and
Indians, who also staked some claims to wildlife, did not get the same rights as did
the European settlers. It was not until the 1950s that African interests began to
be addressed by wildlife governance institutions. Thus, macro-political dynamics
in terms of proximity to political (legislative) authority determined that white
settlers got limited rights to manage wildlife earlier than other social groups, even
though all shared the same grievances related to wildlife. Similarly, changes in the
structure of wildlife governance institutions to accommodate African interests
evolved simultaneously with African representation in the legislative council as
well as the rise of African nationalism. Thus even though the state had economic
interests in wildlife which would have made it prefer to retain exclusive control,
proximity to political power by contending non-state actors led to equivocated
forms of devolution.
126 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

For example, the 1945 National Parks Ordinance provided for consultation
with Africans when their land was to be affected by establishment of protected
areas. While it would be a stretch to call this requirement for consultation devolu-
tion of authority, it was certainly a shift in the governance regime given the context
of a colonial administration in which native interests were secondary to those
of the state and settler communities. The 1900 East African Game Regulations
had earlier provided that the Commissioner (of the protectorate) could, with the
approval of the Secretary of State, declare any area a game reserve and could
also alter any boundaries. The 1945 Ordinance thus brought local-level actors
(Africans) closer to the orbit of natural resources governance institutions as the
colonial state was beginning to be more sensitive to African grievances as the tide
of nationalism took shape, thereby reducing the imperial distance between the
governors and the governed.
By 1957, tangible reforms were becoming more evident. The 1957 Wild
Animals and Park Ordinance amendment brought game fees in African District
Councils’ land units into par with government charges and created Controlled
Areas in African land units in which African District Councils had powers to
pass bylaws (Maforo, 1979). The culmination of these reforms occurred in 1961,
only two years before independence, when both Amboseli and Maasai Mara were
removed from the control of the National Parks Trustees and handed over to the
Kajiado and Narok District Councils, respectively (Lindsay, 1987). The impetus
for this radical step was the need to appease the local populations so that they
might be more amenable to the conservation of wildlife. However, this measure
was not uncontested. The colonial Governor appears to have acted behind the
back of the National Parks Trustees and the latter were horrified by the move, and
so were the conservation lobby groups who had all along opposed Maasai access
to Amboseli (Ibid.).
It thus appears that proximity to decision-making authority, interacting with the
estimation of those in power as to the weight of local grievances against the extant
natural resources governance institutions, was a critical determinant of the way
reforms were carried out. In the case of decentralizing governance of Amboseli
to the Kajiado African District Council, for example, the authorities sought to
placate the Maasai who had contended that they would continue conserving wild-
life if they could benefit from it (Ofcansky, 2002). Given that this approach was
being pursued in the twilight of colonial rule, the authorities perhaps sought to
secure Amboseli as a wildlife reserve by giving it to the local District Council
because the departing authorities feared that the incoming independent regime
might not be sympathetic to wildlife conservation (Western, 1997). Such fears
were not unfounded given that the nationalist movement had mobilized against,
among other things, the supposedly harsh colonial wildlife laws. The departing
colonial authorities actually seemed to have resigned themselves to this fate as seen
in the position of the 1959/60 Game Policy. That policy observed that the future
of wildlife in Kenya would depend on the attitude of the people of Kenya towards
it. To this extent, the policy underscored the need to have economic incentives for
game preservation on the part of local people (Colony, 1959/60, pp4–5). In retro-
spect, it is now clear that the nationalist vanguard, both in Kenya and elsewhere
in Africa, never intended to overturn the colonial wildlife governance regime (see
 Historic and Contemporary Struggles for a Local Wildlife Governance Regime 127

for example Gibson, 1999; Ofcansky, 2002). To the contrary, as successors to the
departing colonial edifice, the post-independence government proved to be more
Catholic than the Pope. This disposition was imposed, as we see below, by the
political realities of economic underdevelopment and a constitutional dispensation
that denied the public space to assert their claims over their leaders.
The colonial era can thus be summed up as a period when both state and non-
state actors competed for a (re)structuring of wildlife governance regimes. The
form that these regimes took reflected the balance of power at the macro-political
level. The dynamics of this balance of power were negotiated within the institu-
tions crafted by the colonial state, but these institutions were in turn re-shaped by
events at the local level. Two narratives about wildlife appear to have provided the
context within which these negotiations were played out. There was the presenta-
tion of wildlife as a renewable resource that needed the proprietary role of the state
if depletion and subsequent extinction were to be avoided. But within state circles,
there was also a parallel narrative that informed centralized control over wildlife by
depicting wildlife as an invaluable resource in a cash-strapped emerging colonial
state whose imperial guardian had sounded the warning that it had to fend for
itself. In contrast, non-state actors pursued a ‘liability’ narrative that depicted wild-
life as a candidate for extinction unless it was made to mitigate its costs at the local
level. Underwriting this liability narrative is the institution of private property that
wildlife was conceived as threatening. The discriminatory recognition of property
rights by the colonial state largely accounts for the variance in the incorporation of
the non-state actors in the wildlife governance regime. Thus, the European settlers
precede Africans in this area, not because of race, but because of the property rela-
tions between the state, settlers and Africans.

The post-colonial state and wildlife governance

The post-colonial state was equally informed by the considerations that drove
its colonial predecessor’s approach to natural resource governance. The nascent
Kenyan state sought to appropriate wildlife as an economic resource and, to
this extent, centralizing, not decentralizing, control over wildlife institutions was
deemed appropriate to achieve this objective. Government’s sessional papers and
parliamentary legislation were deployed to give legal force to this objective (RoK,
1965; RoK, 1975). The 1965 Sessional Paper, for example, was clear that devo-
lution, especially in its privatization dimension, was out of the question as far as
wildlife resources were concerned. Indeed, it spelt out clearly that the participa-
tion of the people, hence local actors, was to follow a government script (RoK,
1965, pp11, 57). During this period of change, wildlife governance institutions
continued to be shaped by macro-political exigencies, namely the desire to use
wildlife to swell up national coffers, rather than the interests of local-level actors
living with wildlife.
There were, however, some notable variations to this general pattern with
respect to certain aspects of wildlife utilization. The Wildlife Conservation Act of
1976 (RoK, 1977) allowed landowners some leeway in the management of the
sport hunting industry. Landowners controlled commercial hunting on private
128 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

land and were entitled to payments for game hunted on their land. Nevertheless,
this arrangement did not translate into devolution of authority in the sense that
landowners cannot be understood to have had power over wildlife on their lands.
The question of whether they reserved the power to consent on whether a hunter
could hunt or not is quite tenuous (RoK, 1977, s.29). Nevertheless, even the
indeterminate authority they may have had was extinguished in 1977 when the
state banned sport hunting as a form of wildlife utilization. This had the effect of
removing even the indefinite veneer of local-level control over wildlife that may
have existed, even if nominally.

The 1977 ban on consumptive utilization

In 1977, the government banned sport hunting following an outcry over perceived
declines in wildlife numbers which were attributed to uncontrolled hunting. It
was also thought that sport hunting facilitated illegal poaching. Animal rights
groups (whose influence in post-colonial Kenya was specifically referred to in the
sessional paper on wildlife) and the tourism industry are said to have been at the
centre of calling for this ban. Because the latter rely on wildlife abundance for their
trade, it is credible to assume that there may have been a marked decline in wildlife
numbers or that there was something about sport hunting that was perceived to
damage their industry. The legacy of this ban has weighed down heavily on subse-
quent attempts to devolve authority over wildlife to local communities because it
is often presented as a constraint the wildlife regulatory authority has in holding
devolved levels accountable in their management of wildlife. Thus, a narrative of
regulatory failure shapes the debate on sport hunting and, by extension, devolu-
tion of wildlife to local actors.
Critics of devolution argue that the factors that led to the failure of sport hunting
in the pre-1977 period remain relevant to Kenya’s situation and hence, it would be
premature to devolve authority again as that would amount to treading an already
beaten path. Proponents of devolution, however, contest this interpretation of the
1977 hunting ban. They contend that the ban should not be misconstrued as an
indictment of the ability of local-level actors to husband natural resources because
it was not aimed at them, but rather, at governmental wildlife authorities. It was
government authorities, they argue, who were the culprits because they would
issue permits in bulk to the dealers.7 To the proponents of devolution, the sport
hunters could not have been a problem, otherwise there would be evidence of
prosecution of hunters for malpractices. The ban on sport hunting was followed
by a ban on sales of animal products such as skins. In the latter case, the govern-
ment revoked wildlife dealers’ licences so that nobody could trade in wildlife prod-
ucts in Kenya. What this meant was that even when a wildlife cropping experiment
was introduced in the 1990s, landowners could not process hides and skins but
had to export them to Tanzania and South Africa, and then re-import the finished
products back to Kenya. To local groups, this did not make sense and it showed
the extent to which the establishment was insensitive to their right to utilize their
lands economically. Yet, in addition to this deprivation, the state still went ahead
to impose an additional burden on communities living with wildlife by abdicating
responsibility for compensation for wildlife damage.
 Historic and Contemporary Struggles for a Local Wildlife Governance Regime 129

Devolving costs of wildlife production:The 1989 Wildlife

(Management and Conservation) Amendment Bill
Analysis of the debate over the 1989 Wildlife Bill in Parliament represents a study
of the absurd. The Bill sought to remove compensation for property damaged
by wildlife. At this time, the post-independence state was compensating for the
loss of both human and livestock life and physical property damaged by wild-
life. The process was, however, so widely abused that by the time of this amend-
ment, cases of non-existent damage had been compensated while genuine ones
were still pending. The wildlife-related debt that the state owed landowners was so
great that proponents of abolishing compensation for wildlife damage to property
(other than human life) argued that paying the debt would bankrupt the wildlife
agency. Most of the parliamentarians who contributed to the debate commended
the Minister for introducing the Bill, on the basis that under the new law people
would be compensated and thus live harmoniously with wildlife. In fact, the Bill
intended to do the exact opposite. While it is standard practice for the relevant
Minister or the Attorney General to inform the parliamentarians if they are misin-
terpreting a Bill (in this case thinking that there would be greater compensation)
in this instance the MPs were left to wallow in their utter confusion.
What is of interest is that those MPs who seem to have read and realized that
the amendment was removing compensation argued against it, but still ended up
supporting the Bill. For example, one MP condemned the drafters of the amend-
ment and said that it would be committing a crime against God to support a
Bill that is against the people.8 Yet in the end he supported the Bill. On the other
hand, the Minister responsible for wildlife, and the key mover of the Bill, repre-
sented a constituency that was at the epicentre of human–wildlife conflict. There
were very few MPs who pegged their support of the amendment to the deletion
of the clause on abolition of compensation for wildlife damage but politicians
known to be strongly pro-establishment came out openly to support the Bill. As a
result, the Bill was adopted and compensation for wildlife damage thereby abol-
ished (although provisions for compensation were subsequently reinstated). What
explains such a radical institutional change which served to abdicate governmental
responsibility for wildlife damage yet excluded local actors from control over the
resource, at a time when central regulation and protection of wildlife in Kenya
were plagued by problems?
The explanation for these legislative dynamics lies in the emasculation of
Kenyan governance institutions as power became increasingly monopolized by
the presidency in the late 1980s and political repression intensified. The 1988
national elections that produced this Parliament were arguably the most abused
electoral contest in Kenyan history. It was ingrained in the national electoral
psyche that if the executive and the only political party (by then the two had
become quite indistinct) was determined to rig a politician out of politics, the
demise of the political career of such a candidate was a foregone conclusion (see
for example Widner, 1993). Opposition to those in power was equated with polit-
ical subversion and was deemed actionable. During this period, all the proponents
of legislative proposals needed was support from the presidency, and they would
be almost certain of getting their preferred outcome by portraying their opponents
130 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

as pursuing subversive activities detrimental to the interests of the state. Indeed,

one MP known for his avid support of the regime overtly stated that the Wildlife
Bill had to be passed because the President wishes it to be so.9 Thus, the power
wielded by the executive branch in Kenya at the time dominated patterns of insti-
tutional change and wildlife governance.
In this particular episode, actors in the wildlife sector within the establishment
were concerned that the claims for wildlife damage pending action before the
wildlife authority were so huge that the agency would have to ground all other
activities for it to be able to even approximate paying the claims. Within this
context, the state decided to repudiate its responsibility for wildlife damage. Thus,
the institutional change of this era is largely accounted for by an authoritarian
political dispensation which had disabled the electorate as principals of the legisla-
ture and was consequently able to emasculate the latter into handing the executive
a blank slate in which it could author its wishes into law. It was against this back-
ground that widespread agitation for reform took place in the 1990s including the
re-introduction of pluralist politics. The climax of this agitation was realized after
the then-ruling party (Kenya African National Union, KANU) lost power in the
2002 general elections, leading to a more open political environment that paved
the way for a more diverse range of civic actors to agitate overtly for wildlife sector
reforms.

Reform efforts since the 1990s

The study of contemporary institutional reforms in Kenya’s wildlife sector is a
continuing story of the obstacles posed by macro-political factors to improving
natural resource governance. This is the case even when such reforms were spon-
sored by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) itself, the country’s national wildlife
authority. Prior to 1989, the wildlife sector was organized in two departments:
the Game Department and National Parks. The former was in charge of wild-
life outside of the protected areas, while the latter took charge of national parks.
The 1989 Wildlife Amendment Act merged these two into the parastatal Kenya
Wildlife Service (KWS). Popular opinion now holds that the previous wildlife
organizations were mismanaged, and wildlife decline was the norm. The key signi-
fiers of this decline included poaching that had gone out of control and poor rela-
tions between the wildlife sector and communities living with wildlife. Indicative
of the former, wildlife populations across Kenya declined by about 30 per cent
from 1977 to 1994, and the country’s elephant population crashed as a result of
poaching (DRSRS, 1995; Leakey, 2001). Thus, the new outfit was charged with,
among other things, bringing poaching to an end as well as improving relations
between the wildlife bureaucracy and communities living alongside wildlife.
In the early 1990s, KWS undertook several internal initiatives to reform the
wildlife sector. KWS was perhaps aware of the smouldering discontent among
communities living with wildlife, and that the opportunity of falling back on the
security provided by state organs was waning in light of the new democratic dispen-
sation provided by the onset of multiparty politics. KWS may have thought it
preferable to placate the communities before they rebelled in one form or another
 Historic and Contemporary Struggles for a Local Wildlife Governance Regime 131

against extant arrangements. Thus macro-political changes contributed to new

efforts to restructure wildlife governance in a way that took greater account of
local economic interests.
In 1990–1991, KWS undertook a comprehensive wildlife sector review, resulting
in a document dubbed the Zebra Book, which set out the sector’s policy frame-
work and development plans. With respect to institutional reforms, fairly progres-
sive observations were made that pointed towards devolving greater authority to
local actors. For example, the Zebra Book stated:

KWS policy is that landowners should retain all the revenue that they derive from
wildlife on their lands, as they do for competing land uses. KWS will aim to cover
its supervision and administrative costs…Landowners will certainly not be obliged
to seek wildlife use rights in order to develop tourism on their land.
(KWS, 1990, pp46–47)

Such targets were, however, not followed through, even as KWS subsequently
moved to help communities hosting wildlife to organize themselves in a National
Wildlife Forum so as to present a unified body that KWS could work with. There
was an attempt, led at this time by KWS, at reintroducing consumptive wild-
life utilization as a way to expand the returns from wildlife on private lands. In
addition, KWS began a community service scheme that sought to share wildlife
benefits with communities neighbouring national parks, but, as Table 6.1 shows,
its funding relative to other budgetary provisions was minimal.

Table 6.1 KWS expenditures, 1998–2003 (figures in thousands of KShs)

1998/99 1999/2000 2000/01 2001/02 2002/03
Wages 690,875 677,533 697,532 833,534 808,478
Operating Expenses 372,118 453,173 525,719 725,538 536,867
Community Services 11,281 18,450 10,133 34,523 11,318

Source: adapted from Wachira, 2004

The National Wildlife Forum, comprised of landholder and community repre-

sentatives from Kenya’s wildlife-rich districts, was formed around 1994, through
the initiative of KWS under David Western’s directorship. It was, however, beset
with problems even as it was being conceived. The registrar of societies had reser-
vations about the forum. The problem, according to him, was that some national
political functionaries were apprehensive about the rise of an organization suppos-
edly representing the people; they argued that elected political leaders were already
representing the people (see Kabiri, 2007). This reservation by the politicians
should be understood as reflecting less an analysis of what is good governance
in the wildlife sector, but more as turf wars in regions where such an organiza-
tion might have a significant political impact. But even when conservation-specific
considerations came to the fore, obstacles to reform from interest groups were the
norm as the case of sport hunting demonstrates.
132 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

In 1994 KWS commissioned a review group to study the wildlife sector and
give recommendations on the way forward. The review group recommended,
among other things, the re-introduction of sport hunting as a way of increasing
wildlife’s economic value to local communities and private landholders (KWS,
1996). This recommendation became controversial not only in the national public
arena, but also because some members of the team are said to have disowned
the recommendation, claiming that it was smuggled into the report without their
knowledge (Opanga, 1997). In a public meeting held to discuss the report, the
KWS director was part of the coalition supporting the re-introduction of hunting.
He was enjoying the support of the emerging National Wildlife Forum while the
opposition to lifting the ban was spearheaded by Kenyan conservation NGOs such
as the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and personages from the Kenya Association
of Tour Operators (Coffman, 2001). The former can be said to represent animal
welfare persuasions opposed to hunting on ideological grounds while the latter
argues that sport hunting is detrimental to Kenya’s overall tourism industry. It
was this combination of interests that stalled the bid to reopen sport hunting in
the mid-1990s, despite the support of KWS. This shows the extent to which even
KWS itself is not necessarily the driving force behind wildlife governance institu-
tions in Kenya.10 It is merely an actor within a broader struggle for the control of
the sector at different levels of government and society. The obstacles to reform lie
in the differential and often incompatible interests of those multiple actors.
The last major reform initiative of the mid-1990s involving KWS was the attempt
to review national wildlife legislation. In 1996 KWS, with financial support from
the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), produced a
draft Wildlife Bill that sought to devolve some power to local authorities, but the
initiative never materialized. There are conflicting opinions as to what happened
to the Bill. Some observers, including KWS officers, claim that it was returned
to the Ministry by the Cabinet because it was not consultative enough.11 Other
observers claim that the Bill was either withdrawn from the Cabinet paper trail or
disappeared before reaching the Cabinet for discussion.12 The point is that there is
no clear evidence about what the position of the state was in the 1990s regarding
wildlife sector institutional reform, especially with regards to devolving greater
power to the local level. The only evidence of a state perspective on this issue is the
1999 Sessional Paper on environment and development.
The 1999 Sessional Paper No. 6 on Environment and Development, in contrast
to the 1975 Sessional Paper on Wildlife Conservation, marked the first attempt by
the state to recognize the need to involve communities as effective actors in biodiver-
sity conservation (RoK, 1999). It recognized that there are inadequate incentives to
stimulate local community participation in biodiversity conservation and proposed
greater involvement of local communities in wildlife conservation and management.
But apart from stating that it will develop mechanisms to allow communities to
benefit from wildlife, there is no clear expression of an intention to devolve govern-
ance of wildlife to local-level actors as was the case with, for example, neighbouring
Tanzania’s 1998 Wildlife Policy (Nelson and Blomley, this volume). It was this void
that the communities hosting wildlife in their lands sought to address in subsequent
reform initiatives which were enabled by macro-political changes that gave political
pluralism some effective meaning following the 2002 presidential transition.
 Historic and Contemporary Struggles for a Local Wildlife Governance Regime 133

The 2004 ‘GG Bill’

Up until this time, locally-driven responses to wildlife governance were haphazard,
given the failure of the national wildlife movement to take place. In Amboseli,
there were well-established mechanisms for KWS to share revenue from Amboseli
National Park with local communities. This arrangement was negotiated through
the group ranches as the locus of community interest in land matters in Kenyan
pastoralist areas. In Maasai Mara, the Narok County Council was in charge of
the reserve, and since it is assumed that the county council belongs to the local
community, for some time community interests were seen as being addressed
by the council. During the 1990s, however, due to the failure of communities to
get what they considered a fair share of the proceeds from the reserve, commu-
nities began to organize themselves around group ranches and the council was
forced to channel a certain percentage of the reserve proceeds to the communities
(Homewood, 2009). In other areas of Kenya, there was little attempt to have local
communities share the proceeds from the wildlife estate, except where the same
is designated as a National Reserve, in which case the proceeds go to the local
authority instead of KWS. Such proceeds involved are, however, limited to non-
consumptive utilization. As such, the failure to have some of these local authorities
utilize wildlife in all its possible aspects drove these communities into joining those
who were receiving nothing in the agitation for institutional reforms.
These concerns around local benefits from wildlife led to the development of
the ‘GG Bill’ (RoK, 2004),13 which played out as the most contentious recent
episode in Kenya’s long-running political struggles over the transformation of
wildlife management institutions. By this time, communities had effectively lost
faith in other (bureaucratic) avenues for securing greater property rights in wild-
life. Community and landholder representatives thus formed a forum, the Kenya
Wildlife Working Group (KWWG)14 through which they set to lobby for review
of the wildlife legislation. They sought to do so through a Private Members’
Parliamentary Bill, which after a series of lobbying efforts for and against, was
passed by Parliament. In the end it failed to become law as it did not secure
presidential assent. Among the highlights of the Bill were the restructuring of the
balance of power in the KWS board whereby landowners would have more input
in the management of wildlife, there was provision of high rates of compensa-
tion for wildlife damage, and legalization of consumptive utilization (hunting).
While the micro-political conditions for securing a transformation in the institu-
tions of wildlife management were favourable, given the rise of an organization
representing local landholders’ interests, the macro-level conditions were not yet
ripe to fully support such a change, the opening of national democratic space
notwithstanding.

The reformist strategy

KWWG pursued a two-pronged approach to reform. It sought to work within the
establishment and hence pursued dialogue with KWS and the Minister in charge
of wildlife. When this failed, it went directly to Parliament to secure the support of
legislators so that the bill would be passed once tabled in Parliament. With respect
to KWS, KWWG hoped that they could influence the wildlife policy from within,
134 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

banking on the fact that a new government had been instituted in Kenya15 which
was proving to be more receptive to public participation in the management of
public affairs. In this setting, the popular opinion on the ground in Kenya was that
policy-makers and policy implementers could now make decisions without having
to wait for directives from the powerbrokers in State House as was the case with
previous regimes. At first, it seemed as though this strategy could work. Initial
encounters with the Minister in charge of wildlife were promising, but soon the
doors began to close and KWWG’s letters to the Minister went unanswered.16
The failure to strike a rapport with the Ministry’s top brass does not seem to
have had anything to do with the personalities there. Between the beginning of
the GG Bill initiative and its enactment into law by Parliament, KWWG dealt
with three different Ministers in charge of wildlife. The pattern was the same
with all three: initial favourable response followed relatively quickly by a blackout.
This suggested to KWWG that there were antagonistic forces which were not
only active but were also gaining an upper hand in alienating the top brass in
the Ministry from forging a relationship with KWWG. Consequently, KWWG
shifted its efforts towards Parliament.
KWWG first moved into Parliament through the window presented by the
Pastoralists Parliamentary Forum. This is an informal grouping of MPs from
pastoralist areas that is used to rally support for pastoralist interests in and outside
Parliament. Almost all pastoralist areas are endowed with wildlife and thus most
of these MPs were perceived as sympathetic to wildlife-based issues. KWWG also
had the advantage of access to then-Speaker of the National Assembly, Francis
Ole Kaparo, by virtue of his hailing from Laikipia District and thus being one of
their own as a landowner from a wildlife-rich pastoralist area. The linkage with the
Speaker proved a good anchor to the group’s ability to forge links with Members of
Parliament and even the Minister in charge of wildlife.17 The immediate outcome
of these efforts was the formation of an informal parliamentary committee on wild-
life.18 The aim was to sensitize MPs on the need for legal reform within the wildlife
sector.19 KWWG held several meetings with this group in 2003 and 2004.
These meetings took the form of brief luncheons or retreats where KWWG had
technical experts take the MPs through the key issues that needed to be addressed.
After one luncheon that was held in Nairobi, KWWG came out exuding confi-
dence on the progress they were making in their lobbying activities as reported in
the subsequent monthly meeting:

Members noted that the luncheon was a big success as pertains sensitizing MPs
on the proposed wildlife policy and drawing their input into the document, as well
as winning their support to lobby for speedy revival of the national wildlife policy
review process. It was noted that due to effective media coverage of the event, and
the on-going human wildlife conflicts…MPs and other stakeholders’ interest and
support for KWWG activities had been aroused.20

KWWG lobbying also took legislators and other wildlife sector actors on trips to
southern African countries practising consumptive utilization so that the legisla-
tors could have an empirical view of the wildlife industry in those countries. The
tours included Ministry officials, KWS staff, MPs and KWWG trustees. The tours
 Historic and Contemporary Struggles for a Local Wildlife Governance Regime 135

worked well for KWWG because MPs involved largely agreed with the group’s
proposals regarding the need for reintroducing consumptive utilization. During
a seminar organized to receive a report of this tour, one MP claimed that when
the GG Bill comes up for debate he would argue that people have to benefit from
wildlife through sport hunting, although it should be controlled. Thus KWWG’s
lobbying efforts were paying dividends. But this success also ignited a strong
counter-lobby to the GG Bill and the agenda that KWWG was pursuing.

Opposition to reform
The opposition to the GG Bill was organized by a consortium of NGOs that
adopted the name Kenya Coalition for Wildlife Conservation and Management
(KCWCM). Central to this consortium was a group of animal rights NGOs,
including both local and international organizations, opposed to consumptive wild-
life utilization and organized around the Kenya Wildlife Coalition (KWC).21 The
composition of KWC is significant in that their values, as animal rights groups,
shed some light on the source of the opposition to the GG Bill.
In opposing the GG Bill, the KCWCM lobbied Kenyan legislators against
passing the Bill. For example, they organized a consultative meeting with them in
Nairobi in the run-up to the debate of the Bill in Parliament. The letter of invita-
tion to the individual MPs read thus:

The Coalition of Wildlife Conservation Group…has now organized a consulta-

tive Meeting with members of parliament to facilitate dialogue and deepen MPs
understanding of the impact of the current Amendment Bill so as to realize a
more community and human rights responsive legal regime… The meeting will be
attended by other members of parliament from affected areas, policy experts and
community representatives…22

The inclusion of community representatives here may be seen as a tactic to under-

mine the claim by the proponents of the GG Bill that they represented the inter-
ests of local communities.
The GG Bill was finally adopted by Parliament in 2004, but that did not mean
that the opposition ended. The opponents opened a new front where they now
targeted the next institutional stage in law-making: the assent by the President. The
coalition overtly staged a demonstration against the GG Bill once it was passed
by Parliament. The demonstration was aimed at appealing to the President not to
assent to the Bill. During the demonstration, the coalition issued a press release
in which they appealed to the President for his intervention in the GG Bill by not
assenting to the Bill. They cited reasons for their opposition and the fact that:

…the local communities will be the major losers if this bill is enacted; …we hereby
appeal to His Excellency the President to refer this Bill back to parliament to allow
due constitutional process and appropriate all inclusive amendments thereof.23

Given this turn of events, the proponents of the Bill had two possible strate-
gies (which were not necessarily mutually exclusive). They could likewise make
inroads to the Presidency to influence his decision as their antagonists were
136 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

doing, or they could stick to Parliament and raise a two-thirds support of legisla-
tors who would over-rule a presidential veto on the bill. Neither of these possi-
bilities worked in their favour.24 So, when the President failed to assent to the
bill, their efforts to entrench their interests through transformation of wildlife
management institutions failed with it. How is the conflict over the GG Bill
to be accounted for and how is the triumph of one camp over the other to be
explained?

The eye of the storm:The animal welfare lobby and the politics of sport
hunting in Kenya
As noted earlier, hunting was banned in 1977, but elements of it were re-introduced
in the early 1990s as a pilot wildlife cropping scheme. Sport and/or recreational
hunting was, however, not re-introduced, in spite of several KWS administrative
initiatives favouring its re-introduction (KWS, 1990; KWS, 1994; Wanjala and
Kibwana, 1996). The anti-hunting lobby has somehow been able to sell its case
to the government and, to a significant degree, to the public. One element of this
success has been the anti-hunting lobby’s ability to prey on the fears of the state
with respect to the tourism industry. As far back as 1975, for example, the govern-
ment issued a policy paper on wildlife in which it argued in a way similar to that
of the hoteliers and tour operators. As if allaying the antipathy towards hunting,
the government appealed to the West to be sympathetic to the country’s pursuit of
sport hunting as a management tool:

Overseas public education activities are extremely important, from the standpoint
of the future economic value of wildlife. Potential donors must be informed of the
difference between simple preservation and conservation, so that donations do not
dry up due to misunderstandings. Even more important, we must ensure that the
potentially large and secure export market, for the products of consumptive wildlife
utilization (sports hunting, sales of meat, skins and other trophies), are not fore-
closed through ignorant ‘preservationist’ pressure on overseas Governments and
firms. Already there is some evidence to suggest that prices of some skins have fallen
due to such pressure. If wildlife are to ‘pay their way’ over large parts of Kenya, such
development as this must be reversed – and quickly.
(RoK, 1975, p35)

The government was, and still is, thus sensitive to two issues related to sport
hunting. First, the enterprises that are based on the wildlife sector (especially
photographic tourism and the hotel industry), and second, the externally-derived
donations to the wildlife sector. Opponents of sport hunting advanced the argu-
ment that if the government lifted the ban, the outcome would be that tourists
would shun Kenya in favour of other destinations.25 At a time when the economy
was heavily reliant on tourism, it is not difficult to see why the government would be
unwilling to experiment with the wildlife sector. As Table 6.2 shows, tourism earn-
ings have been growing and in terms of its contribution to the national economy,
the tourism sector has increasingly moved to the forefront, competing for the
lead position with tea and horticulture. In 2006, for example, tourism contributed
12 per cent of Kenya’s Gross Domestic Product (RoK, 2007). Hence, the state
 Historic and Contemporary Struggles for a Local Wildlife Governance Regime 137

can be expected to treat wildlife-related issues with caution, thereby giving actors
claiming to represent tourism interests preferential treatment in the clamour for
state attention.

Table 6.2 Tourism earnings in Kenya, 2000–2007

Year Amount
2000 283
2003 347
2005 579
2007 934

Note: 2007 figures provisional; figures in millions of US$.

Source: RoK, 2007; Honey, 2008, p299

Moreover, the tourism industry and the animal welfare lobby against sport hunting
are well-organized, not to mention that many of those in decision-making echelons
of the state are themselves shareholders at one level or another in the tourism
industry. The clout of the anti-hunting lobby stands in contradistinction to the
local communities living with wildlife, who for the most part have been beset with
collective action problems with respect to influencing government policy formula-
tion (see for example Yeager and Miller, 1986).
The anti-hunting lobby, therefore, was able to advance its interests without
necessarily saying they were doing so because they had personal or instrumental
objections to wildlife hunting. Their narrative is founded on the economy of the
country (and hence national welfare) plus the health of wildlife populations.
Opponents of sport hunting argue that the reasons that led to the banning of
hunting in 1977 are still valid and that until institutions able to check abuse are
put in place, it would be a grave error for the state to lift the ban. In addition to
the recourse to conservationist arguments, opponents also appeal to nationalist
sentiments. Sport hunting was depicted as a race and class issue that eluded
the indigenous poor Kenyans who bear the brunt of supporting the wildlife
estate. One commentary claimed that when a former Attorney General was in
charge ‘of the Board and [Richard] Leakey the vice-chairman, KWS danced
to the whims of game ranchers and to the detriment of Kenya’s conservation
goals’ (Mbaria, 2003). Nevertheless, KWWG and the proponents of consump-
tive utilization saw their opponents’ position in a different way. They crafted a
counter-narrative that argued that the opposition to hunting is based on pres-
ervationist ideologies that oppose killing of wildlife for recreational purposes.
The key question then is how to explain the success of one side over the other in
achieving their preferred outcome.
The answer may lie partly in the interaction of a well-resourced global animal
welfare movement that is strongly committed to its ideology, and the fiscal
constraints besetting KWS as the lead state wildlife authority. This is thus an
138 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

argument based on the politics of underdevelopment. KWS faces a significant

shortfall in its annual operating budget (Table 6.3), which it seeks to fill through
external sources of funding.

Table 6.3 KWS income and expenditure, 1998–2004

Year 1998/99 1999/2000 2000/01 2001/02 2002/03 2003/04
Operating 619,799 396,514 322,613 790,041 492,290 958,942
Deficit
External 523,599 274,802 273,416 373,882 274,077 93,770
(non-treasury)
Grants
Net Operating (46,200) (121,712) (49,197) (416,159) (218,213) (865,171)
Balance
(Deficit)

Note: Figures in thousands of Kshs.

Source: Adapted from Wachira, 2004

Consequently, interest groups that can mobilize large amounts of revenue as

support for KWS may obtain significant leverage over these governmental actors.
As Table 6.4 shows, KWS and other local wildlife actors receive substantial
contributions from leading animal welfare NGOs such as the International Fund
for Animal Welfare (IFAW). These funds are in addition to non-cash donations in
the form of training, repairs and housing; occasionally, aircraft are also donated.

Table 6.4 Contributions by IFAW to various Kenyan organizations

in 2005 and 2006
Recipient 2005 2006
David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust 41,138 19,677
Wildlife Clubs of Kenya 6,152 12,028
Kenya Wildlife Service 519,622 265,562
Bill Woodley Mount Kenya Trust 15, 103
Laikipia Wildlife Forum 110,576
Olare Orok Conservancy 88, 572
Kuku Group Ranch 3,110
Maasailand Preservation Trust 9,618
Namunyak Wildlife Conservation Trust 10, 253
Olpusare Conservation Youth Group 1,951

Note: Cash only, figures in US$.

Source: IFAW Internal Revenue Service tax returns (publicly available)26

Consequently, the clout of the global wildlife and animal rights lobby cannot be
underestimated in its ability to influence wildlife policy and governance in Kenya
 Historic and Contemporary Struggles for a Local Wildlife Governance Regime 139

(Norton-Griffiths, 2007). It is thus easy to sympathize with the verdict of the

proponents of sport hunting as to what the causes of their tribulations were. The
GG Bill sought to re-introduce consumptive utilization of wildlife27 and this was
the most contentious issue. Other supposed problems in the bill cited by its oppo-
nents were mostly diversionary (see Kabiri, 2007). Moreover, the anti-hunting
lobby was able to more fully outflank its antagonists in the next round of drafting
new wildlife policy and legislation in 2007.

Reform anti-climax
In 2007, a new wildlife policy and Bill was drafted, and the latter was awaiting
debate in Parliament at the time of writing (RoK, 2007). What the draft wildlife
law promises relative to the question of reforming the wildlife sector is clearly
inclined more towards further centralization, not decentralization. Whereas one
would have expected to have substantial community representation in the new
Bill, given the reference to lack of local representation as a basis for the earlier
presidential rejection of the GG Bill, the current draft does not promise greater
community clout in wildlife management, in spite of the inclusion of community
representatives in the Board of Directors of KWS. This representation is however
limited to one-sixth of the total board’s composition, meaning that community
interests can only prevail at the pleasure of the executive that is more heavily
represented. Moreover, community representation is conditioned in the sense that
membership of the non-government officers of the board is pegged to academic
qualification. This means that communities may not necessarily be represented by
those who understand their problems most. The draft Bill has aroused consider-
able concern within Kenya’s conservation community, at least in some quarters, as
a result of the perception that it will create further disincentives for local commu-
nities to support conservation on their lands.

Conclusion
This chapter has shown how wildlife policy and governance institutions in Kenya
have been shaped by a range of political forces and contextual factors from the
early colonial period up until recent reform efforts and debates. During the colonial
era, white settlers were able to use their representative legislative bodies and claims
relating to wildlife damage to private property to gain concessions related to access
to benefits from wildlife and limited control over wildlife utilization on private lands.
Local District Councils were, in the latter colonial period prior to independence,
able similarly to force concessions that resulted in some of Kenya’s major wildlife
protected areas – namely Amboseli and the Maasai Mara – being transferred from
national jurisdiction to district-level control. In the post-colonial era, the evolution
of Kenya’s highly centralized, neo-patrimonial state led to wildlife governance meas-
ures that eventually came to greatly limit any form of local involvement. Widespread
private appropriation of public resources in Kenya during this period contributed
heavily to the decline of wildlife through illegal use in the 1970s and 1980s.
In recent years debates over wildlife governance have continued, pitting
advocates of more locally-based frameworks that enable landholders and rural
140 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

communities to make decisions about [wildlife] use against the tourism industry
and global animal welfare organizations. These latter groups have been more
effective at forging alliances with the government wildlife authorities in the form
of the chronically indebted KWS. With Kenya having lost over half of its wildlife
during the past 30 years while periodic efforts at reform were caught in these
interest group conflicts, reform is at once urgently needed yet increasingly unlikely
on political grounds. While Kenyan politics has clearly become more open and
pluralistic following the adoption of a multi-party system in the early 1990s and
again following the landmark 2002 general election, the democratization of wild-
life governance institutions has been remarkably limited. This is due both to the
difficulties of entrenching democratic governance in Kenya and also to the tactical
influence of well-resourced and strategically astute external interests in wildlife
policy. The next generation of reform efforts will have to grapple more effectively
with these structural political challenges if more sustainable patterns of wildlife
governance in Kenya are to be achieved.

Notes
1 It did not matter whether society would collapse or not. Thus, the governance of the
wildlife sector should not be understood differently – i.e., one should not be tempted
to assume that because a war of attrition with local communities could spell doom
to biodiversity, then the relevant actors with public authority over wildlife should be
expected to see sense and give in. Giving in to popular pressures was not part of the
game in African governance circles for a long time prior to the 1990s (for studies on
transition in African governance in the 1990s, see for example, Bratton and van de
Walle, 1997). Apparently, even after transition to democracy, the new actors have not
yet demonstrated that their pursuit of power is for the transformation of society rather
than their own raw pursuit of power; hence the sense of stalled democratic transition
currently enveloping Africa (see Ake, 1996)
2 Over the years, a mentality was ingrained among Kenyans that state/public property
is a resource that a person (especially holders of public office) may use for personal
aggrandizement. The Kiswahili phrase mali ya umma (public property) has come to
have the allusion of: use it to your advantage without regard to cost because those
costs are externalities to be borne by the public. This mentality gained currency
under founding President Jomo Kenyatta. Soon, it became common in Kenya to hear
comments to the effect that if you occupy a big office and do not make it (that is, move
beyond poverty levels), you will be considered a useless person in the eyes of the public
who would characterize you thus: you were a high ranking person in society yet you
did not help yourself (i.e. use public office to amass personal wealth; the implication
being that you can’t, therefore, be expected to help others). Thus, these stories, taken
together, led to the development of a mindset that today holds society hostage in as far
as appropriation of state largesse is concerned. The land sector, state parastatals and
wildlife have been prime targets of this mindset. See Wrong (2009) for a recent account
of this characteristic of Kenyan public life.
3 See, for example, Zegart (1999) on how in the US, the executive is constrained from
unilateralism by the doctrine of separation of powers to the extent that it is sometimes
difficult to undertake bold reforms because the legislature and the executive have to
trade compromises which sometimes dilute the necessary legislation.
 Historic and Contemporary Struggles for a Local Wildlife Governance Regime 141

4 This was case in Tanzania during the implementation of Ujamaa (villagization) when
bureaucrats seemed to impose their version of the project contrary to party policy. This
forced President Julius Nyerere to complain of the tendency of some leaders not to
listen to the people, but rather only to tell people what to do (Scott, 1998, p236).
5 For the role of interest groups in influencing public policy, see for example Sunstein
(1985), Morone (1992) and Crowley (2003).
6 For the influence of the sports-hunting interests in the early institutional dynamics of
wildlife management in Africa, see for example Mackenzie (1988).
7 KWWG meeting, 4 April 2003.
8 Hansard Reports of Kenya’s National Assembly Debates on Wildlife Conservation
(Amendment) Bill, 1989 and 2004, National Assembly, Nairobi, Kenya.
9 Such references to the wishes of the President became a signature strategy in Kenyan
political debates of the time (whether or not the President was actually aware of the
issue).
10 In terms of the multifaceted way in which forces driving conservation should be concep-
tualized, this point echoes Gibson’s observation regarding the failure by President
Kaunda of Zambia to always have his way with respect to his preferences about the
wildlife sector (Gibson, 1999).
11 Seminar sponsored by East African Wildlife Society to discuss the GG Bill on Wildlife
Conservation and Management (Amendment) Act, 2004, held at Kenya Commercial
Bank, Karen, 1 December 2004.
12 KWWG meeting, 2 July 2004.
13 The 2004 Bill to amend the Wildlife Conservation and Management Act was commonly
known as the GG Bill because it was tabled in Parliament by the then MP for Laikipia
West, G.G. Kariuki.
14 This forum grew out of the regional fora that had developed in the 1990s, in part due
to KWS’s prompting.
15 Following the 2002 general elections in which the ruling party for the past 40 years,
KANU, was dethroned for the first time.
16 For example, in the July 2003 KWWG monthly meeting it was reported: ‘The Secretariat
confirmed having sent a letter to the Minister of Environment, Natural Resources and
Wildlife, seeking an appointment for him to meet a delegation of KWWG of which
no feedback had been received….The Secretariat reported having sent a letter to the
Chairman of KWS seeking to have a meeting between him and KWWG members of
which there has been no feedback.’ From ‘Minutes of a KWWG Monthly Meeting
Held on 4 July 2003 At the EAWLS Boardroom’ Nairobi, Kenya (on file with the
author).
17 KWWG meeting 4 April 2003; ‘Minutes of a KWWG Monthly Meeting Held on
4 April 2003 At the EAWLS Boardroom’ Nairobi, Kenya (on file with the author).
18 Parliamentarians from tea, coffee and sugar growing areas have a similar committee.
19 KWWG meeting 24 July 2004; ‘Minutes of a KWWG Meeting Held on 24 July 2004,’
Nairobi, Kenya (on file with the author).
20 KWWG meeting 4 July 2003; ‘Minutes of a KWWG Monthly Meeting Held on 4 July
2003 At the EAWLS Boardroom’, Nairobi, Kenya (on file with the author).
21 Prominent among the members of this coalition were the International Fund for
Animal Welfare (IFAW), Born Free Foundation, David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, Kenya
Human-Wildlife Conflict Management Network (KHWCM Network) and Youth for
Conservation. According to their critics (such as KWWG), the coalition partners had
no interest in conserving Kenya’s wildlife, rather, tying them together was a combina-
tion of animal rightist ideology, turf wars in the struggle for the control of wildlife
142 Political Economies of Natural Resource Governance

agenda at local level and career hunting (in case of the first three, KHWCM Network,
and Youth for Conservation, respectively) (see Kabiri, 2006).
22 KCWCM letter of invitation to MPs to attend a meeting on GG Bill (on file with
author).
23 KCWCM Press Release urging President not to assent to the GG Bill (on file with
author).
24 Raising a two-thirds majority in a multi-party Parliament requires an issue that has, for
example, captured the national imagination and wildlife conservation has not reached
that stage yet. On the other hand, what happened with respect to State House in case
of this Bill remains a black box.
25 Since the demise of the apartheid regime in South Africa, some proponents of sports
hunting have held that the argument of Kenya potentially losing tourists because they
find sport hunting morally repulsive has been discredited, because Kenya is now oper-
ating under the fear of losing its traditional clientele to South Africa, yet the latter
widely pursues both consumptive and non-consumptive utilization of wildlife.
26 For 2005 data: http://dynamodata.fdncenter.org/990_pdf_archive/311/311594197/311
594197_200606_990.pdf
For 2006 data: http://dynamodata.fdncenter.org/990_pdf_archive/311/311594197/311
594197_200706_990.pdf Both accessed 27 September 2009.
27 RoK, 2004, s. 10 (b) (3).

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 Part 3

Local Struggles and

Negotiations across
Multiple Scales
 7

Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion?

Local Communities in the Great
Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation
Area, South Africa

Webster Whande

The last time I saw Endani – frail, half blind and over 100 years old – he repeat-
edly pointed to the very rudimentary plan he had for a house. The plan, drawn on
the ground in the form of trenches for the foundation, had been standing there
the entire time I was conducting research along the Madimbo corridor in the
far northeast of South Africa. His wish was to live in ‘that house’ before he died.
However, that was not to be, as he died before the house could be built. His one-
room house was very basic. It had a single window on one side, located too high
for him to sit on his bed and look outside.
During my field-work, Endani described his experiences with state interven-
tion. To me, his descriptions were themselves windows in time, which opened up
new perspectives on the past and on the future. His stories provided me with a
different understanding of the physical and conceptual windows through which he
viewed various interventions. In the village of Bennde Mutale, Endani’s compan-
ions of similar age, Gakato and Maphukumele, had managed to get their houses,
courtesy of the post-apartheid South African government’s Reconstruction and
Development Programme. Yet they too would always sit at the entrances of their
houses, and not by their expansive windows. To me these elders opened windows
of their memories as hunters in their youth, and their reliance on a range of natural
resources in the area. They spoke of how their relations with the environment were
disrupted and of local people’s difficult relations with state conservation officials
and of life along a frontier zone.
They highlighted their disappointment at how their aspirations had not been
met. However, while expressing sadness about some of their experiences in the
past, they did not lose sight of the future. The stories they told formed the basis
upon which local people’s claims to the Madimbo corridor were based, and lay at
148 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

the heart of a range of post-apartheid policy changes. Their memories served as the
maps of the old homesteads, livestock grazing areas and of paths that connected
them with social relations across the border in Zimbabwe. The stories, though
they spoke of hopes and expectations, serve as windows bequeathed by the elders
for the younger generation to contest state interventions that exclude local people
from participation and decision-making over their land and natural resources.
The early phases of establishing the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation
Area appear to be reinventing the exclusion of local people by subverting local
mental and lived maps with alternative visions for ordering the landscape, and
thus closing windows of exclusion rather than opening windows of opportunity
based on the elders’ stories and local aspirations. Local communities appear to be
standing on one side and unable to contribute to the proper functioning of the
windows being constructed by the South African transfrontier conservation initia-
tive, which raises the question of whether transfrontier conservation areas present
opportunities or represent enhanced exclusion of local communities along the
Madimbo corridor.

Introduction
This chapter explores the dynamics of transfrontier conservation implementation
along the Madimbo corridor, a land restitution case in the northeast corner of
South Africa bordering Zimbabwe, but also a central cog in the Great Limpopo
Transfrontier Conservation Area (GLTFCA). The story of the Madimbo corridor
juxtaposes national and regional priorities for transfrontier conservation against
local demands for the restitution of land and resource rights, which is the key ‘action
arena’ and window of analysis for this chapter. Windows in terms of opportunities
relate to the politics of framing, which is understood to be an outcome of who or
what is included or excluded (Apthorpe, 1996), and of material possibilities. In
policy terms, windows relate to the convergence of problems, politics and policy
in the formation of public policy (Kingdon, 1984); that is, when policy provides
solutions to problems at a politically opportune moment for action and implemen-
tation. The restitution of land rights as provided for in South African legislation
presents a window of opportunity for formalizing the needs and aspirations of
people like Endani, by restoring local people’s land and resource rights in light of
historical dispossessions. However, unequal power dynamics and access to finan-
cial and technical resources have emerged as keys to the actual realization of rights
in terms of what is formalized in policy terms and implementation processes. This
suggests that the convergence of problems, policies and politics can be influenced
by different interests which do not necessarily reflect local social concerns in influ-
encing policy evolutions. Local people along the Madimbo corridor are excluded
from meaningful participation in both formulating ideas about the future manage-
ment of their land and physically from the land itself.
Land restitution is post-apartheid South Africa’s response to years of systematic
dispossession of black people through colonial and apartheid laws. It is provided
for through the South African constitution as well as the Land Restitution Act No.
22 of 1994, which allows groups or individuals who were dispossessed of their
 Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion? 149

land through racially motivated laws and practices, since the 1913 Natives Land
Act, to claim their lands. Land restitution presents a policy solution to historical
injustices in the context of post-apartheid South Africa’s political dispensation,
which provides the imperative for implementation.
The Madimbo land restitution case is characterized by a complex political matrix
involving local and non-local actors, state and non-state agencies, private tourism
enterprise developers, national and international NGOs such as the land rights-
focused Nkuzi Development Association; the transboundary protected areas facil-
itator, the South Africa-based Peace Parks Foundation (PPF); and recently NGOs
such as ResourceAfrica and Cesvi. They all have various agendas and different
capacities to influence the policy formulation and implementation process. The
question of local land rights – here used in reference to access to and control over
land and other natural resources – in an area of global biodiversity significance,
much like in other parts of South Africa (see Kepe, 2008), is subject to a variety
of contestations and presents a policy window based on historical experiences of
injustice and exclusion. The contestations over land rights involve the local leader-
ship – including chiefs and an elected Vhembe Communal Property Association
(CPA) – and occur between local leaders and other external actors, including
national and international NGOs, the private sector, and local, provincial and
national government. The dynamics along the Madimbo corridor are specifically
driven by the politics of inclusion and exclusion in making decisions over land and
natural resources, which are further shaped by the specific location of the area
along an international geopolitical boundary.
The location of the Madimbo corridor within the GLTFCA adds another
layer of contestation to the land restitution process and decision-making over
land uses and management. One complication in relation to this physical location
is that the land restitution process for the Madimbo corridor is no longer solely
the national preserve of South Africa, but is rather tied to the establishment
of the GLTFCA. The GLTFCA itself opens another policy window in relation
to biodiversity as a global public good to be conserved for future generations,
juxtaposed against the restoration of local communities’ land rights. The TFCA
concept combines objectives of biodiversity conservation, promoting regional
peace and stability, and job creation through tourism development (Hanks,
1997). This TFCA image is one of breaking down the boundaries and fences
that divide nation states and communities from conservation areas, yet it is also
seen as picking up Cecil John Rhodes’s colonial empire-building dreams and
opening up spaces for private sector investment (Wolmer, 2003) to the exclu-
sion of local communities (see Hughes, 2003; Dzingirai, 2004; Spierenburg
and Wels, 2006). Tourism is the central axis around which the success of the
TFCAs is organized, as exemplified by the 2005 Southern African Development
Community (SADC) Regional Council of Ministers’ endorsement to position
TFCAs as southern Africa’s premier tourist attraction (RETOSA, 2009). Yet
major questions remain on the openness of the process to determine land uses
such as tourism – including exclusive private sector operations and supposedly
community-based tourism initiatives.
The location of the corridor in an area of global and regional biodiversity
significance affects the nature of negotiations over land uses, and whether the
150 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

local community adopts a strategy based on mutual gains (i.e. ‘win–win’), or a

more confrontational distributive approach (see Fay, 2007). The Land Claims
Commission approved the Madimbo land claim in 2004, which signalled the
beginning of a new process of negotiation over land use and tenure in the area.
Observations from elsewhere indicate that local communities fare badly when
matched against seasoned negotiators representing various state departments and
well-resourced NGOs, with respect to the attainment of win–win outcomes through
co-management arrangements such as Contractual National Parks (CNPs) (see
Fay, 2007). Kepe (2008, p319) provides further details on the ambiguity of land
restitution negotiations, noting that in most land claims involving state protected
areas, decisions have kept land under conservation uses.
A process-related issue concerns ambiguity in both the land restitution process
and the establishment of the GLTFCA, both of which continue to frustrate the
needs and aspirations of local people along the Madimbo corridor. A source of
misunderstanding is that there is a formal agreement for the establishment of the
GLTFCA, which there is not. Rather, the GLTFCA implementation in areas such
as the Madimbo corridor is based on the treaty signed in 2002 for the establishment
of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) (Whande and Suich, 2008).The
core GLTP is concerned with establishing protected areas, which is quite different
from the multiple land use TFCA (Figure 7.1). It is difficult to disentangle policy
and administrative decisions made for the GLTP from processes related to the
implementation of the GLTFCA. This confusion also affects the hierarchy of the
actors involved. Transfrontier protected areas are state-controlled and -managed,
leaving the process for the establishment of the GLTFCA confused with regards
to the exact role of the state with regard to other stakeholders, particularly local
communities, and in the case of the Madimbo corridor, the resolution of land
restitution claims.

Figure 7.1 The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area

and constituent protected areas
 Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion? 151

The next section in the chapter discusses debates surrounding local communities
and conservation. It is followed by a brief historical overview of the Madimbo
corridor, exploring the closure of windows of local engagement in the affairs of
the corridor. The macro-political changes of the 1990s, with the demise of apart-
heid, opened new policy windows for regional cooperation at a national level as
well as for re-engagement of local communities such as those along the Madimbo
corridor in deciding how their lands and natural resources are governed. This
section is followed by a discussion of local contestations of exclusion through legal
pursuit of a land restitution claim. The strategies and tactics of state and NGO
planners in resisting these local claims are discussed before concluding with a
synthesis of key emerging windows of engagement and exclusion.

Framing local communities in transfrontier

conservation
The role (or lack thereof) and place of local communities and local land and
resource rights in the implementation of conservation initiatives globally, and
specifically of transfrontier initiatives in southern Africa, is the subject of intense
debate amongst academics, development and conservation practitioners and
policy-makers, but consensus is far from being achieved. These debates highlight
tensions, differences and synergies on the extent of integration between biodi-
versity conservation objectives and local development needs, resulting in two
predominant frames, albeit fluid and dynamic, through which local communities
are viewed. These can best be illustrated by discussing governance and livelihood
issues in relation to natural resource management.
The first governance frame is concerned with attaining a balance between
centralized state-driven and local, community-based approaches to natural resource
management. It is based on the notion that ‘governance that starts from the ground
up and involves networks and linkages across various levels of organization’ (Berkes,
2007, p15188) is key to sustainably managing natural resources and inclusive of
a variety of actors. This approach provides windows of opportunity for empow-
ering communities and scaling up community-based natural resource management
(CBNRM) initiatives across geopolitical boundaries (Jones and Chonguiça, 2001).
Creating viable incentives for local communities’ involvement in conservation activ-
ities is required for success (Metcalfe and Kepe, 2008), and so is a balance between
community-based and state-driven approaches as exemplified by regional debates
on democratic decentralization and devolution (see Rihoy and Maguranyanga, this
volume). Despite this policy window for local incentives and perspectives, and the
widespread acceptance and implementation of CBNRM since the 1980s, global
environmental governance is also shifting the scale of decision-making upwards to
include TFCA agreements among neighbouring states (Duffy, 2006).
The second governance frame for balancing state–local interactions privileges
more centralized approaches based firmly on the role of the state. This repre-
sents a continuation of protectionist and exclusionary approaches to conser-
vation as pursued for much of the 20th century. There are also trends to have
privately managed protected areas run as business enterprises (Fearnhead, 2008).
152 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

Arguments for this approach focus on the status of biodiversity as a public good,
which cannot be left to local communities to destroy (see Kabiri on the Kenyan
conservation discourse, this volume), even though local communities are as much
affected by as they impact on biodiversity loss. It is in this context that TFCAs,
while defined as multiple use zones, act as windows of exclusion with the discourse
inclined towards protected areas and efforts to implement TFCAs heavily reliant
on state actors and processes. In governance terms, the focus of TFCAs on state
regulated processes replicates ‘a “government” style of governing instead of a
“more governance mode”, dealing with multiple actors in a flexible way’ (Büscher
and Dietz, 2005, p11).
Livelihoods comprise ‘the capabilities, assets (including both material and
social resources) and activities required for a means of living’ (Chambers and
Conway, 1992, p6) another frame through which communities and their linkages
to conservation can be explored. Livelihood strategies are of course facilitated or
constrained by the governance models and institutions in place. Communities rely
on a range of natural resources for their livelihoods, and Salafsky and Wollenberg
(2000) describe three generic categories of conservation–livelihood linkages:
no linkage, indirect linkage and direct linkage. ‘No linkage’ corresponds to the
centralized governance approach of viewing local livelihood activities as threats
to biodiversity that need to be minimized. The ‘indirect linkage’ category strives
to provide substitutes for local uses of biodiversity, thereby limiting the impact
of human uses of natural resources. The ‘direct linkage’ category is character-
ized by livelihood–biodiversity connections functioning as an incentive for long-
term conservation by local users. Centralized resource governance systems tend to
promote the ‘no’ and ‘indirect’ linkages, and often prefer linking local livelihoods
to tourism revenues generated in areas where local communities are not allowed
to directly harvest natural resources.
In the TFCA context, tourism elicits both strong interest and support on the
one hand, and resistance on the other hand. For instance, Hughes (2003, p2) notes
an emerging ‘Africa for tourists, and community for peasants’ trend in the plans
espoused for transfrontier conservation and peddled through tourism marketing.
The latest initiative associated with tourism marketing and development within
transfrontier conservation initiatives is ‘Boundless Southern Africa’, the motto of
which is ‘open spaces, unlimited beauty, infinite possibilities’.1 This underscores
the main contention on the part of social scientists that TFCAs ‘undermine black
peasants’ claim to work the landscape within the Great Limpopo’s zone’ (Hughes,
2003, p3; see also Spierenburg and Wels, 2006). Despite these concerns on the part
of some analysts, tourism is clearly one of the major underlying factors behind the
rise of the southern African TFCA discourse. Between Mozambique, South Africa
and Zimbabwe, the three countries involved in the GLTFCA, estimated tourism
revenues are about US$2.45 billion per year (Spenceley, 2005), representing very
significant amounts of money and illustrating that tourism is a land use potentially
offering livelihood diversification – or a substitute for use of biodiversity – for local
communities. However, the revenues generated are not equally shared among the
three countries, with the lion’s share going to South Africa (see van Ameron and
Büscher, 2005) nor are these revenues equally shared between local communities
and private investors.
 Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion? 153

The macro-level importance of tourism to South Africa – contributing 8.5

per cent of GDP in 2008 (Mail & Guardian, 2009) – and in particular to South
African National Parks (SANParks) and numerous private investors who gener-
ally have more political influence than local communities, is a key dynamic in
the outcome of the TFCA enterprise. Largely because of the economic impor-
tance of tourism, the preferred settlement of land claims on protected areas is
to keep them as conservation land and substitute local livelihood strategies with
tourism-supported ones. A challenge, however, is that local livelihoods as a whole
may be undermined if one specific form of land use is pursued over others.
Additionally, the reliance of tourism on conservation, an approach historically
pursued through the forced removals of local communities, leads to suspicions at
the local level and even resistance (Whande, 2007). Lastly, tourism revenues are
subject to market shocks and changing preferences, the benefits are not evenly
distributed and the available local skills are not the same as the skills required by
the hospitality industry.
The governance and livelihoods debates that frame the discourse around TFCAs
illustrate that policy windows are not absolute but are contested by different inter-
ests. The balance between different interests involves debates over centralization
and decentralization, and the degree to which conservation activities are directly
or indirectly linked to local livelihoods.

Closing windows for local engagement:

The creation of the Madimbo corridor
The Madimbo corridor has historical significance that cuts across different objec-
tives of the South African state, including protection of the beef industry, biodiver-
sity conservation and national security and sovereignty.Yet the corridor is a creation
of colonial and apartheid South Africa, meant to control local people’s movements
as well as to provide security to a minority of South Africans in a region increas-
ingly faced with liberation movements from the 1960s onwards (Steenkamp, 2001;
Linden, 2004; Whande, 2007). As a physical locale, it presented problems whose
policy solution included militarization, conservation, veterinary disease control
and exclusion of local people. The early attempts to control local movements of
people predate the formation of the corridor, with veterinary disease controls
limiting animal movements across the Limpopo River. Some of the fences that
traverse the area are a result of this early interest in controlling veterinary diseases
and protecting livestock production, which continues today.
Protected area designation, in particular the extension of the Kruger National
Park north of the Levhuvhu River in 1969, also heralded a new form of control of
local people’s movements as well as their exclusion from environmental resources
that had been central to their livelihoods (Whande, 2007). Security concerns on
the part of apartheid South Africa sealed these control mechanisms, resulting in
the outright exclusion of local people from the Madimbo corridor. In short, veteri-
nary, military and conservation actors shaped the reality along and within the
Madimbo corridor.
154 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

The location of the Madimbo corridor, along an international boundary with

Zimbabwe, was strategic for apartheid South Africa’s national sovereignty and
security, as witnessed by the deployment of soldiers in the area in the late 1960s
and early 1970s (Poonan, 1996). What is crucial to note here is the linkages
between the military and conservation – the pursuit of their respective and shared
interests resulted in displacement and restricting movement of local people. From
the 1960s, the then-South African Defence Force (SADF) 2 was deployed to areas
along international borders where it acted to prevent illegal immigrants and guer-
rilla soldiers from entering South Africa (these areas included two military units in
the Kruger National Park assigned to the Mozambique border while the Madimbo
unit was for Zimbabwe) (see Mckenzie, 1995). Earlier, during the Anglo-Boer
war of 1899–1902, the western section of the corridor at Malala Drift had been
a flash point between the Boer-controlled Transvaal region and British-controlled
Southern Rhodesia (Burrett, 2002).
Policies do not necessarily provide solutions to everyone’s problems; often they
exacerbate a certain group’s problems but are tailored to provide solutions for
another. For local people, the corridor was both a home and source of livelihoods,
and they had historically hunted in the area to supplement their diets (Bulpin,
1954). In 1969 the Makuleke clan were moved from the eastern section of the
corridor and the Pafuri triangle to their current location at Ntlaveni, 80km to the
southwest (Steenkamp, 2001). Various Venda3 families, under Chiefs Mutele and
Tshikundamalema, were moved from the corridor to villages immediately along
the edges of the southern boundary of the corridor (Linden, 2004; Whande, 2007).
Endani’s family was moved, and in the process he lost his headmanship because
his royal family was moved into a different jurisdiction. As indicated on the map
(see Figure 7.2), he moved to the village of Tshikuyu but some of the people from
his area, who were under his leadership, moved to Bennde Mutale village. Some
of the villages, such as Madimbo and Gumbu, were moved several times to reflect
changing apartheid government concerns. Both the Makuleke and Venda families
which moved from the corridor were settled in areas designated according to the
apartheid government’s policy of Bantustans.4 The Tsonga Makuleke clan was
moved into a Tsonga Bantustan, Gazankulu, while the Venda were moved into the
Venda Bantustan.

Figure 7.2 The forced removals from the Madimbo corridor

 Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion? 155

The effects of the forced removals were devastating for the communities and
include the break-up of families, destruction of houses, settlement in poor agricul-
tural areas, loss of property and of access to natural resources along the Limpopo
River (Steenkamp, 2001; Whande, 2007). The legacy of the removals are contin-
uing contestations over who exactly was settled where and has a right to claim
which land, as indicated in Figure 7.2, with the area marked disputed between
Makuleke and Mutele.5 The area is also designated as the Matshakatini Nature
Reserve because the SADF gazetted a nature reserve in 1992, with the boundaries
for the Madimbo corridor and the nature reserve being contiguous.6 Gazetting
military bases into protected areas was not limited to the Madimbo corridor.
Mckenzie (1998) notes that the SADF established a nature and environmental
conservation unit in the early 1980s, and some military land was managed as
conservation land. This general trend within the military to use their training lands
for conservation might have motivated the gazetting of the Matshakatini Nature
Reserve in 1992, even though it is not clear why this occurred at this stage in the
final years of apartheid. A possible reason is that the military was anticipating
possible land claims as, by 1995, the newly constituted South African National
Defence Force (SANDF) was openly admitting that there were pressures to use
military land for other purposes (see Mckenzie, 1995). The effect of this gazet-
tement is that the area has been under multiple state authorities. These include
the Department of Public Works, which is the government owner of the land; the
SANDF with use rights to the area;7 and the Limpopo Tourism and Parks Board
providing management support to the nature reserve (see Mckenzie, 1998 for
comparable situations). However, it should be noted that the Limpopo Tourism
and Parks Board never physically established itself in the area in the conventional
sense of having game rangers, instead relying on periodic visits from nature conser-
vation officers from Musina Nature Reserve more than 100km away.8 Given the
evolution of transfrontier approaches in the area, it appears that the messy matrix
of political and administrative interests will get even more entangled and perhaps
more removed from the realm of local communities.9

Post-apartheid policy windows for regional

cooperation and local resource rights
Understanding the local natural resource governance dynamics along the Madimbo
corridor is difficult without first locating them within the regional and national
policy context that has emerged since the end of apartheid rule in South Africa. On
the one hand, countries in southern Africa hold that there is a central role for local
communities in decision-making over land and natural resources, as witnessed by
the development of widespread CBNRM initiatives during the last 20 years (see
Campbell and Shackleton, 2001) while on the other hand, policies and practices
for protected areas retain the centrality of the state in decision-making and imple-
mentation (see Metcalfe, 2003). In areas falling along geopolitical boundaries
such as the Madimbo corridor, the relationship between the need for community-
centred approaches and retention of the state’s centrality is often tense, making the
fixation of policy windows all the more difficult. In pursuing conservation goals,
156 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

the balance between the opening of windows of opportunity for local involvement
in decision-making and closing those windows in an exclusive fashion is difficult
to attain.

Transfrontier conservation approaches and the new

South Africa
From their popularization in the mid-1990s, transfrontier conservation approaches
were aligned with the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, providing
‘images of the continent that emerged after the collapse of the apartheid state
in South Africa’ that ‘were part of a process that sought to shape the future of
the continent under entirely new national, regional and global political environ-
ment’ (Ramutsindela, 2007, p142). Globally, the end of the Cold War opened a
policy window for conceptualizations of security other than state militarization
(Buzan, 1991). The narrow conceptualization of security in terms of state military
intervention was instead encompassed into more nuanced forms of security such
as human-concerned, focused on giving voice to the marginalized, and environ-
mental security, which acknowledged the role of degraded environments as sources
of conflict. Practically, the conceptual shift in the view of security was through
calls to redirect resources spent on militaries to fund natural resource manage-
ment approaches and development (Steiner, 1993; Cock and Mckenzie, 1998).
Transfrontier conservation approaches in southern Africa provide a link between
national security concerns, by offering a platform for dialogue and peaceful reso-
lution of conflicts, and concerns for the environment by adopting ecosystem
management approaches that transcend fragmented political boundaries (Hanks,
1997). Community-based approaches also offer new interpretations of security
in terms of community development needs (Koch, 2004). While the geo-strategic
focus on military security and the destabilizing role of South Africa gave way to
new forms of regional cooperation, peace and security, this has also led to the
strategic expansion of South African economic interests in southern Africa and
more broadly on the African continent. In terms of TFCAs, this is playing itself
out in terms of tourism revenue, which, in the absence of a clear revenue-sharing
structure, is a source of disgruntled voices among South Africa’s neighbours
(see van Ameron and Büscher, 2005). More broadly, post-Cold War Africa has
emerged as a post-apartheid South African export market, with volumes of trade
increasing to the advantage of South African exports (Daniel et al, 2003). South
Africa dominates in mergers and acquisitions of struggling African companies on
the continent in virtually all fields of operations ranging from finance, energy and
infrastructure, telecommunications and tourism. South Africa’s leadership in the
implementation of TFCAs has to be seen within this broad context, particularly in
terms of interests in tourism businesses and the role of tourism in TFCAs.
Transboundary approaches to biodiversity conservation and natural resources
management are now a prominent feature of inter-state cooperation for managing
shared natural resources across political boundaries. The SADC lists 17 regional
transfrontier conservation initiatives currently either in the conceptual phase or
being implemented.10 They are supported by the SADC protocol on wildlife,
which promotes transfrontier initiatives as inter-state cooperation mechanisms
 Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion? 157

(SADC, 1999), with the Peace Parks Foundation (PPF) playing the critical role
‘to fund and facilitate the development of TFCAs’ (Hanks, 1997, pp2–3). South
Africa – both in terms of state and non-state actor – has clearly taken leader-
ship of TFCA implementation, nowhere more prominently than in the flagship
GLTFCA.

The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area

Between Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe, the core Great Limpopo
Transfrontier Park (GLTP) covers an estimated 35,000km² incorporating the
Kruger National Park and the Makuleke Contractual National Park in South
Africa; the recently designated Limpopo National Park in Mozambique; and the
Gonarezhou National Park, Manjinji Pan Sanctuary and Malipati Safari Area
in Zimbabwe. The overall GLTFCA, encompassing the GLTP, covers an esti-
mated 100,000km², and additionally incorporates Zinave and Banhine National
Parks, Massingir and Corumana areas in Mozambique as well as privately and
state-owned conservation areas in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The rest of the
GLTFCA is made of communal areas in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The nego-
tiation process for the establishment of the GLTP started in the 1990s, culminating
in the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in 2000, followed by
the formal tri-state treaty of 2002 (PPF, 2008).
The signing of the MoU led to the constitution of a Joint Management Board
(JMB) for the area, supported in its work by thematic management committees,
which were conservation (later changed to conservation and veterinary); safety
and security; finance, human resources and legislation; and tourism. In 2004,
the management committees were composed of 35 people with a mixed back-
ground including veterinary officers, national parks officials, customs officials, the
police and one NGO official – the Director of the PPF – but not any community
representatives or NGOs concerned with community development or land rights
issues. The functions of the management committees are to implement action
plans as approved by the JMB. The JMB itself had 12 members responsible for
policy interpretation, approving action plans and monitoring implementation, and
supporting a three-member Ministerial Committee responsible for overall policy
guidance.
The absence of local community representatives in the official structures for the
GLTP and GLTFCA underscores the contention that TFCAs exclude the very
same beneficiaries to whom they claim to be bringing development. This raises the
question of the place of the land restitution process in restoring local land rights
and affording landowners the opportunity to determine land uses in the TFCA.

Post-apartheid policy windows for local communities

The major policy problem South Africa inherited from the colonial and apart-
heid systems is the gross inequalities that characterize the country’s social and
economic life. This is nowhere more evident than in relation to access to land
and natural resources. In a post-apartheid South Africa, the need to redress
these inequalities through community-centred approaches is seen in policies and
158 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

legislation stipulating the restitution of land rights. South Africa has instituted
a number of land and natural resource governance reforms aimed at redressing
historical and racially motivated land dispossessions. These reforms are especially
significant following decades of racial segregation and disenfranchisement of black
populations, which after the Natives Land Acts of 1913 and 1936 were eventually
restricted to only 13 per cent of land in South Africa, despite constituting the vast
majority of the country’s population. Additional reforms were aimed at improving
local governance after years of abuse by Tribal Authorities, institutionalized by the
1951 Tribal Authorities Act, and which acted as ‘decentralized despots’ answer-
able to the colonial and apartheid regimes (Ntsebeza, 2005; see also Murombedzi,
this volume). The 1994 Land Restitution Act aims to ensure that communities
dispossessed of land since 1913 as a result of racially discriminatory laws receive
equitable redress, either in terms of the actual lands they lost or alternative redress.
The process is handled through a land claims court and commission established
under the 1994 legislation. Other components of the land reform process include
land redistribution to the landless and addressing security of tenure for millions
of residents.
In relation to protected areas, the redress of historical injustices has thus far
been approached through co-management of Contractual National Parks (CNP),
which involves formation of legal entities in the form of Communal Property
Associations (CPAs) as provided for in the Communal Property Association Act
of 1996. That Act enables groups to collectively acquire, hold and manage land
under a locally defined and constituted association (Magome and Murombedzi,
2003; Reid et al, 2004; Cousins and Kepe, 2005; Grossman and Holden, 2008).
Co-management is now ‘the most popular approach for reconciling land
claims and biodiversity conservation in South Africa and beyond’ (Kepe, 2008,
p311), yet those two societal goals are still characterized by conflict (Kepe et
al, 2005). Contractual parks are instituted on land either belonging to the state
or groups of people and managed as a national park under joint management
agreements between SANParks and the group of people or landowners. CPAs
have represented local communities in co-management arrangements involving
claimed lands.
The Makuleke/Kruger CNP, adjacent to the Madimbo corridor and a constituent
of the GLTP, is frequently portrayed as a South African success story and ‘one of
the most advanced programmes of community involvement in conservation and
wildlife anywhere in the world’ (Steenkamp and Uhr, 2000, p2). Robbins and van
der Waal (2008, p54) note that this might be because the restitution discourses in
South Africa emphasize ‘reconciliation, nation building and economic develop-
ment rather than retributive justice’. The Makuleke community, through its CPA,
was from the beginning ‘prepared to maintain the conservation status of the land
as an integral part of the Kruger National Park’ (Steenkamp and Uhr, 2000, p7).
Yet it is also possible that conditions set by SANParks influenced the course and
nature of the agreement. The option of retaining land uses for conservation is also
impacted by the arrangements and agreements between the Ministry of Land
Affairs, on the one hand, and the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, on the
other hand (Kepe, 2008). Even though the agreement between the two ministries
was officially signed in 2008, in practice the negotiations from SANParks were
 Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion? 159

always aimed for a mutual gains outcome at worst. The Mkambati land claim
case in the Eastern Cape provides an example of this reluctance on the part of
the state to transfer land and allow the new owners freedom of deciding on land
uses. In Mkambati, Kepe et al (2005) highlight a constellation of state interests
pushing for retaining the area as a protected area as well as for economic devel-
opment through a Spatial Development Initiative (SDI) that could benefit the
land claimants and thereby quell some of the local grievances. Like the GLTP, the
grand plan also included expansion of the original protected area’s boundaries
into Pondoland National Park. A more comparable example, by virtue of loca-
tion along an international boundary, is the claim by both Khomani San and
Mier Transitional Local Council for part of the Kalahari Gemsbok National
Park, which has since been included in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park with the
claimant communities receiving land both within and outside the park. They are,
however, ‘excluded from management of the transfrontier park since their portion
of the park, it is argued, lies geographically outside of the crossborder resource
management area’ (Kepe et al, 2005, p12). What is important to note, however,
is the retention of the land for conservation purposes, assuaging the key interest
of SANParks (or the provincial conservation authorities as appropriate) and the
‘substitution’ of direct use of natural resources with indirect alternative forms of
economic development.
Also relevant are recent developments in relation to land claimed within
protected areas, which indicate continuing tensions between the need to balance
land rights and national objectives of biodiversity conservation. Indications are
that SANParks is reluctant to repeat co-management arrangements similar to
those in the Makuleke case, especially where land within the Kruger National Park
is concerned. In December 2008, the South African Cabinet under former care-
taker President Kgalema Motlanthe (who now serves as the Deputy President)
approved a plan to settle all land claims within the Kruger National Park through
equitable redress as opposed to actual restoration of the rights to land under claim.
Whereas restoration of land within the Kruger National Park would have meant
similar co-management arrangements between local communities and SANParks,
the latest decision means protected area management remains solely the preserve
of SANParks. Yet, according to the cabinet, the decision is meant to ‘balance
rights of claimant communities and the interests of society as a whole’ (GCIS,
2009). The rationale for this move reveals the tensions within the post-apartheid
government in trying to restore land rights in protected areas and meeting goals
of transnational conservation, which converges with the national tourism interests
as well as protected areas’ managerial preferences for retaining strong centralist
and bureaucratic approaches. Under the new President Jacob Zuma, this issue is
now being debated in Parliament, with the Land Claims Commission indicating
the required 20 billon Rand required to settle these claims is not available and the
new Minister responsible for land reform stating that ‘it is an issue that needs to
be resolved’ (Groenewald, 2009).
These developments clearly put paid to the idea that CNPs are a win–win solu-
tion for the restoration of land rights and achievement of biodiversity conservation
objectives. Previously, land transfers to claimant communities were accompanied
with a parallel negotiation for keeping the land as part of national parks through
160 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

co-management agreements (see Kepe, 2008). It is not yet clear what implications
the recent Cabinet notification and ongoing debates within the government will
have on the balance between conservation and development initiatives on claimed
land that is part of the national parks estate. At the same time, it appears land neigh-
bouring the Kruger National Park is subjected to the same conservation status as
core protected areas, with the land restitution claim for the Madimbo corridor
having dragged on for years on the basis that it is strategic in relation to transfron-
tier conservation objectives and national security and sovereignty concerns.

Contesting windows of exclusion:

Land rights along the Madimbo corridor
The dynamics along the Madimbo corridor suggest that where policy windows are
competing, different interests can appeal to those aspects of policy solutions that
advance their cause. The Madimbo corridor is located along the southern banks
of the Limpopo River and is about 45km in length and 3–6km wide, adjoining
the Makuleke/Kruger CNP which lies to the east. Both the Madimbo corridor
and Makuleke/Kruger CNP are of considerable strategic importance to non-local
actors, principally the Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Agriculture (veterinary),
Ministry of Environment and Tourism, as well as various conservation NGOs.
The strategic security importance of the area is evidenced by the long-standing
and recurrent presence of fugitives from law at the so-called Crooks Corner.11
The Makuleke and Madimbo land claims differ in that the Makuleke land has
been returned to local communities while the Madimbo corridor is still under
negotiation.
Following the Land Restitution Act of 1994, local people along the Madimbo
corridor who had been forcibly moved from the corridor claimed the area in 1998.
Initially the claim was divided into two, one led by the Gumbu people (from a village
by that name, see Figure 7.2) and the other by the Mutele people.12 However, it
was recommended by the Limpopo Regional Land Claims Commission (2004)
that it would be better if the two combined, which they subsequently did by
forming a joint Gumbu-Mutele CPA, later renamed Vhembe CPA after the local
reference to the Limpopo River. The Vhembe CPA was constituted by leaders
from both the Gumbu and Mutele areas (past tense as this leadership is currently
being disbanded, as apparently it was not properly registered).
Despite the fact that presently different state actors are saying the Vhembe CPA
was not properly registered, the Limpopo Regional Land Claims Commission
recommended that the Madimbo corridor be transferred to the claimants in
August 2004, which paved the way for negotiations on land uses and the actual
management and ownership of the land. The transfer of the land held promises of
opening up a variety of livelihood-related windows for local residents – irrigated
agriculture, possible mining following on diamond prospecting in the mid-1990s,
accessing grazing pastures and restoring old settlements along the banks of the
Limpopo River. However, from 2004 to date the community has been engaged
in protracted negotiations over land uses within the corridor, with, at first, the
SANDF taking the lead in claiming that it had to remain in the area for national
 Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion? 161

security purposes as well as conducive training conditions.13 As it turns out, the

transfer of the land was conditional on the SANDF retaining a part of the land for
training purposes, the quantity and specific location of which became subject to
negotiations. In a meeting in April 2006, the SANDF indicated that they ‘needed’
half the entire area of claimed land, a demand that did not sit well with the local
claimants. Additionally, not only did they want half the land, but this was also seen
locally as the most productive land in the eastern side of the corridor, and also
strategically located next to the Makuleke/Kruger CNP.
Besides the SANDF, the Vhembe CPA also had to contend with conserva-
tion officials as the area had been designated a nature reserve in 1992. What had
appeared to be an opening of windows in the post-apartheid reform era soon
became as uncertain as it had been in the past.
The ambiguity created by the overlapping interests of multiple state actors
has been an effective means to delay the negotiation process and finalization of
local land use planning. Essentially there are different layers of negotiation for the
restoration of land rights for the Madimbo corridor. The first is between the local
community and the different state units with an interest in the Madimbo corridor.
The second layer is among the state units themselves and the third is between the
state and NGOs such as PPF. The intricacies of this negotiation can be illustrated
in the example of the de-proclamation request by the Vhembe CPA.
In April 2006, the Vhembe CPA requested that the Matshakatini Nature Reserve
be de-proclaimed and local residents formally allowed to make land use decisions,
gain direct access to the corridor for resource use and the rebuilding of settle-
ments.14 This has not happened even though the SANDF suddenly left the area
in early 2009. The departure of the SANDF has not changed anything for local
people, however, as the Limpopo Tourism and Parks Board has insisted that the
de-proclamation can only be requested by those who set the nature reserve up in
the first place (the SANDF) (see Whande 2007).
While negotiations over de-proclamation of the reserve between the CPA and
the state are ongoing, locally there are also other manifestations of competition
and conflict over authority, a situation that can only weaken the community in its
resolve to restore access to land and resources within the Madimbo corridor. The
possibility of having a nature reserve divided local people, with the CPA leadership
generally in favour of grazing, mining and human settlements in the area while
chief Mutele and some of the village headmen along the Madimbo corridor are in
favour of conservation-driven tourism. These dynamics mirror broader contesta-
tions within the GLTFCA that involve, on the one hand, conservation and tourism
interests, and on the other hand land rights and development interests.

Perpetuating local exclusion:The South Africa National

Defence Force and the Limpopo Tourism and Parks Board
It has been more than five years since the transfer of the Madimbo corridor to
the local claimants was formally approved in 2004. Part of this delay is because
the agreement contained a condition that the SANDF should continue using part
of the land for training purposes and part is due to the fact that the area is also
a nature reserve. It is not clear what is going to happen now since the SANDF
162 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

quickly packed up and left the corridor in March/April 2009, and were imme-
diately replaced by a ‘special’ policing unit. According to the police, their task is
border patrols. This is understandable, as the area is regarded as a major migrant
route for Zimbabweans coming to South Africa (Hennop, 2001).
The SANDF noted the unique conditions for military training along the
Madimbo corridor (it still retains a small number of troops for ‘special’ training
even after the SANDF moved out of the area). The argument to stay was made in
relation to South Africa’s peacekeeping obligations and operations on the African
continent, with the SANDF officials arguing that the climatic conditions, terrain
and vegetation were similar to environmental conditions they encounter on peace-
keeping missions in other African countries.15 The SANDF also argued that they
needed half of the corridor for military training purposes, owing to the medium-
range missiles they trained with.
However, it is unlikely that the military wanted to stay in the area solely because
of similar climatic conditions to the ones encountered on peacekeeping opera-
tions. A more plausible reason for the continued presence of the military is directly
linked to delaying the finalization of the land claim pursuant to alternative border
control arrangements being made. Issues of security, specifically to controlling the
influx of Zimbabwean economic refugees (see Hofstater, 2005) are important,16
even though the discourse surrounding TFCAs suggests otherwise.
While acknowledging wide-ranging changes in international relations in the
post-Cold War and post-apartheid era, the South African government still regards
certain inter-state activities and conditions as a threat to the South African state. In
particular, such threats include underdevelopment, illiteracy and unemployment
in neighbouring states, which can result in a flood of refugees which is seen as a
threat to South Africa (Government of South Africa, 1995). Until recently, when
the soldiers left the Madimbo corridor, criminal activities within the corridor were
controlled by the military and not the police.17 The SANDF apprehended illegal
immigrants and smugglers (of gold, cigarettes and meat products) and handed
them over to the police.
Hennop (2001) notes the SANDF has a ‘filter system’ for border controls,
with the first filter concerned with deployment of soldiers along the actual border
line to raise the alarm concerning illegal immigrants, in this case the Limpopo
River. The first ten kilometres forms the second filter while the third filter is 30km
from the second, and these two zones are patrolled as immigrants start moving
towards major roads, catching taxis and buses. It is therefore more likely that the
desire for continued presence along the Madimbo corridor was motivated by
concerns focused on illegal immigrants rather than training conditions, and as
soon as the police unit was ready to take over operations along the first filter, the
SANDF left.
Local residents dismissed the state’s rationales for security, arguing that they
were the ones suffering the most from the presence of the SANDF. They particu-
larly pointed out that the presence of the military and the position of the fence on
the South African side meant natural resources within the corridor were available
to Zimbabweans and not to them as the new owners of the land. In his presenta-
tion about the de-proclamation of the Matshakatini Nature Reserve, the chair-
person of the Vhembe CPA argued that livestock from Zimbabwe grazed within
 Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion? 163

the corridor and that local South African residents should also be allowed to access
the pastures. In challenging their continued exclusion from the corridor, local resi-
dents also alleged that the SANDF was involved in hunting wildlife in the area,
an allegation officials from the Limpopo Tourism and Parks Board indicated was
widespread wherever nature reserves had been planned on land occupied by the
SANDF (see Whande, 2007). According to local people, the continued presence
of the SANDF had little to do with national security but rather was intended to
keep local people out of the corridor to ease access for pursuing personal hunting
interests. The pursuit of national security interests was viewed locally as benefiting
individual senior military officials at the expense of local livelihood security and
access rights to the corridor.18
At the same time, it appears the CPA has often been consumed in conflicts with
the Chief and failed to realize certain opportunities to get state actors on their
side, even as such opportunities may have meant the continued involvement of the
state in the affairs of the Madimbo corridor. In 2007, the Limpopo Tourism and
Parks Board proposed using the Madimbo corridor as a hunting concession.19
While this was suggested as a temporary measure, the CPA refused to apply for a
concession, arguing that this would further delay their land claim, while by contrast
Chief Mutele supported the proposal. The CPA rejected the proposal, essentially
arguing that if the Chief supports it, then it is bad. Leaders of the CPA also argued
that the Limpopo Tourism and Parks Board was scripting its own involvement in
the future management of the Madimbo corridor, a misread of the situation as
the Limpopo Tourism and Parks Board was already involved by virtue of the area
having been designated a nature reserve. The CPA leadership was perhaps moti-
vated by the fact that the majority of the Vhembe CPA leadership own cattle – the
potential to gain access to grazing pastures might have motivated them to take
leadership positions in the land claim – and a hunting concession will potentially
be in conflict with their own livelihood interests. It is perhaps imperative to note
here that there is diversity of opinions on how to use the Madimbo corridor, as
in any group setting with divergent and convergent interests. But more impor-
tantly, the CPA’s rejection of the hunting concession mirrors a common sentiment
among local residents, namely their preference for a redistributive rather than a
‘win–win’ outcome to the land claim process.
One way for the local residents to gain total control over the Madimbo corridor is
through getting the different state actors out of the area and affairs of the corridor.
Instead of agreeing to the concession as proposed by the Limpopo Tourism and
Parks Board, the CPA pushed to have the area de-proclaimed as a nature reserve,
which essentially would have stripped the parks board of any decision-making
authority over the corridor. In requesting de-proclamation, the CPA framed its
argument in terms of local livelihoods, often pointing out that conservation in the
past had contributed little or nothing to their livelihoods. Residents of Bennde
Mutale village, who live directly next to the Makuleke Kruger Contractual Park
and the Makuya CNP, pointed out that they ‘were promised jobs at the begin-
ning’ but ‘we were surprised that the fences were put up to keep us outside’.20 The
refusal to consider tourism as a livelihood was based on mistrust of conservation
officials as people noted that, ‘Park people promised us long-term jobs, but, imme-
diately after the fence was done they fired us.’21 Some of the residents in Bennde
164 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

Mutale pointed out that natural resources, such as ilala palms, which they use for
making palm wine and sustaining a living, had been fenced inside the parks. They
argued that the tourism jobs that had been planned were not forthcoming, and
their livelihood situation had deteriorated as a result. This is despite the fact that
when parks were established in the area, people worked to put fences up and build
houses for game rangers, a situation one of the residents reflects on:

When the park was started, some local people were employed there. But the park
was the beginning of restrictions for our cattle to graze there. We could not argue
against the park, as some people now had jobs.22

The CPA also argued that de-proclamation would allow them to access grazing
pastures currently fenced off in the corridor. Applying for a concession, they
argued, will just result in the closure of any other livelihood activities. From their
arguments, it is clear that obtaining a more direct link between livelihoods and
conservation than that proposed by state officials is perceived by locals as their
window of opportunity in the land claim process’s reformative undertaking.
But the de-proclamation request has taken a long time to resolve since it was offi-
cially requested in 2006 and indications are that this is not going to be fully agreed
to. In other words, the window of opportunity for direct use of land and natural
resources within the Madimbo corridor appears unlikely to be opened, a reality the
CPA acknowledges. Recently the government departments assigned to negotiate
land uses with the CPA hired an ‘independent’ consultant23 to, according to the
CPA, put in place a CPA that will agree to tourism as a source of livelihoods. This
is possible as the Regional Land Claims Commission, despite having approved
the transfer of land in 2004, now says the Vhembe CPA as currently constituted
is illegal. The implications of this, of course, is that the CPA as currently consti-
tuted cannot proceed with land use planning even if the area is de-proclaimed as
a nature reserve. A further hindrance is that officials from the Parks and Tourism
Board indicated de-proclamation of the Matshakatini Nature Reserve can only be
requested by the SANDF, as they are the ones who established the reserve in the
first place.24 With growing external interest in the land for TFCA conservation
purposes, it is unlikely that there is going to be a resolution that responds to the
needs and aspirations of the CPA leadership.

Closing windows are forever: Strategies to keep

local people out of the Madimbo corridor
While South Africa’s post-apartheid national policy changes emphasize co-manage-
ment and the involvement and rights of local communities, the implementation of
the GLTFCA appears to prioritize centralized conservation, tourism investment
and security interests. The way this is playing out in the GLTFCA is through the
exclusion of local communities from a meaningful contribution towards the evolu-
tion of the initiative, both in terms of shaping policy and practical implementation.
The role of the Peace Parks Foundation in facilitating the implementation of the
GLTP and the GLTFCA is important in understanding these perceptions.
 Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion? 165

Different groups of stakeholders are differently engaged by the PPF. For

instance, Heads of State are invited to be patrons of the PPF, while at an opera-
tional level technical experts’ salaries are met by the foundation. The PPF to date
has not focused on getting local communities involved in the implementation of
the GLTP and the GLTFCA; to the contrary, it is actively pushing for the alien-
ation of local communities. Spierenburg and Wels (2006) use the examples of
mapping to show how the operations of the PPF are essentially disenfranchising
local communities. Mapping is one of the tools deployed by the PPF ‘to create
ecological and social information systems for the various TFCAs under develop-
ment’ (PPF, 2004). Duffy (2006) notes the use of similar maps by the African
Wildlife Foundation in the GLTFCA, which are also not reflective of local realities
and livelihood interests.
The maps that PPF produces fulfil a number of objectives. Firstly, they are
thematic in that they are used for showing conservation areas within the GLTFCA.
They do not indicate, however, the contesting local land use types, such as live-
stock and crop agriculture, in these areas. Secondly, they are cadastral maps; they
denote property boundaries between state land (in this case land allocated for
conservation purposes) and other forms of land tenure, specifically communal
land. Related to the cadastral maps are the political and administrative aspects,
especially where boundaries of municipalities, wards and chiefly territories coin-
cide and overlap. What is significant about the maps, however, is not so much what
they show, but what they do not show. In clearly marking the property boundaries,
the maps do not show how some of these boundaries are contested and constantly
negotiated by local demands for land and natural resources based on historical
claims. As a result, the maps are deployed in a way that gives prominence to certain
land uses in the GLTFCA while remaining silent on competing and conflicting
land use, in particular those that might be preferable for local communities and
would create meaningful entry points for local participation.
The main strategy to involve local communities in the constituent communal
areas is through tourism development. Tourism is also a major driving force
behind the whole initiative even as it is highly susceptible to political disturbances
(see Ferreira, 2004). The magical attraction of tourism, similar to the magic of
maps that visually simplify highly complex situations, is in the numbers. The PPF
(2008) forecasts 61,000 potential jobs in Limpopo National Park (equivalent to
more than a third of Mozambique’s entire civil service of 167,420 people) as a
result of sharing the 1.3 million tourists who visit the Kruger National Park, but
this estimate does not actually provide the numbers of people already working in
the Kruger National Park. With the estimated population of communal area resi-
dents within the GLTFCA at about 500,000, such high employment numbers, if
attainable and depending on the nature of the work and remuneration, will have
a major impact on livelihoods. These statistics, however, do not indicate anything
about the nature of state–local engagement, whether this involves adopting new
forms of governance from the ground up or a continuation of the imposition of
blueprints from above.
It is clear, however, referring back to Salafsky and Wollenberg’s (2000) concep-
tualization of the linkages between conservation and livelihoods, that the GLTFCA
approach is premised on substituting complex local livelihoods with indirect links
166 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

to conservation and tourism. The implications of the numbers game therefore can
be assessed in governance terms, whether local communities have any authority
to influence the nature of the linkages between conservation of globally significant
biodiversity and their own livelihoods or they are perpetually grateful for jobs
which they have limited control over and which can be diverted elsewhere on the
slightest indication of political instability. Current tourism planning processes do
not do much to suggest that equity and inclusiveness is one of the main priorities.
In South Africa and Zimbabwe, the PPF (2008) progress report notes:

…the Pafuri Integrated Land-use and Tourism Plan was drafted in order to inte-
grate tourism development and conservation in the Pafuri Region. This region
includes the northern section of the Limpopo and Kruger National parks, the
Makuleke region, areas in South Africa’s Limpopo Province that lie to the
west of the Kruger National Park and the Makuleke region, and the Sengwe
and Tshipise communal areas in Zimbabwe.
(my own emphasis)

Despite the contested nature of the land restitution along the Madimbo corridor,
the PPF report of 2008 as well as some of the maps produced by PPF and
Landscape Architects (2006) already portray the area as a link to yet another
TFCA to the northwest of South Africa, the Greater Mapungubwe TFCA, and
as such already earmarked for tourism development. The point here is not so
much that the area is included in the tourism plans but rather that the process of
identifying such areas continues the top-down virtual mapping of colonial times,
rather than a consultation with the local communities that effectively stand to lose
or gain the most.
Local communities are further excluded from the implementation of the
GLTFCA on national sovereignty issues. In part this is contributing to the lack
of an organic evolution of local transboundary institutions in the management
of natural resources. For instance, communities along the Madimbo corridor
in South Africa experience high levels of cattle thefts while those in Zimbabwe
experience goat theft.25 It is suspected the livestock is driven across boundaries,
yet state controls of human movement continue to hinder meaningful collab-
oration in tracking the livestock and putting in place collaborative monitoring
arrangements. Interviews with both the military and police force indicate they are
unaware (at the local operational level) of the implementation of the GLTFCA
and act more as a hindrance to any potential local collaborations than as facilita-
tors. The recently constituted Livestock Committee,26 with a mandate to establish
links with Zimbabwean livestock owners, still faces difficulties in moving across
national borders.
While local communities present an option in crossborder facilitation of commu-
nity-based approaches and balancing the objectives of biodiversity conservation
and local development, the governance structures evolving within the GLTFCA,
such as the management committees and the Joint Management Board, are slowly
resulting in the marginalization of communities in both decision-making and
the actual management of land and natural resources. As a result, the focus has
shifted drastically to issues of state-led conservation, which quickly is becoming
 Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion? 167

the one-size-fits-all for economic opportunities, local communities’ needs and

biodiversity conservation. Conservation here is synonymous with exclusive state
protected areas, resulting in the designation of a national park on the Mozambique
side for ‘offloading’ elephant populations from the Kruger National Park, although
management of elephant populations is not the stated rationale for the Limpopo
National Park. As well as an exclusive emphasis on state protected areas as the
form of ‘conservation’ to be pursued, there is also a reluctance to recognize other
forms of land use even in areas meant for ‘multiple land uses’. As a result, ‘conser-
vation’, while on paper including the idea of benefits to local communities and
development through tourism, is increasingly portrayed as the only measure that
will promote regional integration in the context of TFCAs. The focus on conserva-
tion indicates a lack of integrated planning and little understanding of the complex
land use approaches in the area, and is trending towards putting in place windows
for the outright exclusion of local people.

Conclusion
Negotiations over land use and tenure in the Madimbo corridor juxtapose efforts
to restore local land and resource rights against national and global interests in
transboundary conservation and South African maintenance of national sover-
eignty and security. Both provide policy windows for dealing with pressing soci-
etal problems of inequality and dispossession in the case of land and resource
rights and conserving globally significant biodiversity in the case of transfrontier
conservation. The policy and legislative reforms of the post-apartheid era, particu-
larly in relation to land restitution and co-management of contractual national
parks, provide a window of opportunity to redress historical injustices. However,
as this case shows, there continue to be formidable challenges to implementation
and powerful forces that keep such windows shut and locals excluded.
The case discussed here suggests that while policy windows are in a continuous
state of flux, the interaction of various actors impacts on the outcome of what is
actually implemented. This can be seen in the reluctance among national-level
actors within the GLTFCA to move from conservation-driven tourism as the only
sustainable land use to truly embracing multiple uses of natural resources and
exploring more ways of linking conservation and livelihoods in localities such as
the Madimbo corridor.
From this case and other examples in South Africa, it appears co-management
is increasingly restricting itself towards promoting indirect linkages (through
tourism) between livelihoods and conservation, to the exclusion of other liveli-
hood strategies that rely on more direct uses of natural resources. The implications
of this in relation to ongoing negotiations over lands and resources is that the state
is often relatively intractable when it comes to conservation and that the posi-
tion of the state is necessarily one oriented towards mutual gains not distributive
outcomes (Fay, 2007). In other words, pursuit of retributive justice and a redistrib-
utive outcome is counter to current bureaucratic perceptions of nation-building
(see Robbins and van der Waal, 2008; Rihoy and Maguranyanga, this volume on
the Botswana discourse). The result is that in cases where external interests are
168 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

high, such as along the Madimbo corridor, in relation to biodiversity conservation,

national security and sovereignty, the window of opportunity for restoring local
land rights has been turned into a window for continued exclusion.
While the diverse set of actors often acknowledge local communities in their
programmes of work, the dynamics along the Madimbo corridor call into ques-
tion the actual relevance of such references. Additionally, the recent decision by
the South African Cabinet not to restore land rights in relation to land claims in
the Kruger National Park and the pursuit of co-management even when diverging
views exist locally (see Kepe, 2008) raise questions about the perceptions of polit-
ical leaders with regards to the co-management of CNPs. Local communities, as
well as being physically excluded from certain environments deemed important
for biodiversity conservation at national and global scales, are also excluded from
direct involvement in policy-making processes. However, as lessons from a century
of contested implementation of protected areas show, it is unlikely that forced
decisions are going to be sustainable in the long run. While the local Madimbo
residents have adhered to the legal process as provided in the Restitution Act, they
have also previously resorted to illegal hunting within the corridor and at times
even within the Makuleke Contractual National Park. Such forms of resistance are
likely to be repeated in a context where decisions are enforced from outside, and
they highlight local agency against what are perceived as injustices.
An important dimension of the Madimbo corridor is that local communities
have not accepted their exclusion from land and natural resource governance.
Rather, communities have actively used the provisions of the post-apartheid laws
and policies to contest exclusion. This local agency is seen both in using the legis-
lative changes from 1994 to claim lands, but also in pushing for the de-procla-
mation of the Matshakatini Nature Reserve. The stories told by Endani, Gakato
and Maphukumele (as well as countless others who lived and experienced forced
removals) are further testimony to local agency.Yet the relationships between local
people and other actors can be summed up by referring to maps. While the locally
produced map shows details of local people’s settlements within the corridor, state
and NGO TFCA maps produce a blanket of tourism and wildlife conservation.

Acknowledgements
I thank Bram Büscher, Patience Mutopo and Michael Schoon for comments
on a draft version of this paper. The data presented here was part of the multi-
disciplinary collaborative research project ACACIA (Arid Climate, Adaptation
and Cultural Innovation in Africa) at the University of Cologne, funded by the
German Research Foundation.

Notes
1 See: http://www.boundlesssa.com/en/
2 Changed to South African National Defence Force (SANDF) at the end of apartheid
in 1994 and to reflect the inclusion of Bantustans in the whole of South Africa.
 Windows of Opportunity or Exclusion? 169

3 The Venda people are located in northern South Africa and south to southwestern
Zimbabwe. Linguistically, TshiVenda is related to Shona spoken predominantly in
Zimbabwe and Sotho. They also share architectural designs with the Shona as seen
in the cities built of stone such as Mapungubwe, Dzata and Great Zimbabwe (see
Stayt, 1931).
4 The apartheid government argued that black South Africans were not a homogeneous
group and that they could seek self-governance on the basis of culture and language
(Bennett, 1996). In reality, however, Bantustans were meant to confine black South
Africans to less than adequate land (13 per cent of the entire country) and to control
their movement between the Bantustans and commercial and industrial South Africa.
5 A first meeting in 15 years, facilitated by the NGO ResourceAfrica’s Community
Theatre Outreach, was recently held between the Makuleke and Mutele (Bennde
Mutale) people to resolve their differences and explore working together, mostly on
tourism-related issues.
6 Administrator’s Notice 4 (Provincial Gazette 4799, 1 January 1992).
7 The SANDF left the area in March/April 2009 and it is not clear at the moment what
their interest in the area is.
8 Interview with SANDF officers, Polokwane, May 2006.
9 The Limpopo Tourism and Parks Board itself is faced with considerable uncertainty as
it is generally left out of the TFCA planning processes.
10 See: www.sadc.int/fanr/naturalresources/transfrontier/.
11 The Crooks Corner is located within the neighbouring Makuleke/Kruger Contractual
National Park and is the confluence of the Limpopo and Pafuri Rivers. It draws its
name from the fact that in the past fugitives from law escaping from the developing
towns and big game hunters came here from where they ran their hunting operations
and acted as middlemen for Africans coming en route to seek jobs on diamond and
gold mines (see Bulpin, 1954).
12 It is pertinent to note here that Gumbu is a village and as such is constituent to a bigger
traditional area under Chief Tshikundamalema. The Mutele, on the other hand, is a
collection of villages under Chief Mutele.
13 SANDF presentation at Madimbo base, April 2006.
14 Presentation by Nelson Masikhwa, the former chairperson of the Vhembe CPA at a
meeting with various state agencies, April 2006.
15 SANDF presentation, April 2006.
16 Interview, Jack Greefe, Pafuri Gate, March 2006.
17 Interview, Thohoyandou, March 2006.
18 Interviews members of the Vhembe CPA, April 2006; Junior Soldiers at Madimbo
corridor, June 2007.
19 Interview, Polokwane October 2007.
20 Focus Group Discussion, Bennde Mutale Village, April 2006.
21 Interview, Bennde Mutale Village, March 2007.
22 Interview, Bennde Mutale Village, October 2005.
23 Some members of the Vhembe CPA pointed out to me in May 2009 that the consultant
is not independent as he has been promised an environmental impact assessment job
within the corridor if plans for the bridge along the Limpopo River are approved. They
alleged he had been hired to ‘get rid of them’ and put in place people who support
Chief Mutele on using the land for conservation purposes (Interview, May 2009).
24 Interview, Polokwane, October 2007.
25 Interviews with local veterinary officials, May 2009.
26 This was formed by local cattle owners in May 2009 to coordinate tracking of stolen
cattle.
170 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

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 8

‘People are Not Happy’:

Crisis, Adaptation and Resilience in
Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE Programme1

Liz Rihoy, Chaka Chirozva and Simon Anstey

Introduction
In the early 1990s Mahenye Ward, located in southeast Zimbabwe, was a leading
local reference point for the widely heralded CAMPFIRE Programme (Communal
Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources), which was in turn
a leading influence on wider experimentation with community-based natural
resource management (CBNRM) across southern Africa. Regional and interna-
tional analyses of CAMPFIRE held Mahenye up as a leading functional example
of the programme’s aspirations to forge new links between local democracy, rural
development and wildlife conservation (Peterson, 1991; Murphree, 1995; Borrini-
Feyerabend, 1997; Murphree, 2001).
Key factors in the relative success of local people in Mahenye to sustainably
manage and derive benefits from their natural resources included ‘the insights,
ingenuity and commitment of socially dedicated individuals in positions of influ-
ence or leadership…which has been balanced in its sources of traditional and
popular legitimation’; an ‘enlightened private sector’; a capacity for flexibility and
acceptance of innovation; and particularly local intra-communal cohesiveness:

…in-group solidarity, rooted in history and reinforced by perceptions of external

differences…Like any community Mahenye has its internal differentiations but
these have been contained by a sense of collective communal interest. The impor-
tance of this condition cannot be overstressed...
(Murphree, 2001, p192)

More recently, and again both reflecting and informing changed national and
regional discourse around CBNRM (e.g. Dzingirai and Breen, 2005), the narra-
tive emerging from Mahenye has shifted to one of crisis and collapse and a
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 175

questioning of the merits of devolving rights over natural resources to the local
level (Balint and Mashinya, 2006). Scholars report how local élites have under-
mined the formerly flourishing CAMPFIRE system and formerly democratic
local institutions (Ibid.)
The narratives and counter-narratives2 about Mahenye and its CBNRM initia-
tive matter not only because of the centrality of natural resources to the people of
the Ward, to their survival and their future livelihoods. They also matter because,
as in the 1990s, Mahenye has an impact and reach far beyond a peripheral zone
of Zimbabwe. The recent narrative of crisis in CAMPFIRE in Mahenye Ward,
in questioning the merits of devolution of natural resource governance, in local
élite capture of benefits and decision-making, in the strivings for participatory
democracy, and in resilience and adaptability all have their reflections and rele-
vance at other scales. These range from academic or policy debates on the ‘crisis’
in CBNRM in southern Africa (e.g. Dzingirai and Breen, 2005; see also Mapedza,
2007), on the contested evolutions of democracy in Zimbabwe or the region and
on natural resource management and human livelihoods more widely.

Methodology
This chapter is based on interviews, primary research and secondary sources.
Research in Mahenye was initiated by one of the authors who spent one month
living in the Ward in August 2005. He focused on familiarizing himself with
the day-to-day lifestyles, concerns, characters and aspirations of the people of
Mahenye, holding both informal discussions and formal semi-structured inter-
views with people living and working there. This was followed by a one-week
visit by all the authors in October 2005, during which initial research was verified
and further interviews and analysis undertaken. Field-level research was comple-
mented by interviews with relevant government officials, politicians, donors,
NGOs, academics and private sector representatives at both district and national
level who are currently (or were formerly) involved in CAMPFIRE implementa-
tion, analysis and policy development (see also Rihoy, forthcoming).
In total over 100 semi-structured interviews were conducted over a four-month
period, including over 50 with people in Mahenye.3 Attention was paid to ensuring
that a representative mix of people was interviewed. These included those who are
currently and were formerly involved with the Mahenye CAMPFIRE committee,
traditional leaders, others in positions of authority, government employees (e.g.
teachers and health workers), employees of the lodges and safari operator, private
business people and subsistence farmers.

Background
Evolutions of CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe
Over the past 20 years the CAMPFIRE programme – like Zimbabwe itself – has
seen dramatic fluctuations in its fortunes and in the way in which it has been
perceived. CAMPFIRE was initiated in the 1980s by the Department of National
176 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

Parks and Wildlife Management. By the 1990s CAMPFIRE was embraced as a

holistic approach to environment and development endorsed by the Government
of Zimbabwe, local and international NGOs and drawn upon as a source of inspi-
ration for natural resource management regionally (Jones and Murphree, 2001;
see Nelson, this volume, Chapter 1).
Since 2000, CAMPFIRE has frequently been portrayed as the archetypal
example of CBNRM in southern Africa in crisis (Katerere, 2001; Dzingirai and
Breen 2005). It has witnessed the growth, followed by the demise, of a coordi-
nated, multiskilled and expert group of organizations and individuals committed
to the implementation of the programme, collectively known as the CAMPFIRE
Collaborative Group (CCG) (Rihoy, forthcoming). It has grown from an initia-
tive involving 2–3 districts, to one in which 52 of the country’s 57 districts are
involved (Child et al, 2003). During the period 1990–2003 it was the recipient of
approximately US$30 million in external funding from a variety of international
donors (Balint and Mashinya, 2006), all of which have now withdrawn, leaving the
programme largely unfunded.
CAMPFIRE has in practice largely been a process of decentralization of legal
authority over wildlife to Rural District Councils (RDCs), rather than one of devo-
lution to sub-district level semi-autonomous institutions as was originally concep-
tualized (Murphree, 2005; see also Nelson, this volume, Chapter 1). Such ‘aborted
devolution’ has repeatedly been identified as the prime challenge for CAMPFIRE
and indicative of the need to move on to what Child (2004) calls ‘second-genera-
tion CBNRM’ in which clear authority and responsibility over decision-making is
shifted to the smaller scale of producer communities, rather than partially through
national or district government agencies.
At the same time, there has also been a growing chorus of voices raising a
cautionary note about devolution as panacea. Research from other countries in
the region and globally (e.g. Ribot, 2004) contends that management institutions
that are not accountable to their constituents (such as those usurped by local
élites) can be as serious an impediment to effective community management of
natural resources as decentralized control through local government. Murphree
(2000), however, points out that devolution is not an exercise in isolationism, but a
process of finding local regime inter-dependence within the larger setting of inter-
dependence or nested institutions at many scales (see also Ostrom, 1990).
In the CAMPFIRE context these interconnected governance elements include
the people of a ward, village or ‘producer community’ who delegate upwards to
a CAMPFIRE committee; the RDC; and national government agencies to tackle
jurisdictional, functional or ecological scale aspects; but who retain the right to
accountability from this delegation of authority – whether by committee, chair of
committee, local or traditional government, RDC or others. Devolution remains
the ‘cardinal input’ (see Murphree and Mazambani, 2002) but a hierarchy of insti-
tutions based on delegation from, and accountability to, the producer community
provides the cross-scale linkages and democratic process to resolve either local,
district or national misappropriation of funds or power. In this sense, CAMPFIRE
is fundamentally about experiments in and piloting of democratic governance,
lodged in issues of national and local politics, and the people and the scales that
they interact within that comprises such politics.
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 177

The national context

Zimbabwe has undergone significant and far-reaching political, economic and
social upheavals since the mid-1980s when CAMPFIRE was first introduced, and
since 2000 has descended into a state of protracted crisis. Its relatively strong
economy has been reduced to the weakest in the region (Bauer and Taylor, 2005;
Hill, 2005). Once reasonably stable political conditions are now characterized by
civil unrest and political repression and a previously well-functioning bureaucracy
is in tatters. Respect for basic democratic principles, the rule of law and human
rights are limited in their observation (Hammar and Raftopoulos, 2003; Harold-
Barry, 2004). Zimbabwe, once a darling of the international donor community,
has become a pariah and exhibits many of the attributes of ‘disorder as a political
instrument’ in which political actors and élites seek to maximize their returns from
conditions of confusion and uncertainty (Chabal and Daloz, 1999). This decline
has had significant impacts on many different elements of the CAMPFIRE
programme, including the process of policy-making, the economic benefits avail-
able from wildlife and tourism, donor or private investment, governance arrange-
ments and implementation capacities of both NGOs and government agencies.

Economic conditions
The negative macro-economic and political environment in the post-2000 period
presents major challenges for local communities to generate revenue from wild-
life. Between 2000 and 2003 Zimbabwe’s GDP plummeted by 30 per cent and
the trend has continued; manufacturing has declined by 51 per cent since 1997
and exports fallen by a half since 2001 (Dell, 2005). Inflation rates reached 1700
per cent by 2005 and near world-record hyperinflation overtook the economy by
2008, rendering the Zimbabwean dollar (Z$) virtually worthless from one day to
the next. Dell (2005) estimates that the proportion of the population living below
the official poverty line has more than doubled since the mid-1990s, standing at
about 80 per cent as of 2005.
The political and economic turmoil has led to the collapse of the tourism sector.
Nemarundwe (2005) highlights the negative impacts of this economic climate
on CAMPFIRE, compromising not only its income-generating potential through
tourism but also undermining community investment projects. Inflationary
changes in prices make a mockery of budgeting, erode financial benefits and
value, and given the cycle in which payments of household cash dividends from
CAMPFIRE revenue activities takes place six months to a year after activities have
occurred, the loses to inflation of cash benefits are massive. Finally, in the absence
of many other income or taxable options, the current situation is further increasing
the RDCs’ dependence on CAMPFIRE wildlife revenue for survival, presenting a
disincentive for fiscal or other devolution (see also Taylor and Murphree, 2007).

Political climate
The extreme economic and political problems that now face Zimbabwe can best
be analysed and understood in the context of its history (Raftopoulous, 2004).
Zimbabwe emerged from almost a century of white rule, following a long and
violent liberation war that ended in 1980, fought largely over land. Since 1980, the
178 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

political priorities of the government have been dominated by reversing decades

of racially-biased inequalities in land, resource and asset distribution (Hammar
and Raftopoulous, 2004). As the ruling party slogan ‘the land is the economy,
the economy is the land’ implies, struggles over land have been at centre stage
throughout the colonial and post-colonial period. This struggle over land and
natural resources is central to understanding the political dimensions of natural
resource management in Zimbabwe, and explaining why it receives such a high
degree of political prominence.
By the late 1990s, due to a range of factors, the political legitimacy of the ruling
ZANU-PF party was coming under increasing public scrutiny, culminating in
significant and escalating electoral challenges and civil unrest. The response on
the part of the party-state was increased authoritarianism, violence and repression
of political opposition, leading to the creation of a climate of fear and intolerance
(Raftopoulous and Savage, 2005) and a breakdown in the rule of law (Bauer and
Taylor, 2005; Hill, 2005). Concerted efforts by the ruling party to consolidate rural
support were undertaken, most significantly the Fast Track Land Reform Process
(Keeley and Scoones, 2003) but also through the introduction of the Traditional
Leaders Act (TLA) in 2001. This restored legal powers and authority to chiefs (a
shift from and unclear addition to the previous policy of democratically elected
local governance at village and ward level) and is in essence a replica of colonial
strategies towards the traditional leadership geared towards co-opting the tradi-
tional leadership to ensure political penetration of the state and ruling party into
rural landscapes (see Murombedzi, this volume).
In broad political terms Zimbabwe can no longer be described as an ordered
political polity (Chabal and Daloz, 1999) in which political opportunities and
resources are formally defined and codified by legislation or precedent. Whereas
in the 1980s Zimbabwe had a relatively well-functioning bureaucracy, at present
informal political relationships have come to play a much greater role in policy
formulation and implementation. Powerful ruling party politicians have assumed
leading roles within the wildlife management industry in Zimbabwe (see for
example Hammer, 2006) and overt political influence on government decision-
making is now prevalent.

Civil society
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Zimbabwe witnessed the growth of a strong
and vibrant civil society. NGOs received generous support from donors and
effectively collaborated with many government programmes. CAMPFIRE exem-
plified this (Duffy, 2000), with the CAMPFIRE Collaborative Group (CCG),
a joint facilitating structure of both government agencies, NGOs and academic
institutions, playing a key role in implementation until 2000 (Child et al, 2003;
Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007). However, the shift in the political landscape of
Zimbabwe immediately prior to 2000 resulted in major opposition by civil society
organizations to a government-led constitutional amendment referendum. From
1999, some segments of civil society began to challenge the government on land,
electoral and human rights issues. This challenge was treated as a sign of political
defiance warranting the repression of NGOs, and the government introduced the
2005 NGO Bill which considerably curtailed NGO functions and independence.
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 179

This volatile political climate translated into a difficult operational environment

for civil society, particularly in any area of governance or involvement in rural
development (Bauer and Taylor, 2005; Raftopoulous and Savage, 2005).
The impact of this marginalization of civil society on CAMPFIRE has been
profound. Members of the CCG formerly played a key role in capacity building
at grass-roots level (Child et al, 2003). Members of the CCG also fulfilled a crit-
ical role as third-party brokers providing neutral arbitration in instances where
community-level polarization stalled progress in programme implementation.
As of 2003, because of the political backlash against civil society, NGOs have
been prevented from playing any significant role in implementing CAMPFIRE
(Rihoy and Maguranyanga, 2007). Compounding this operational marginaliza-
tion has been the loss of access to funding that has been experienced by NGOs
throughout Zimbabwe as a result of donor withdrawal arising from the political
situation.

Mahenye: History, people and CBNRM

evolutions, 1982–2000
Mahenye Ward is located at the southern end of Chipinge District, bordered on
the east by Mozambique and to the west and south by Gonarezhou National
Park. It has a low average rainfall of 450–500mm supporting dry land cultiva-
tion of grains only in good seasons, but its relatively low human population
density has ensured that the low-veldt habitat has remained relatively intact
(Booth, 1991).
Many of the current inhabitants of Mahenye were evicted from their tradi-
tional lands prior and up to 1966 as these areas became incorporated into the
Gonarezhou National Park. Following independence in 1980, strong hopes within
the community that their land would be returned to them were soon dashed
when the new government indicated its priority was to gain the foreign exchange
brought into the country by tourists and the park. This resulted in heightened
resentment towards Gonarezhou and wildlife, manifested as increasing incidences
of illegal resource use as people sought illicit ways in which to assert their tradi-
tional resource rights and livelihoods.
Murphree (2001, p179) notes that one product of the geographic location of
Mahenye is its notable ‘discreteness and isolation’. Their neighbours to the east are
in a different country, to the south is a national park whilst those to the west are
in a different province; thus Mahenye retains administrative isolation from those
in its immediate vicinity. Perhaps most significant is that within Chipinge District
itself, the people of Mahenye are ethnically discrete as they are the only Shangaan-
speaking people in a district otherwise made up exclusively of the Shona-Ndau
ethnic group. Thus the people of Mahenye are culturally, politically and adminis-
tratively distinct from their neighbours, which Murphree (2001) concludes led to
the development of a strong level of intra-communal cohesiveness – then largely
manifested around the institution and individual of the Chief – and a sense of
collective communal interest.
180 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

Evolution of CBNRM in Mahenye

The granting of Appropriate Authority (AA) status to Gazaland District Council
(now Chipinge RDC) in 1991 provided the legal mechanism through which the
people of Mahenye were able to benefit from natural resource management activi-
ties in their ward, by giving the district user rights over wildlife. At the ward level,
in order to ensure effective management of the resource base and an accountable
and representative local-level management structure, the Mahenye CAMPFIRE
Committee (MCC) was established in the late 1980s. The operations of the MCC
are governed by ‘bylaws’ (commonly referred to locally as ‘the Constitution’) which
were developed following lengthy consultations with the general community, tradi-
tional leadership and local CAMPFIRE leadership and are still frequently referred
to in CAMPFIRE discussions today. While neither the MCC organization nor
the bylaws have formal legal status, they are (or were) strongly legitimized by
use, precedent and acceptance by the various CAMPFIRE-related bodies. These
bylaws outline the objectives of the organization; specify the roles, responsibilities
and terms of the office bearers and general members; and stipulate means through
which accountability to the broader membership are to be assured. These, impor-
tantly, include:

• the holding of regular Annual General Meetings (AGMs) for transparent

disclosure of management and financial activities by the MCC office bearers
to the community;
• the holding of annual elections (via secret ballot by Mahenye households)
for posts in the Mahenye CAMPFIRE Committee (MCC) such as that of
Chairman, Vice-chairman, Finance Manager and others.

The bylaws are a written, widely known and understood representation of the
standard to which the MCC should be adhering. They represent an important
benchmark against which to measure and exert accountability for the activities
of the MCC, its officeholders and the operation of CAMPFIRE at the producer
community scale.
Institutional linkages and networks between authorities and across jurisdictional
and functional scales also became well-developed during this period. During the
early 1980s the primary decision-making institutions in the ward were those of the
traditional authority (through the leadership of Chiefs, headmen and Sabhukus)
working in a closely coordinated relationship with the democratically elected struc-
tures such as the Ward Development Committees (WADCOs) and the higher
scale of the RDCs. In the 1990s, by virtue of its elected basis and development
importance locally, the MCC also became a powerful local institution. The private
sector, originally represented by one individual (who had also facilitated early
CBNRM evolutions in the ward between the various bodies) also had significant
influence (Murphree, 2001). Strong linkages existed between the MCC and a
broader national actor network in capacity building and technical wildlife manage-
ment advice with NGOs, the national CAMPFIRE representative and advocacy
body (CAMPFIRE Association) and the state wildlife agency (DNPWM).
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 181

Economics of CAMPFIRE in Mahenye

One of Mahenye’s progressive attributes during this period, compared to most
CAMPFIRE wards, was its diversification in revenue from solely sport hunting
income to the ecotourism sector. In the early 1990s the RDC, on behalf of the
people of Mahenye, entered into a joint venture arrangement with a private
tourism operator for the construction of two lodges – Mahenye Safari Lodge and
Chilo Lodge – catering to a high paying tourist market for game viewing and
photographic safaris. Under the terms of the 1996 agreement, land was leased
by the operator from the RDC for a 10-year period. Initially revenue earned was
paid via the RDC, but in 2003/4 a more direct allocation was made to the MCC.
In principle this represented a significant step towards fiscal devolution (albeit
undertaken in an informal way) but was a decision subsequently reversed at the
request of the RDC.
The income potential from these lodges was considerable and by 1997 gener-
ated twice the income of sport hunting and was responsible for more than tripling
the overall CAMPFIRE income for Mahenye between 1994 and 1997 (Murphree,
2001). However, the downturn in tourism in Zimbabwe post-2000 has meant that
the real financial returns have become limited and sport hunting has returned
as the largest revenue source. Despite this, the lodges have continued to bring
considerable benefits, most notably in the form of employment.4
In the early 1990s and again since 2000, the primary form of income genera-
tion for the MCC has been from the sport hunting concession in the Mahenye/
Mutandahwe area. CAMPFIRE revenue in the period 1992 to 1997 from sport
hunting was around US$15–20,000 (largely from elephant hunting) with the
total revenues achieved in the late 1990s from both hunting and lodge tourism
reaching around US$40,000 (Murphree, 2001). As important as the overall
revenue were the actual disbursements to the household level of dividends in the
form of cash and the proportion that this represented of the overall CAMPFIRE
revenue. On average, in this period the proportion of total revenue allocated
to household dividends was consistently around 50 per cent – with around 20
per cent allocated for RDC administration costs (essentially a ‘tax’), 2 per cent
for the CAMPFIRE Association and the rest roughly equally divided between
MCC-managed development projects (e.g. grinding mills) and wildlife manage-
ment costs (see Murphree, 2001).
The household dividends of around US$15–25 were significant in comparison
to other CAMPFIRE areas (median household-level income of US$4.49; see
Bond, 2001) and an important incentive for encouraging local support for wildlife
management and supporting local household incomes. A number of interviewees
from this current research had strong memories of the cash dividends of the late
1990s as being key contributions to the family’s ability to purchase goods, food in
drought years or enabling the payment of school fees.
182 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

CAMPFIRE evolutions in Mahenye, 2000–2005

Institutions, management and local governance
Since 2000 there have been significant shifts of power within and between different
actors and institutions in Mahenye, as well as the major shifts in macro-economic
and national political context that have occurred in Zimbabwe as a whole. One
outcome of these shifts has been the dramatic demise of CAMPFIRE in the view
of the overwhelming majority of local inhabitants interviewed, and summed up
as follows by one woman: ‘CAMPFIRE used to be for all the people, now it’s a
family business’.
The demise of CAMPFIRE in Mahenye, its core local institution (the MCC)
and dramatic falls in the value of household dividends coincide with, and have
been strongly influenced by, four related local events:

1 the death of the highly respected old Chief Mahenye in 2001 and replacement
by his son, who is the current Chief;
2 on the explicit instructions of the new Chief, the complete change in MCC
office bearers following the flawed MCC elections of 2001, including the direct
appointment (not election) of the Chief’s younger brother as Chairman;
3 the election of a new Councillor for the Ward;
4 the re-tendering of the sport hunting concession which has led to ongoing
conflict and the widespread belief among most local stakeholders that the
operators are currently un-transparently bidding for the concession and are
competing amongst each other in their attempts to illicitly ‘buy off’ the Chief
and MCC to ensure preferential treatment.

These changes have effectively removed the strong local leadership whose commit-
ment and accountability were formerly such a distinctive feature of Mahenye
(Murphree, 2001). These included the Chief, headmen and respected elders,
the school headmaster and other teachers and an elected leadership including
the Ward Councillor and members of the MCC. Collectively these provided a
leadership structure that was balanced in its sources of traditional and popular
legitimacy.
Local power and authority have shifted away from the delicate balance estab-
lished between traditional and elected democratic institutions and the leadership of
these structures, and concentrated into the hands of a core local élite concentrated
within the traditional leadership. ‘Honest brokers’ in local dynamics, whether of
the private sector, NGO, state, RDC or other have become rare, ineffectual or
sidelined. As many people in Mahenye said, the result is that they now have their
own ‘dictator’. An important point in the following discussion is the premise that it
is not the institution (rules of the game) of either the MCC or customary authority
that is the root source of these governance problems, but the distortion of the rules
governing both by particular forces since 2000 that have permitted élite capture
and perpetuated stalemate, contrary to the past existing delegation and account-
ability mechanisms.
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 183

Management of CAMPFIRE in Mahenye:The situation in 2005

The Mahenye CAMPFIRE Committee, once viewed by the Mahenye people with
pride as contributing to the overall development of the community and to the live-
lihood needs of individual families, is now widely perceived as an institution which
mismanages and abuses community funds for the personal enrichment of the
Chief and his clan. This has included the use of project vehicles for personal trans-
port, the ‘privatization’ of the general store, grinding mills and other CAMPFIRE
projects, and access to scarce employment opportunities at the lodges being medi-
ated by the Chief’s family. Enabling this situation has been the dismantlement of
those locally developed and mandated mechanisms that ensured that CAMPFIRE
was a participatory process, representative of and accountable to the people of
Mahenye.

The demise of democratic procedures

Whilst it has no formal legal basis, the MCC is, according to its Constitution,
responsible for carrying out management functions, employing local staff to
monitor wildlife and wildlife use, including poaching and the hunting activities of
the professional hunter. It sets budgets and is responsible to general community
meetings for its activities and planning. Prior to 2000, MCC board members were
democratically and transparently elected (once every two years) at open Annual
General Meetings (AGMs), and incomes and budgets were openly made and
presented with all decisions regarding use of revenues collectively taken at these
AGMs.
However, since 2000 only two AGMs have been held, both of which were rela-
tively poorly attended. Elections for committee members have not been held at
any AGM since those of 2001. The Chairman (in 2005) was never elected but was
given this position by the Chief after his predecessor (who had been elected in the
2001 elections) had left the village after allegedly misappropriating CAMPFIRE
funds.
On the rare occasion when AGMs are still held, their function is now very
different to the accountability basis outlined in the Constitution. According to the
Chairman of the MCC himself:

…we use AGMs as a way to tell the community how the committee and traditional
leaders have budgeted and spent CAMPFIRE money and other things. It’s where
we let them know what their leaders are doing for them.

Income and budget transparency has evaporated as the mentality of the leadership
has shifted from collective decision-making by and with the people or accounting
for actions and decisions (active and inter-active) to informing the people, whose
role is now passive.

Shrinking incomes and incentives

The earnings in Mahenye from CAMPFIRE declined dramatically from 2000 to
2005 (Table 8.1), as a result of both local misappropriation and leakages arising
from national economic distortions. These leakages primarily result from:
184 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

• the loss in value occurring when converting foreign exchange to the massively
over-valued Zimbabwe dollar;
• the loss in value resulting from annual inflation rates as high as 650 per cent
to over 800 per cent (as of 2004–2005) when revenues remain stored in bank
accounts for periods of six months to up to a year before household dividend
payments are made.

Table 8.1 Household dividend payments and proportion of overall

revenue in Mahenye, 1996, 1997 and 2004
1996 1997 2004
Household (HH) dividends Z$183 Z$442 Z$100
US$18.67 US$27.63 (Z$6,100)*
US$0.03
Proportion of overall revenues 50% 55% 0.2% (14%)^
allocated to HH dividends

Notes:
* The actual HH dividend received by people was Z$100 (US$0.03) after an unclear local ‘tax’ of Z$6,000 was
deducted prior to payouts.
^ In proportion of overall revenues allocated to HH dividends the percentage prior to the’ tax’ was +/– 14%.
The actual cash dividends for the household totalled Z$89,400 (894HH × Z$100) which represents only
0.2% of the Z$40,118,791 noted as total revenues by the RDC records.
Source: 2004: this research and 1990s data adapted from Murphree, 2001. Exchange rates based on Reserve
Bank of Zimbabwe data.

Throughout the 1990s annual allocations to household dividends were consist-

ently around 50 per cent of total budgets in Mahenye (Murphree, 2001). Since
2001 there has only been one allocation for household dividends. This took place
in May 2004 and was on the basis (according to the official figures submitted by
Chipinge RDC) of a total revenue earned (2003) of Z$40,118,791. The household
dividend amounted to a cash payment (in principle) of Z$6,100 per household.
Of this, each household was first deducted Z$6,000 for a ‘district development
levy’ by the traditional authority, the validity of which has never been verified,
resulting in an actual cash dividend ‘in hand’ of only Z$100 (US$0.03) (see Table
8.1). As a proportion of the overall stated revenues, this sum of ‘actual cash in
hand’ dividend represented less than 1 per cent (0.2 per cent) compared to the 50
per cent averages in the 1990s. As stated by one interviewee:

Z$100 even then wasn’t enough to buy one match, and most didn’t know about
it. I don’t know anyone who even went to the [MCC project] office to collect
their money.

The most lucrative source of income has been sport hunting and this has been
mired in considerable complexity. In 1997 Tshabezi Safaris won the concession
for a five-year period. In 2002, the hunting concession was tendered again and
once again awarded by the RDC to Tshabezi Safaris. However, no contract has
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 185

been in place since 2002, one of the causes of the conflict surrounding the hunting
concession. The resulting uncertainties and competition between the various
stakeholders has been one of the driving forces enabling powerful local-level élite
to co-opt the power and resources of the MCC for their own political and personal
financial ends.
The simple facts are that the households in Mahenye are getting no mean-
ingful economic dividends from CAMPFIRE, in stark contrast to the 1990s. The
outcome of this situation is that there is no longer any independent local body that
represents the interests of the people or to which the grievances of the people can
be aired. All discussions and decisions now take place at the Chief’s Dare (assembly
meeting). This is the context of changed local governance and economic incen-
tives against which the following section of local narratives are set.

Local narratives and perceptions

Vanhu varwadziwa, havana kwavanochemera
(People are not happy, but they don’t know where to complain.)

Given the competing interests at stake it is perhaps not surprising that the narra-
tives surrounding CAMPFIRE in Mahenye differ amongst the various stake-
holders and that different scenarios for change are identified by these groups. In
very broad terms the stakeholder groups can be identified as follows:

• the traditional leadership and current MCC members;

• general community members;
• external stakeholders such as the RDCs and NGOs such as the CAMPFIRE
Association.

However, as the following discussion indicates, this simplistic breakdown of dispa-

rate actors hides an overlapping and constantly shifting array of perceptions, alli-
ances and networks. This section relates the stories articulated by each group,
highlighting the concerns and issues dominant within each group. Wherever
possible this is presented in their own words based on the interviews carried out
in 2005.

Traditional leadership
The traditional leadership in Mahenye consists of the Chief, two headmen and
29 kraal heads. Given the thorough co-optation of the MCC by the Chief and his
immediate family – in 2005 every member of the 12-person MCC was a relative
of the Chief – we combine the traditional leadership and the MCC here as falling
within the same stakeholder group, even though there are very clear fault lines
developing amongst various individuals and sub-groups. Despite this close asso-
ciation of the Chief with the programme, he claims to have no direct relationship
with it, although he is outspoken in his support, noting that:

CAMPFIRE has been here a long time and brought many good things but it needs
changes. The main problem is that money from hunting goes to the RDC first, it
186 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

should come directly to Mahenye; also the RDC want to interfere in who we select
as our hunter.

The narrative constructed by both the Chief and the MCC Chairman is one of a
successful CAMPFIRE programme that has brought development to Mahenye,
whilst protecting the natural resource base and upholding local culture and
traditions. They identify some problems with the programme but consider that
these are brought about by external agents and technical deficiencies with the
implementation process, what they portray as the greed and inefficiency of the
current safari operator, coupled with the unwillingness of the RDC to commit
to fiscal devolution and local-level decision-making regarding the selection of
safari operators.
However, with the exception of these two individuals, the other members of the
traditional leadership and MCC interviewed presented a different story by iden-
tifying failures in leadership, financial management and governance – including
detailing several instances of abuse and misuse of funds and MCC assets by the
Chairman – coupled with the technical and administrative problems identified by
the Chief and Chair as being the most significant impediment to the programme.
As articulated by a senior member of this sub-group:

The situation at the moment is a free for all, soft drinks, sitting allowances, free
transport, Christmas parties, nothing like before when things were run properly. It
is corruption and bribery (undyire). But those of us with the authority to do some-
thing can’t because this dispute is in our own clan. Does a son question his father?
Someone from outside must step in, either the RDC or CAMPFIRE Association.
We made sure an auditor came but now the council (RDC) do nothing, they must
remove the culprit, even make arrests. Council are letting us down.

General population
The story told by people in the general community (meaning that they do not
belong to the other stakeholder groups) had at its centre disappointment and
disillusionment with the current situation, but also a sense that events were still
unfolding and that they collectively had at their disposal means to address the
current problems. This group unanimously identified poor leadership, governance
issues and the misappropriation of power by the MCC as the root cause of their
problems but there was also considerable concern and confusion articulated about
the private sector tourism operations, the role of NGOs and the role of the RDC.
CAMPFIRE was described as a source of local pride and confidence as well as
development for over 10 years. It was considered to have been a genuinely repre-
sentative process about which the majority of ward residents had considerable
information concerning the nature and extent of their rights and technical details
relating to wildlife management, and in which they enthusiastically participated
and benefited. People articulated trust in and respect for their leaders during
that time, who they credited with having brought about this success. Specifically
mentioned on many occasions were the (former) Chief, (former) Councillor,
(former) MCC members, the private sector partner, as well as NGOs formerly
active in the area.
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 187

There is universal agreement over the cause of the problems that subsequently
emerged:

Our troubles started when the old Chief passed and…[the former MCC
Chairman] and the others were pushed out of the committee and…was made
Chairman for life.

There was also widespread acknowledgement that there are constraints to what
they can do about this because ‘people fear to challenge the Chairman, this is chal-
lenging the Chief and would result in losing land or even being chased from the
area.’ A widely anticipated outcome of this is that ‘people will go back to poaching
because there’s no benefit from wildlife otherwise’. There is also a common view
that ‘the RDC has more power, they should do something’.
However, whilst there is little that people can do overtly, they do have their
own covert means of expressing their displeasure and translating this into political
statements. Identical versions of the following story were recounted by several
different interviewees.

The Chief had been told by the District Administrator that everyone must vote
ZANU-PF and then he would get a vehicle.We were told to do so, but everyone
here voted MDC to get back at him. He couldn’t do anything about that because
it was a secret ballot. We hoped that the Chief wouldn’t get his vehicle and
realize that everyone was aware that he was allowing our CAMPFIRE money
to be lost.5

Thus there is a remarkable level of agreement on the basic situation and the way
to resolve it amongst the majority of those in Mahenye. However, beyond this
common understanding the situation is complicated further by the ongoing conflict
between the MCC, the safari operators and the RDC over the re-tendering of the
hunting quota. There is a strong perception amongst the community members
that this conflict is being used by the MCC as a smokescreen to cover for their
own misconduct.
Despite large-scale disillusionment with the situation, the majority of interviewees
identified a core strategy to solve their problem. This strategy involves appeals
to the RDC, as the only institution with the authority, legitimacy and mandate,
to intervene and assist in the restoration of local structures that are accountable
and representative of the community. Thus the collective local demand is for the
RDC to accept its responsibilities as the agency granted Appropriate Authority
(AA) for wildlife in the district and act accordingly to ensure that the CAMPFIRE
‘Constitution’ (the bylaws of the MCC) and democratic local institutions (the
MCC under the rules of the bylaws) are in place. Essentially the action demanded
was the holding of elections for the posts of the MCC according to the bylaws’
procedures, after four years of blatant flouting of these basic rules.
Local people are thus collectively indicating that the RDC has an important
function to play in fostering the conditions that will ensure their empowerment
by providing a neutral arbitration role in a situation that, for a variety of reasons,
cannot at present be addressed locally. People are clear that CAMPFIRE, by
188 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

providing them with information about their rights and those of the other insti-
tutions involved, has provided them with the basis to express demands to the
RDC:

People are very much aware of their rights and obligations and they know this
because the old committee used to bare all things and read the Constitution in
public at AGMs and other meetings, we also know from this what the RDC should
be doing.

However, this does not imply that the RDC is viewed entirely favourably in Mahenye
and mounting frustration was articulated by many. The RDC is perceived to be
primarily concerned with ensuring maximum income from the hunting opera-
tions to meet their own financial needs at the expense of the people.
The most striking element of the local community’s narrative is the level of
agreement on the nature of the problem and how it can potentially be solved
through RDC intervention to restore earlier local democratic institutions. Despite
considerable problems (and dangers), the people of Mahenye continue to demon-
strate the remarkable level of ‘intra-communal cohesiveness’ and capacity for
expressing ‘constituency demands’ identified in the past (Murphree, 2001).

The Rural District Council (RDC)

The role of the RDC includes formal awarding of the hunting concession following
an established process of advertising and competitive tendering. As well as having
a legal obligation in this regard, they also have a financial incentive to ensure that
the process is efficiently managed as they are recipients of 20–35 per cent of
income as an administrative fee or tax. In theory, tenders are evaluated both in
terms of financial value and on qualitative considerations, with the expectation
that RDCs take into account the views of the wildlife-producing ward. However,
an independent Commission of Inquiry undertaken in 2005 at the request of the
Chipinge RDC indicates that established procedures and competitive bidding
processes have not been adhered to with the result that there is: ‘no clear relation-
ship between the value of the resources and the total amount paid by the safari
operator in terms of the contract’.
Following a written request from the Mahenye Ward Councillor, backed up by
anonymous letters from Mahenye residents, the RDC undertook an independent
audit of the MCC in 2004. This audit clearly revealed the validity of accusations
of mismanagement and misappropriation of CAMPFIRE funds by the élite within
Mahenye.
According to the RDC Chief Executive Officer (CEO) the situation in Mahenye
is thus ‘a big mess’ which has largely occurred because ‘one individual is no longer
accountable’ which is bringing the RDC into disrepute:

Chipinge is proud of being the birth place of the CAMPFIRE concept, but now
we are failing to live up to our reputation.We view it as a priority that things are
put right.
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 189

The RDC’s chosen strategy has been to analyse what they see as the two elements
of the problem: lack of accountability, and conflicts between the broader commu-
nity and the safari operator:

And now we will approach the issues in stages. Our first priority is to sort out the
problems with the safari operators. Once this is done we’ll address local problems of
representation. Elections with a secret ballot need to take place, and new safeguards
developed to make sure authority isn’t abused.

They are well aware of the demands for greater fiscal devolution regarding which
the CEO says:

Personally I don’t have a problem with the hunting fee going directly to the
community but we have to sort out the abuses first and the decision isn’t only
mine to make.

The story according to the RDC is that they are aware of problems and are in the
process of making a measured and responsible determination of how to proceed,
which will respond to the demands and needs of their constituency. Given such
a reasonable response it is fair to speculate why action has been so slow in forth-
coming. The audit – which clearly illustrates fraud and corruption – was carried
out in August 2004, whilst the Commission of Inquiry took place in May 2005.
And yet by October 2005, despite the CEO acknowledging that it was a priority
for the RDC, no action had been taken. This may simply be a result of bureau-
cratic ineptitude, but once again it is possible to identify alternative reasons.
Chief Mahenye’s position provides him with networks linked to politically
powerful national factions that may have an influence on the strategies adopted
by the RDC. For example, the Deputy Minister of Local Government, Rural
and Urban Development has attended meetings with the Mahenye CAMPFIRE
committee at which discussions were held relating to securing greater financial
devolution from the RDC. The Chief has also worked closely with the former
District Administrator of Chipinge (himself now a Member of Parliament) to influ-
ence the Mahenye vote for the ZANU-PF MP candidate. These personal national
networks and political affiliations provide an additional level of complexity in local
power struggles which impact on the balance of power between the RDC and
traditional authorities, and this may at least partially account for the reluctance of
the RDC to take any decisive action.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)

The marginalization of civil society from policy-making and implementa-
tion in Zimbabwe’s politically contested rural areas has had significant impacts
on CAMPFIRE. The consequence of this marginalization is that those former
CAMPFIRE Collaborative Group (CCG) members (particularly NGOs such as
WWF and Zimbabwe Trust) who formerly played key roles in institutional devel-
opment within Mahenye are no longer able to do so.
Some scholars have criticized NGOs for this (e.g. Balint and Mashinya, 2006),
but this glosses over the reality that Zimbabwe’s national political context since
190 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

2000 has served to marginalize and exclude those NGOs from the local govern-
ance arena. This has occurred by denying NGOs access to funds but also by
removing their mandate. NGOs formerly active in Mahenye have been aware of
the problems there but have no means or resources with which to address the
problem, and also felt intimidated to try to do so. As expressed by one NGO
officer formerly active in the area for a decade:

[Our friends] in the RDC tell us Mahenye is a mess, the Chief and Chairman have
taken over. I hate to hear it after years of working with them but with no vehicles,
no fuel, and no reason to go there, what can we do? Anyway, I’m known as MDC,
the Chief is ZANU-PF, it wouldn’t be good for my health.

The one NGO that is still highly active in CAMPFIRE implementation is the
CAMPFIRE Association (CA). They are familiar with the current situation in
Mahenye and are involved with the RDC in seeking a solution to the problems
based on their understanding that:

There are a lot of undeclared interests at play in Mahenye. There’s a need to iden-
tify the root cause of the problem and sort the institutional problems. We strongly
felt as a commission there was need for changes in tenure of office, to elect a new
committee.

As in the case of the RDC narrative, there is also a sense of some deadlock in
taking actions or decisions in the discourse of the CA; particularly given this is
precisely the institution taxed (literally, given that the CA membership fees are
deducted from Mahenye revenue) with the task of linking the producer communi-
ties of CAMPFIRE with district and national agencies and with the overall coor-
dination of the programme.

Discussion
In discussing contemporary CAMPFIRE and natural resource governance evolu-
tions in Mahenye, a good place to begin is to recognize the complexity of the
current situation both in Zimbabwe and in Mahenye, but also the extent to which
there is remarkable congruence and depth in the narratives of local, district and
national scales about existing challenges and the most urgent next steps to take.
At the crux of these stories is a multi-tiered and interrelated set of politically
and socially constructed stalemates inhibiting those steps from being taken and
governance problems being addressed. As noted in the previous section by one
interviewee: ‘people are not happy, but they don’t know where to complain’.

Local governance, CBNRM institutions and historical

precedent
One of the paradoxes and strengths of the case of Mahenye is the degree of adap-
tation and cross-scale linkages that characterize local governance dynamics over
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 191

the course of the past two decades. Mahenye had, by the mid- to late 1990s, devel-
oped a complex set of multi-tiered natural resource governance linkages involving
upward delegation and downward accountability depending on political agency
and ecological and social scale requirements (cf. Murphree, 2000; Rihoy and
Maguranyanga, 2007). It had in that decade moved beyond the ‘chicken and egg’
structural dilemma of full devolution as prerequisite for CBNRM versus fragile
local common property regimes as a cause of failure of CBNRM. The egg had
produced the chicken and chicken produced the egg in a context, as described
earlier, of happy congruence where the strengths of the local society (not one
mired in feudal, hierarchical condition – as characterized, for example, by Balint
and Mashinya (2006) – but mixing both modern and customary) was linked to
higher scale organizations of the state, private sector and NGOs, with powerful
economic incentives and political capital supporting these evolutions. The chal-
lenge was to come from 2000 with the series of connected local and national
events which generated the dramatic distortions to economic incentives, political
dynamics and local leadership. The informal and precedent basis of the Mahenye
‘constitution’ was inadequate to counterbalance these profound changes. In simple
terms, the devolution-jurisdictional egg was hatching out in a much rougher
neighbourhood.
But it is important to stress, as do the majority of the local narratives from
Mahenye, that this does not preclude local ability to react or adapt. The fact that
the precedent of tackling significant challenges from 1982 to 1991 existed, and
the widely agreed strengths of the institution then until 2000 were established,
provides hope that the scenarios and strategies for change envisaged by most
Mahenye people can engage with contemporary crises.

National to local links, mirrors and influences

Whilst the past decade’s problems in CAMPFIRE in Mahenye do indeed reflect
‘local failures in governance and capacity’ (see Balint and Mashinya, 2006),
those changes in local governance are fundamentally shaped by developments at
the national scale. The situation in Zimbabwe, where political trends since 2000
have resulted in the promotion of those institutions and individuals associated
with the ruling party, whilst those affiliated in any way with opposition parties
and politics have been marginalized, has been comprehensively documented by
many analysts, both Zimbabwean and foreign (e.g. Raftopoulos and Savage,
2005; Bauer and Taylor 2005). The Mahenye situation in this regard mirrors
that of the nation; the impact has been profound in determining the balance of
power between various local actors in Mahenye, as well as determining which
individuals continue to play active roles within institutions, based upon their
political affiliations.
One of the most significant legislative changes promoting shifts in the institu-
tional dynamics and balance of power within Mahenye has been the Traditional
Leaders Act (TLA) of 2001, which has strengthened the power of traditional
authorities nationally whilst also bringing them under the influence of the ruling
party, ZANU-PF. Until the passing of this Act, policy since independence had
strengthened the role of elected RDCs at the expense of traditional authorities.
192 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

The TLA is a significant shift in direction, empowering traditional leaders not

least in terms of natural resource management. A widespread interpretation of the
TLA is that it aims to co-opt traditional leadership to ensure political penetration
of the ruling party into rural areas. This Act has not only enhanced the authority
of chiefs locally but has also changed the nature of the relationship between chiefs,
the RDC and the private sector.
Other changes which have influenced events in Mahenye include the crea-
tion of new and powerful institutions representing the party at local level. These
include the Ward Coordinator (an employee of the Ministry of Youth, Gender
and Employment Creation), while formerly relatively insignificant institutions,
such as the Ward Chairman of ZANU-PF, have taken on new prominence.
Compounding this is that the modern development structures and their repre-
sentatives, notably the Ward Councillor, have also come increasingly under the
influence of and are accountable to the ruling party and are under pressure,
sometimes violent, to represent party interests in rural areas (see Hammar, 2003
for a detailed account).
But changes in the national context have not been limited to legislative or
administrative changes. The year 2000 saw a dramatic and public shift in the
political dynamics of Zimbabwe, culminating in an increase in politically moti-
vated violence and in the collapse of the rule of law (Raftopoulous, 2005). This
situation was underlain by a racial and populist moral discourse about the return
of ‘African soil’ to Africans adopted by the ruling party, which served to margin-
alize and vilify whites and, by inference, political opponents of the ruling party. At
local levels this often translated into the violent persecution and marginalization
of MDC supporters and introduced greater suspicion of wildlife management as
it was considered to be ‘a ploy of whites to forestall land acquisition and justifying
multiple and extensive land holdings’ (Wolmer et al, 2003, p8). Many of those
interviewed noted that the impact in Mahenye has been to marginalize key figures
who were known to be opposition supporters and a further reinforcement of the
powers of the Chief.
Thus the relationship between the traditional and ruling party institutions has
fundamentally changed, with the result that the power and influence of traditional
authorities has been enhanced but at the expense of increased dependency on
the ruling party. In Mahenye this has allowed for the creation of one institution
within which all power is vested: that of the Chief (as distinct from the institution
of customary authority). This has occurred because of the mutually beneficial
relationship and endorsement from ZANU-PF and the other newly created or
co-opted institutions such as the MCC under the current Chairman. The new
roles acquired by the Chief and his family translate into real power over and above
that traditionally extended to them.
The national context has enabled the Chief to translate his newly enhanced legal
position as regards natural resources and his new position as powerful ZANU-PF
representative to divert the claims of others and validate his own claims over these
resources, thus expanding his control over development in Mahenye. One of the
first actions undertaken by the Chief on his ascendancy in 2001 was to ensure that
CAMPFIRE and its benefits were brought under his control.
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 193

Economic returns and incentives

Contemporary realities in Mahenye illustrate that the local and national institutional
distortions are equally present in the economic and revenue context. The collapse
of local democratic governance is equally evident in the declines in CAMPFIRE
household dividends between the late 1990s and 2004 from around US$20 to
US$0.03. The real decline of the proportion of revenue allocated to household
dividends fell from around 50 per cent to less than 1 per cent. Effectively the
ward residents (beyond those employed in the lodge and/or hunting industry and
the élite of MCC) are getting no economic returns from their wildlife manage-
ment or recompense from the costs of living with wildlife. CAMPFIRE revenue
mechanisms are now effectively a long pipeline of massive leakages – exposed to
foreign exchange losses, inflation at the world’s highest rates, ad hoc taxes, fraud
and minimal transparency.

Networks, patronage and power

By effectively capturing CAMPFIRE operations in Mahenye, the traditional
authorities have essentially created a powerful patronage tool for themselves
through which they can construct and reproduce power relationships and perpet-
uate their authority. CAMPFIRE provides the means by which to develop a strong
network of loyal supporters. This begins with the enrolment of other members of
their extended family as MCC members, ensuring that they receive significant
financial benefits in the form of sitting allowances, access to valuable transport and
prestige. The Chairman and Chief have ensured that these people are beholden to
them. By extending participation in certain key meetings to include all members
of the traditional authorities and other party-endorsed positions, this network has
been extended further to all those in positions of authority in the village. The
network is extended outside family by the manipulation of scarce and valuable
employment opportunities within the CAMPFIRE project itself. For example,
posts for game monitors, grinding-mill operators and shop assistants are now
decided upon exclusively by the MCC. The same is true of jobs with the private
sector operators who, by wilfully maintaining the façade that the Chairman of
the MCC represents ‘the community’, give him leverage over who is appointed
to these positions. By consolidating their positions of power in other institutions
outside the MCC, the Chairman and Chief can threaten retribution to any who
question their decisions, not just in the form of losing the benefits that have been
forthcoming from being part of their network but also through the potential loss
of access to food aid, land or being labelled an opposition supporter. This last
threat can also be extended to private sector operators and the RDC through the
manipulation of national political networks.
Thus the Chief and Chairman would appear to have built themselves an unas-
sailable position of power and authority. Yet this is clearly not the case. There is
unanimous condemnation of the Chairman – although many, particularly the
traditional authorities, were careful to draw a distinction between the Chief and
the Chairman – and on the need to find a solution to the current problems, even
though such a solution would probably lead to some people losing privileged
194 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

positions as network beneficiaries. However, whilst there is unanimous discontent,

the situation within Mahenye is effectively a socially and politically constructed
stalemate with no local means of sufficient agency or power to break the deadlock.
Therefore people have identified alternative mechanisms to assist them to solve
their problems. The long and successful history of CAMPFIRE in the area has
ensured that there is considerable local knowledge about the process, including a
widespread understanding of the roles and responsibilities of various governance
bodies. Thus whilst the RDC is widely distrusted on the grounds that it has its own
agenda in relation to the safari operations and securing its own revenue, there is
nevertheless clear recognition within Mahenye that it has a legal responsibility to
step in to break the local stalemate and the – albeit so far latent – political agency
and state–party linkages to do so.
It is generally recognized locally that improving the existing situation involves two
different but interconnected activities. First, addressing issues of local governance
and second, addressing fiscal accountability and use of revenue. Only once these
issues have been resolved do the majority of people in Mahenye want to see greater
fiscal devolution occurring. That is to say, their scenario for change is a sequence
of events in rebuilding a process of devolution based on local responsibilities and
authority but also with strategic linkages and practical politics to get there.

Building accountability from local to district scale

The situation in Mahenye suggests that one of the most significant impacts of
CAMPFIRE over the last 20 years has been to empower local people by making
them aware of the value of the natural resources in their areas and their (albeit
restricted) rights to these, whilst raising awareness of mechanisms through which
they can exercise those rights.
Mahenye illustrates that community members can have the knowledge, confi-
dence and organizational awareness to counter local élites who are usurping power
and undermining democratic decision-making, and to articulate demands to their
political representatives at the district level to assist in resolving the problem. Thus
despite the fact that local political mobilization has had to be largely covert in
recent years due to fear of reprisal, it has nevertheless created space for political
negotiation between the local and district level and catalysed two external and
damning investigations. This could ultimately lead to greater accountability of the
RDCs to their local constituents. Allied with a strategy of practical politics in a
win–win approach to the revenue and economic incentives for the residents of
the Ward, the RDC and the private sector, the potential for breaking the current
stalemate certainly exists.

Conclusions
The foremost lesson from the experiences of Mahenye is that CBNRM is a
process of applied and incremental experiments in local democracy and most
valuable in this because it involves not a single idealized state of full devolution
but the interaction of tiers of governance over time in adaptive processes. What
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 195

could be construed as a ‘failure’ or ‘crisis’ at any one moment is in reality part

of an ongoing process of development which, in this case, contains the seeds of
opportunity through which rural people can develop organizational mechanisms
and abilities to voice their demands. The analysis, as drawn out in the narratives
presented here, demonstrates that CAMPFIRE has had a real impact in terms
of empowering local residents, providing them with incentives, knowledge and
organizational abilities to identify and address their own problems, recognize the
constraints that they are operating within and identify where external interven-
tions are required.
It is apparent that alliances and boundaries are formed throughout these
pro­cesses, and when situations change these alliances and boundaries shift and
reconfigure the landscape of governance and politics of natural resource manage-
ment. The situation currently facing Mahenye is, in the stories of the residents
themselves, just a snapshot of a moment in time. Their eye is on the future and how
to effect an outcome that is favourable to all people in Mahenye, not just temporarily
powerful local élite. Thus what an observer may view as a crisis is viewed by many
local inhabitants as part of an ongoing contest for control over resources within
which lie opportunities for positive change. This has been readily apparent in other
CAMPFIRE locales during the past decade, notably the community of Masoka
which used the crisis brought about by unprecedented RDC appropriation of reve-
nues in 2004 to force a process of renegotiation which led to record benefits being
realized by the community only two years later (Taylor and Murphree, 2007).
The situation in Mahenye illustrates the centrality of political dynamics at multiple
scales to natural resource governance outcomes. A core concern of CBNRM is
therefore working towards the recognition and translation of political capital into a
political tool for mobilizing power and bringing local demands to bear on relevant
authorities in order to support communities to capture and enlarge the political
and policy spaces fundamental to local participation. While in Zimbabwe RDCs
are notoriously associated with ‘capturing’ CAMPFIRE revenues (Bond, 2001;
Katerere, 2001; Shackleton and Campbell, 2001; Child et al, 2003), in the current
context of Zimbabwe RDCs could provide a system of checks and balances at the
local level which can prevent capture of the process by local élites.
But our argument goes further than simply acknowledging the vital role of local
government and addresses the broader issue of democratization. Local govern-
ment has a vital role to play in ensuring democratic outcomes. Mamdani (1996)
argues that emphasizing local participation or empowerment in an isolated or
autonomous fashion, at the expense of cross-scale alliances and representative
forms of democracy, can serve to reinforce authoritarian local structures. He
concludes that ‘to create a democratic solidarity requires joining the emphasis
on autonomy with the one on alliance, that on participatory self-rule with one on
representational politics’.
Put simply, a properly democratic system requires the effective linking of the
local and national. CBNRM provides a means and incentives by which this can
be done. Mahenye, albeit based on informally legitimized institutional founda-
tions (the bylaws) was in the process of doing this in the late 1990s; now in more
complex times it retains the potential to do so again and to provide continually
evolving political and structural applications of CBNRM.
196 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

Despite the manifest problems facing CBNRM in contemporary Zimbabwe,

our interpretation of local narratives at Mahenye draws optimism from the
capacity for local adaptation and resilience. At the community level, there is ample
evidence that many of those factors which Murphree (2001) identified as decisive
to their overall success are still in evidence, notably that of intra-communal cohe-
sion, but also resource richness, social energy, flexibility and evolution and accept-
ance of risk. But it also provides evidence that CAMPFIRE continues to evolve
and has empowered local communities with the means and incentive to engage
and negotiate with their local government representatives.

Postscript: Mahenye in 2008–2009

Since the research that this chapter is based on was carried out in 2005, a number
of macro-political changes have occurred in Zimbabwe, as well as evolutions in
Mahenye CAMPFIRE itself and local tiers of governance.
In March 2008 there were disputed national elections in which a majority of
parliamentary seats were won by the opposition parties, while the presidential
contest led to a presidential run-off in June 2008 between the ZANU-PF and
the MDC candidates which was marked by violence. Conflict over both disputed
presidential elections and the composition of the new government authorities,
led in early 2009 to the signing of a Global Political Agreement (GPA) and the
formation of a Government of National Unity (GNU) comprising power sharing
between ZANU-PF and MDC with agreement to devise a new Zimbabwean
Constitution prior to further elections. The GNU has enabled an improvement in
the basic economic situation with the adoptation of the US$ as currency and the
end of the inflationary spiral that characterized the previous nine years. However,
both the implementation aspects of power sharing of the GPA and GNU have
encountered serious challenges with considerable powers retained by ZANU-PF
in key political, ministerial and administrative structures to the extent that real
authority outside the area of macro-finance remains relatively unchanged or
highly disputed. This is illustrated by the ‘new wave’ of forced asset transfers
in land and resources sectors by members of the ZANU-PF élite, the retention
by this élite of control over the lucrative eastern diamond fields, the retention of
Provincial Governors with considerable local powers as ZANU-PF appointees,
disputes over the extent of civil society involvement in the new Constitution and a
general maintenance of ZANU-PF dominance of local government irrespective of
election results. In these macro-scale political struggles the control over both land
and the most valuable natural resources or benefits (wildlife hunting concessions,
ivory and rhino horn illegal trade, diamond trade, commercial farmland) remain
particularly marked and increasingly complex.
At the level of local governance evolutions and the CAMPFIRE Programme in
Mahenye, there is considerable evidence for continual mirroring of macro-politics
at the local scale, as well as the considerable community agency and ingenuity to
continue to address stalemates or distortions in governance.
Following local concerns of distortions of the MCC ‘bylaws’ and election
procedures noted above, new MCC elections were held in March 2006 at the
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 197

demand of local residents and with the Chipinge RDC as observers. The Mahenye
community insisted on holding open elections (lining up behind the candidate of
their choice in public) so as to ensure transparency and prevent disputed results.
The outcome was the nearly unanimous election of a new Chair and Members
of the MCC. The previous Chairman that was rejected by the community was
to re-appear again in local governance in 2008 following the sudden death of
his brother the Chief (a death locally ascribed to poisoning). This individual’s
assumption as the new ‘Acting Chief’ was not on the basis of customary means
but was a political appointment by the District Administrator and ZANU PF
candidate during campaigns in the period prior to the contentious and disputed
2008 national election process.
The elected Mahenye Ward Councillor of the MDC party also died after a short
illness in early 2009 and the MDC supporters in Mahenye alleged Chipinge RDC
accepted the ZANU-PF candidate (who had received less than 5 per cent of the
ward vote) as the acting Ward Councillor – despite the lack of a procedural basis
to do this. Both the new ‘Acting Chief’ and the ‘Acting Ward Councillor’ (who are
relatives) have little legitimacy, either in formal democratic or customary terms,
but are influential representatives of a political party (ZANU-PF) with minimal
local support. In these roles they are able to considerably influence MCC decisions
on natural resource management and benefit distribution through their claims to
be themselves the prime representatives of the ‘community’ as well as the main
representatives of the dominant political party. The paradox that the local elec-
torate, the Mahenye CAMPFIRE constituency and the customary system have
all rejected this centrally-delegated local governance cartel is a marked feature
of Mahenye narratives at present. That it persists is an indication of the powerful
forces that have constructed this governance stalemate both at district-ward level
and in national politics, and the significance that control over natural resources
such as wildlife has assumed within élite political networks at all levels.
In 2008 the ‘informal contract’ that existed (illegally) between the RDC and
a hunting company was cancelled and new processes for granting this conces-
sion through tender took place. This process was administered by the RDC with
support from the CAMPFIRE Association. However, the actual tender reviews
and agreement on a new hunting company contract for 2008–2010 were noted
by MCC members as having been carried out by the RDC without their detailed
input and in a process that lacked transparency. Revenues have largely been from
hunting (Chilo Lodge payments in 2008 were in Z$ and made effectively worth-
less by inflation, and 2009 payments in US$ remain to be made). Payments to the
community/MCC from hunting remained from 2005 (previous research) until
the end of 2008 in Z$ paid in arrears to the extent that the income was effectively
zero because of hyperinflation. As of early 2009, the MCC opened its own foreign
exchange account and can now receive income in US$. The main beneficiaries of
the hunting revenue in 2007–2008 were the RDC, which was able to secure its
payments in US$, unlike either the CAMPFIRE Association or the MCC. In 2008
for example, the RDC received US$42,000 in income (compared to effectively
zero for the MCC), representing one of the largest income streams for the District
and thus a key incentive to retaining controls over decisions. With all parties
now able to retain income in US$, the contest over distribution of funds and
198 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

allocation of them represents a new set of challenges. Contrast the present distri-
bution system to that of the late 1990s, in which the RDC received 20 per cent
of income for its support functions, CAMPFIRE Association a level of 2 per cent
for its membership support and the balance of 78 per cent was managed by the
MCC (with 50 per cent allocated for household cash dividends). Currently, with
combined revenues of around US$100,000 likely for 2009, the distribution basis
is: around 50–55 per cent for the RDC and 4 per cent to CAMPFIRE Association
– both thus with increased income shares – and the remainder (~45 per cent) to
the MCC. The end of 2009, when payments will be made to all parties, is likely to
see further contestation of distribution and actual incomes both between the three
main beneficiaries (RDC, CA and MCC) and within the local context (MCC and
the Chief/Councillor).
What remains clear in a situation whose complexity has increased since research in
2005 is that the Mahenye community has explored virtually all the available avenues
from national democratic politics to local elections, to changing the MCC composi-
tion, to lobbying its RDC and CAMPFIRE representative bodies to find solutions to
their natural resource governance challenges. The story continues to reveal a consid-
erable level of community agency to find the governance route that will produce the
results it wishes. Current efforts aim to use the customary governance ‘checks and
balances’ structures of the Mahenye Headmen to challenge the illegitimate assump-
tion of power by the ‘Acting Chief’ and free up local democratic space.
As summed up by one Mahenye resident and long-term contributor to the
MCC:

We are between a hammer and a nail. I don’t have a good view of today or tomorrow.
The will of the people is being ignored. Only a change of politics in Zimbabwe will
bring this better. But we can try to change things also here and we are not afraid.

Notes
1 This chapter was published in an earlier form in 2007 as: E.C. Rihoy, C. Chirozva, and
S.G. Anstey. (2007) ‘People are not Happy’ – Speaking up for Adaptive Natural Resource
Governance in Mahenye, Occasional Paper No. 31, Programme for Land and Agrarian
Studies, University of Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa. This version has been
shortened and modified, with a postscript added based on the situation in the study
area as of 2008–2009 in order to update the rapidly changing social and political land-
scape of present-day Zimbabwe.
2 Narratives and counter-narratives draw on the work of Roe (1991) and are used to
explore the significance of particular sets of ideas or discourses or stories and the ways
that they are contested and evolve; and provide plausible explanations and can persist
in the face of even strong empirical evidence against their story lines (see Adams and
Hulme (2001) for more discussion). Used here for stories from or about Mahenye
(and told by policy-makers, academics, local officials and community members) these
narratives are not necessarily the ‘truth’ but more importantly are valid as their own
explanation for reality and its causal features.
3 Given the sensitivity of the information collected, the authors have withheld names of
most interviewees.
 ‘People are Not Happy’ 199

4 At the time of research in 2005, out of a total of 37 staff employed, 32 are from
Mahenye, including one in a management position. The construction of the lodges has
also led to improved local infrastructure such as transport links, electrification, bore-
hole construction and telephone connections.
5 This three-sentence comment is also a powerful summary of the now highly politicized
Zimbabwe rural landscape and the distortions of three normally separate institutions –
the Chief (traditional authority), District Administrator (civil servant) and ZANU-PF
(political party) – in becoming inter-linked.

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 9

The Rise and Fall of Community-Based

Natural Resource Management in
Zambia’s Luangwa Valley:
An Illustration of Micro- and
Macro-Governance Issues

Rodgers Lubilo and Brian Child

Introduction
Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is essentially an
institutional process concerned with restructuring the governance and alloca-
tion of natural resource use. CBNRM combines the twin goals of environmental
conservation and rural development because localized institutional arrangements
can facilitate both aims. Economic institutions such as property rights and contract
law are important for adding value to natural resources and increasing benefits
from sustainable use. Of equal importance are political and organizational rules,
norms and arrangements that empower rural people to control their own lives
through effective and meaningful participation and governance.
Redesigning or reforming economic and political institutions is broad, complex
and inherently contested process. Consequently CBNRM implementation has
not always lived up to its conceptual expectations, at least in the time that it has
been allowed to evolve (Roe et al, 2009; see also Nelson, this volume, Chapter 1).
The practical challenge facing CBNRM thus lies in processes surrounding imple-
mentation rather than in the concept of local resource governance itself. Indeed
CBNRM, combining a range of interconnected political and economic dimen-
sions, is analogous to democratization writ large and brings into play on a smaller
scale broader social struggles over political authority and control over resources.1
Many of the fundamental challenges to CBNRM lie in the definition of roles
and responsibilities and in the configuration and competition over power and
resources between and across different scales (see Figure 9.1). The importance of
 The Rise and Fall of Community-Based Natural Resource Management 203

Figure 9.1 Governance and scale

these relationships is widely recognized, including by leading deductive (Ostrom,

1990) and inductive social scientists (Murphree, 1991; Murphree, 2000a).
In this chapter we discuss natural resource governance in Zambia at the local
level as well as across scales within the broader political environment. Using the
case of the Lupande Game Management Area (GMA), where 65,000 people
live alongside the South Luangwa National Park, the country’s leading wildlife
protected area, we contend that the conditions for CBNRM to operate effectively
at the local scale are available. There is no technical excuse not to be successful,
although many programmes do not achieve their aims because they do not apply
rigorous principles based on local democratic governance. However, an addi-
tional and perhaps paramount challenge is to facilitate conditions that enable
effective local natural resource governance regimes to emerge and persist within
the complex political arena within which power is negotiated and renegotiated.
Moreover, to understand this, we need to understand the nature of the governing
polity itself. Of particular importance is the difference between highly personal-
ized, patrimonial states and the more impersonal and institutionalized economies
associated with liberal democracy.2
The CBNRM programme in the Luangwa Valley is useful for investigating intra-
community and cross-scale governance because it has experienced three distinct
phases marked by institutional changes in decision-making in relation to wildlife
management and associated revenues, which have occurred over the course of
the past 30 years. CBNRM in Luangwa was conceived as a technically strong
and decentralized Integrated Resources and Development Project, essentially
establishing a mini-government for the Lupande GMA that was well-funded by
the Norwegian government and protected politically by then-President Kenneth
204 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

Kaunda (Gibson, 1999). This stage lasted from the initiative’s inception in the
mid-1980s until 1995. In 1996, the programme adopted a much more demo-
cratic approach to community participation, drawing ideas as well as personnel
from CBNRM initiatives in Zimbabwe (see Rihoy et al, this volume). This second
phase led to the devolution of all revenues from wildlife use in Lupande GMA to
the community at various levels, with 80 per cent of revenues controlled within
villages and used according to processes of direct democratic, rather than repre-
sentative, decision-making. Despite the relative success of this approach, wildlife
revenues were subsequently recentralized in 2003, a situation which continues to
the present. We describe the technical outcomes of the three phases and provide
a preliminary analysis of why these changes happened. Our perspective is that
of field practitioners who worked on CBNRM in Luangwa during many of the
years in question, with one of us (R. Lubilo) continuing to permanently reside
and work in the area. As such, we have directly observed many of the changes in
resource governance during these phases and have participated directly or indi-
rectly in many, but by no means all, of the political processes and negotiations that
occurred.

The emergence of CBNRM in Zambia

Zambia’s enormous potential as a wildlife-driven economy has never been fulfilled.
Some 40 per cent of the country is gazetted as national park, forestry area or
GMA, but in most of these areas the wildlife population is depleted (although the
habitat is intact) and Zambia earns an order of magnitude less from its wildlife
than its neighbours in both southern and eastern Africa because of inappropriate
policy and poor governance. Zambia’s wildlife management practices include both
promotion of non-consumptive or photographic tourism, which occurs primarily
in national parks such as South Luangwa, and trophy hunting, which operates in
the GMAs. These GMAs are inhabited by rural communities, who hold customary
rights to the land which is exercised by traditional chiefly authorities (Lewis and
Alpert, 1997; Simasiku et al, 2008).
Politically, Zambia gained independence from Britain in 1964, and followed a
pathway of personalized rule as a one-party socialist state under Kenneth Kaunda
for 27 years. With neo-patrimonial imperatives being paramount over public or
technocratic developmental interests, Zambia rapidly became a highly inefficient
state. The country, led by President Kaunda, adopted a socialist centrally-planned
economic model which was highly dependent on global copper prices, while the
control of natural resources was noticeably centralized (HURID, 2002). After the
collapse in copper prices in the 1970s, Zambia came to depend on the largesse
of western donors, before entering a phase of multiparty democracy in the
1990s characterized by ‘re-cycling’ the same set of politicians through different
competing political parties (Simon, 2005). In the rural areas chiefs are exception-
ally strong, and the economy as a whole is dominated by a relatively small number
of powerful individuals (cf. Brown, 2003). The institutions of property rights,
legal contracting and the judiciary are unreliable and subject to informal negotia-
tions. Corruption is widespread (Szeftel, 2000) and Zambia was ranked 75th in
 The Rise and Fall of Community-Based Natural Resource Management 205

2001 and 115th in 2008 in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions

Index (Transparency International, 2009). Thus, North et al (2009) would
describe Zambia as a personalized economy with high transaction costs, while
Hyden (2006) would recognize the essential features of a neo-partimonial state in
the personalized loyalties of the civil service and the patronage-based rather than
public orientation of policy-making.

Integrating conservation and development in Zambia

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Zambia’s elephant and rhino populations were
ravaged by commercial poaching, with rhino becoming extinct and over 100,000
elephant being killed (Jachmann and Billiouw, 1997). In response, a national work-
shop was held in 1983 at Nyamaluma Training Institute in the Luangwa Valley
(Dalal-Clayton and Lewis, 1984). The workshop identified poverty as the main
reason for rampant poaching and recommended that local communities should
participate in both management of, and sharing of benefits from, wildlife. Thus,
ideas about integrating wildlife conservation with rural development began to
take shape in Zambia, even as experiments with CBNRM arose in neighbouring
countries such as Zimbabwe. The basic idea underpinning CBNRM, as it evolved
across southern Africa, is that wildlife has to be of value to the local people who
live with it if it is to survive. In the early 1980s, regional wildlife managers began
to promote the idea that local communities should be allocated concessions to
use wildlife (Bell, 1987). This ran counter to a generation of wildlife managers
who considered wildlife to be the exclusive property of the government. However,
wildlife under such institutional arrangements had no value to local communities
and landholders, and during the second half of the 20th century was put under
severe pressure, crowded out by alternative land uses and decimated by commer-
cial poachers.
In Zambia, two parallel programmes, the Administrative Management and
Design for Game Management Areas (ADMADE) and the Luangwa Integrated
Resources and Development Project (LIRDP) emerged (Gibson, 1999). The
national ADMADE programme was implemented by the National Parks and
Wildlife Service across Zambia, but most prominently in the Luangwa Valley. In
designing these programmes, President Kaunda collaborated with Norwegian
bilateral aid agency staff to cut South Luangwa out from the purview of the notori-
ously ineffective National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS). Mistrusting NPWS,
Kaunda placed the LIRDP under the Commission for Economic Planning and
Development as a pilot programme for community development in the Lupande
GMA, and for antipoaching in and around the South Luangwa National Park. This
established a competitive relationship between the two experimental community
wildlife programmes that is well documented by Gibson (1999).

Administrative Management and Design for Game Management Areas

(ADMADE)
For the sake of historical completeness, we briefly describe the ADMADE
programme (Lewis et al, 1990). ADMADE emerged out of the experimental
Lupande Development Project (1984–87) which was originally designed to
206 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

examine the damage caused to woodlands by elephants restricted to certain areas

of the park by human disturbance, to involve local people directly in the protection
and sustainable use of wildlife and to return a significant level of wildlife revenues
to them (Lewis et al, 1990). Following the 1983 Nyamaluma Workshop (Dalal-
Clayton and Lewis, 1984), ADMADE established a central Revolving Fund at
NPWS headquarters and worked closely with Nyamaluma Training Institute to
provide capacity-building for rural leadership to participate in wildlife conserva-
tion. The Revolving Fund collected revenues from trophy hunting in GMAs, and
apportioned that revenue from national to local scale as follows:

• 35 per cent to local authorities (i.e. chiefs) for community development;

• 40 per cent for wildlife management in GMAs;
• 25 per cent for NPWS’s general management operations.

What is often not mentioned in public documents is that these proportions only
apply to 50 per cent of trophy hunting revenues, with the other 50 per cent being
retained by the Treasury. Further, records and audits of the Revolving Fund were
notoriously incomplete (Gibson, 1999), so communities were seldom aware of
how much money they were getting, and the relationship between the amount of
income generated in a community and the income paid back to them was never
defined and was tentative at best.
Using the 40 per cent allocated for wildlife management in GMAs under
ADMADE’s revenue-sharing formula, ADMADE instituted a village game scout
programme as a way of involving communities in the management of wildlife,
albeit under the supervision of NPWS antipoaching staff. ADMADE created
wildlife sub-authority committees at chiefdom level for liaison purposes and to
implement projects, and placed an NPWS Wildlife Officer as Unit Leader in
order to support this process. ADMADE catalysed broader thinking on how to
involve communities in the integrated management of wildlife in Zambia so that
promoting greater local involvement and benefits from wildlife came to be seen as
a desirable conservation strategy. However, while the village scout programme and
associated training was a move in a positive direction, the overall performance of
ADMADE was hampered by recentralization at the local level and accompanying
problems of élite capture and financial non-transparency, and because very few
wildlife benefits, except employment as village scouts and a few projects, ever
reached individuals (see Gibson and Marks, 1995; Marks, 2001; Bwalya, 2003).
The personal alliances leading this programme were shattered in the drawn-out
and politicized transformation of NPWS into the parastatal Zambia Wildlife
Authority between 1998 and 2003.

Luangwa Integrated Resources and Development Project (LIRDP)

Piloted in six Kunda chiefdoms in the Luangwa Valley, LIRDP’s first manifesta-
tion was as a large multi-sectoral project designed to coordinate development
planning in the district and to provide basic social services, including water,
forestry, agricultural research and extension, etc. The programme’s mandate was
the integrated management of an area of 15,000km2, including South Luangwa
National Park (9,050km2) and Mambwe District in the Eastern Province of
 The Rise and Fall of Community-Based Natural Resource Management 207

Zambia. Outside the park, not less than 65,000 indigenous people depend on
subsistence farming of maize, rice and sorghum, and more recently, on cotton as
a cash crop. LIRDP was in essence a mini-government for the Luangwa Valley,
financed largely by the Norwegians and administratively shielded from other
bureaucratic interests by the dual influences of that foreign donor and President
Kaunda. LIRDP initially spent heavily on coordinating meetings which, in the
final analysis, was probably essential to buy political support from the various
departments that benefited from participation (including through ‘sitting allow-
ances’) for the then-radical idea of wildlife-based development (Dalal-Clayton
and Child, 2003).
At Cabinet level, an inter-ministerial committee chaired by the President (until
1991) oversaw the project, and two weeks each year were spent in lavish meet-
ings. At district level, numerous coordinating committees met regularly, wrote
reports and absorbed sitting allowances. Unfortunately, this led to LIRDP
becoming an organization oriented towards spending money on administrative
functions and which was regularly criticized for inefficiency, employing between
350 and 600 people and having over 40 Toyota Land Cruisers in use. Moreover,
LIRDP did not have an easy task. Administrative structures in the district were
complex and confused. For instance, the formal district administrative structure,
Mambwe District Council (comprising 13 political wards with elected council-
lors, and an area Member of Parliament) often could not pay its technical staff
for months at a time, while its authority relative to other government depart-
ments, and particularly the traditional leadership, was never clear. The project
area included six chiefdoms under the leadership of Senior Chief Nsefu. Each
chief is advised by a team of indunas,3 while groups of households are adminis-
tered by a Village Headman. Indunas and headmen play a key role in resource
utilization at community level, allocating land for farming and settlements subject
to the approval of the chief.
South Luangwa National Park is Zambia’s premier tourism destination (after
the Victoria Falls). In the central planning mode, LIRDP4 tried to run tourism
and hunting operations itself. This was heavily subsidized by the donor, and
generated income of about US$150,000 from park fees compared to expendi-
tures for the park and GMA exceeding US$3 million annually. This partly funded
LIRDP antipoaching operations, which were most effective between the mid-
1980s and mid-1990s. This stopped rampant elephant poaching, allowing popu-
lations to recover from roughly 5,000 to 10,000 at the same time that elephant
populations elsewhere in Zambia continued to decline (Jachmann and Billiouw,
1997; Patterson, pers. comm.5). However, the park only approached financial
self-sufficiency in the late 1990s when it was managed as a self-financing cost
centre and adopted a new commercial model based on private sector investment.
There are now 50 lodges and campsites with 300 beds in total capacity in and
around the park generating some US$1 million in park fees annually (SLAMU,
2008). This created the first employment-based economy in the GMA with both
positive effects (e.g. economic development) and negative ones (e.g. unplanned
settlement growth). The GMA is one of Zambia’s prime areas for trophy hunting,
and in the 2007 hunting season, for example, generated US$488,000 (SLAMU,
2007).
208 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

The rise and fall of community wildlife

management in the Luangwa Valley
After the idea of community conservation emerged in the Luangwa Valley in
the early 1980s (Dalal-Clayton, 1984), the subsequent evolution of LIRDP can
usefully be characterized according to three district phases.

1 In the first phase of LIRDP (1986–1995) all wildlife revenues generated by

the park and GMA were retained by the programme, and 40 per cent of these
revenues were channelled to local communities through traditional leaders,
the chiefs.
2 In the second phase (1996–2002) the community retained 100 per cent of
revenues from trophy hunting in the GMA, and more than 80 per cent of this
was allocated through some 45 Village Action Groups (VAGs). By this time,
hunting revenues had risen to over US$225,000 annually. The communities
did not receive any of the revenue generated by South Luangwa National
Park, which was treated as a self-financing management unity.
3 Following the transformation of the government department, NPWS, into
the self-financing parastatal, the Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA), wildlife
income was recentralized in Lusaka. ZAWA officially allocates 50 per cent of
trophy fees and 20 per cent of concession fees from trophy hunting to GMAs,
and makes sporadic payments to Community Resources Boards (CRBs)
which have been established at the level of a chiefdom, far more removed
from local communities than the village-level VAGs.

These phases are described in tables and figures to clarify key issues of scale and
authority in the Zambian context. Figure 9.2 shows how policies associated with
the three phases substantially affect the locus of financial decision-making and
the configuration of power between the levels. Note how, in the recentralization
phase, governance is re-personalized, with ZAWA scaling revenues back upwards
to itself and empowering chiefs in relation to CRBs. Predictably, this virtually
eliminated VAG-level activity by removing financing and, indeed, information.
Table 9.1 summarizes performance in terms of participation, benefit flows, finan-
cial accountability and access to information at three levels in the community over
the three phases of the project.

Local participation in wildlife management through

top-down benefit-sharing (1985–1995)
Following an initial planning phase, LIRDP received substantial funding from the
Norwegian government and two co-directors were employed to oversee the devel-
opment of a viable wildlife-based development programme in the Luangwa Valley:
Fidelius Lungu, a confidant of President Kaunda, and Richard Bell, a leading
southern African wildlife manager and CBNRM innovator.
Several factors aligned in the emergence of this new conservation model in
Zambia in the early 1980s. As mentioned, Zambia faced a serious poaching crisis.
 Table 9.1 An assessment of annual performance (participation, benefits, financial accountability, information flows)
at different levels of community administration in the three phases of the programme
Performance metrics First (benefit-sharing) phase Second (participatory democracy) phase Third (recentralization) phase
Participation
Level 3: GMA 80 man days 20 man days Nil
(Chiefs + 2 indunas meet quarterly) (seldom meet because of conflicts)
Level 2:ADC/CRB Informal 600 man days 240 man days (6 committees
(6 committees met monthly) meet quarterly)
Level 1: VAG 81,000 days No meetings
Ordinary people (45 VAGs, 300 people, 3 quarterly GMs, 1
3-day AGM)
Benefits
Household benefits Nil 20,500 people get benefits Nil
Projects A few 262 projects Nil
Wildlife management Nil Allocation increase to 14% of income; ??
employed 78 Village Scouts
Financial Accountability
Level 2&3: LIRDA, ADC, CRB No accounts but many rumours 40% misallocated (mainly 2 chiefs with No records but unhappy
HIV/AIDS) rumours
Level 1: VAG No income >98% of $175,000+ accounted for by year No income
2000
Information flow
Levels 2&3: Committees/chiefs General information on project; As below Not known
rough accounting of income (no
records of expenditure)
Level 1: Ordinary people General idea of project Income and Expenditure plus audit reports Very little
Quotas. Wildlife values. Their rights.
Procedures. HIV/AIDS
210 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

Figure 9.2 A comparison of the organization structures and revenue flows of

different organizational levels in the three project phases

At the same time concerned individuals (e.g. Norman Carr), researchers (e.g.
Dale Lewis), NGOs (e.g. WWF) and government officials (e.g. Gilson Kaweche)
were engaged in a regional debate about the potential of wildlife-based devel-
opment and the merits of citizen- and incentive-led conservation (Suich et al,
2008). As it happened, the Norwegians had recruited an energetic polar bear
expert (Thor Larsen) to their Lusaka Embassy. The financial foundation for
LIRDP was laid when Larsen tracked President Kaunda to his private lodge in
South Luangwa National Park and together they developed the initial idea for
LIRDP. President Kaunda had a fondness for wildlife, and both he and his wife
had their political and personal roots in eastern Zambia, with his wife coming
from Mambwe District.
President Kaunda removed the new initiative from the control of NPWS, the
Norwegians funded LIRDP, and Bell and Lungu managed it. Bell was clearly aware
of the problems of an isolated project approach, having written about similar prob-
lems arising from early Zimbabwean CBNRM efforts (Bell, 1987). Nevertheless,
LIRDP adopted a stand-alone programmatic model. Perhaps it was impossible to
alter Zambia’s model of central planning quite so radically, while Bell and Lungu
may have believed that central planning worked if the central planners were situ-
ated locally and were technically competent, as both these men were. Moreover, at
the time, critical lessons about representational and participatory local governance
had not yet emerged from experiential learning across the region.
The net result was a top-down system where the use of the 40 per cent of
wildlife revenues allocated under LIRDP for local revenue-sharing was decided
locally by the Local Leaders Sub-committee comprising 6 chiefs, 12 indunas (one
male and one female from each chiefdom), 4 elected councillors and other invited
stakeholders. This 40 per cent was shared equitably among the chiefdoms, which
 The Rise and Fall of Community-Based Natural Resource Management 211

covered a total of 65,000 people, based on needs and was targeted towards infra-
structure and service provision. No financial statements describing the use of
these wildlife revenues have ever been made available. Judged by output (e.g. lack
of projects), expenditure was inefficient and used personally, it is said, by local
élites.6 Funds generated by the park and hunting in the GMA were also mixed
with donor funds in their operational use.
A culture of spending emerged, based partly on the availability of external donor
funds, providing services that could never be sustained. The provision of social
services including water, rural development, women’s projects, agricultural exten-
sion, forestry, roads and wildlife management, was implemented in a conventional
bureaucratic style. The communities’ general cynicism about projects and service
provision during this period corresponds to the poor record of service delivery.
Building the capacity of the local community was largely ignored, and local partic-
ipation was limited to interactions with chiefs, who were the principal decision-
makers at the local level. Though the intention was good, the results were poor in
terms of empowering the local people and changing their attitudes towards wildlife.
The project also engaged in entrepreneurial projects including Malambo Milling,
Malambo Transport, Malambo Safaris and a game-cropping scheme to generate
income and employment. These businesses all failed, and absorbed significant
donor funding. The business model relied on almost unlimited access to donor
financing and was never distanced from the personal attention and benefit of the
local élites (i.e. the chiefs).
The chiefs and LIRDP staff took all key decisions, and the centralized decision-
making system did not encourage local people to link wildlife conservation with
benefits received. Most people assumed the services were being funded by donor
aid grants. A series of studies trace a shift from negative attitudes towards wildlife in
the mini-government phase of LIRDP, largely because of human–wildlife conflict
and non-participation (Balakrishna and Ndlovu, 1992; Wainwright, 1996), with
attitudes then improving markedly, initially because of tourism (Butler, 1996), but
by 1998 direct (cash) benefits were prominent in people’s responses (Phiri, 1996;
Butler, 1998).

Transitioning to a bottom-up approach (1992–1996)

After 27 years as a one-party state, the 1991 elections in Zambia saw the startling
defeat of President Kaunda and the end of socialism as the dominant develop-
ment discourse. Frederick Chiluba, a former labour activist and opposition leader
with the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), unseated Kaunda as
Zambia transitioned towards a more liberalized economy under pressure from
donors’ structural adjustment programmes and conditional loan requirements.
In 1992, NPWS wrested control of LIRDP back from the National Commission
for Development Planning and replaced the two LIRDP co-directors with an
NPWS employee.
With income of about US$200,000 and expenditure approaching US$3
million, a proposal was submitted for a third phase of Norwegian funding to
LIRDP in 1992. This was heavily criticized by consultants reviewing the proposal
for replicating a bureaucratic behemoth while claiming to be seeking financial
212 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

sustainability, and for perpetuating paternalistic and weakly accountable commu-

nity conservation structures with only 2 per cent of the budget devoted to commu-
nity development (Scanteam, 1993). Subsequent revisions emphasized returning
functions to line ministries, reorganizing the project with clear and funded core
functions, and strengthening CBNRM through more devolved forms of grass-
roots organization.
In 1996, the project hired a technical advisor from Zimbabwe to develop a more
participatory and ‘bottom-up’ system for community wildlife management.7 This
led to an internal planning process that re-engineered the programme from within,
recognizing that only a modernized organizational culture would support decen-
tralized CBNRM. LIRDP sought financial sustainability by eliminating many
unfunded service mandates, and by devolving planning, budgets and authority
to nine cost centres through a performance management system. It also recruited
new Zambian staff with a more commercial and business-oriented outlook.
Simultaneously, a series of workshops with the six Area Development
Committees (ADCs) indicated that few projects were being implemented, that
communities were not benefiting, and that the project and wildlife were viewed
negatively at the local level. In April 1996, and following a visit to Zimbabwe’s
CAMPFIRE programme, senior project management met and agreed to trans-
form the approach to CBNRM. LIRDP produced a four-page policy document
that clearly described new financial procedures and responsibilities for each of the
administrative layers in the programme – LIRDP, the chiefs, ADCs and commu-
nity members through the mechanism of participation in Village Action Groups
(VAGs).
Under this new approach, all revenue from trophy hunting carried out in the
GMA would be banked in a community account. As soon as conformance moni-
toring verified that proper procedures were followed, including elections, partici-
patory budgeting and financial reporting (both to LIRDP and the community),
80 per cent of this money would be divided amongst the 45 VAGs. Ordinary
people could choose to allocate this revenue for personal or collective benefits
at the village scale, as well as for wildlife management and administrative over-
heads, without interference from the chiefs or the LIRDP management. The ADC
received 4 per cent for general coordinative functions, the chiefs were redefined
as ‘patrons’ and were effectively paid off with a 6 per cent share, and 10 per cent
remained in the account as a contingency fund.
This proposal, representing a radical departure from the way wildlife revenues
were allocated under the prior LIRDP phase, was presented to the national Policy
Committee that oversaw LIRDP and was attended by Permanent Secretaries
from at least five ministries. Amazingly, it was accepted almost without comment
despite almost no pre-meeting lobbying by LIRDP staff. Unlike Zimbabwe and
Namibia, where CBNRM arrangements were built into primary legislation, in the
Luangwa Valley the enabling framework was an administrative agreement made
by this committee and strengthened by the overarching Norway–Zambia bilateral
cooperative agreement.
Support for the new approach was provided for the first revenue distribution
in Malama chiefdom through the attendance of senior officials from both NPWS
and the Norwegian Embassy, a ceremony preceded by considerable participatory
 The Rise and Fall of Community-Based Natural Resource Management 213

planning and budgeting (Child, 2006). The community had allocated money to
schools and other social projects, and were excited when the trunkful of cash for
household cash dividends and projects arrived. Nonetheless, the revenue distribu-
tion was cancelled when Chief Malama conspicuously drove away in his vehicle to
visit nearby relatives. Thus began a four-year battle over fiscal devolution between
the chiefs in the Luangwa Valley and their subjects.
In the short term, the concept of fiscal devolution through face-to-face finan-
cial budgeting and the rights to individual and collective choice over investments
was saved by Chief Msoro. He allowed local revenue distribution according to
the new LIRDP formula to continue in his chiefdom. Social pressure within the
community led even Chief Malama to approach LIRDP with his reconsideration.
The chiefs now legally received a significant annual honorarium from wildlife,
but it is likely that they benefited far more from the non-transparent and top-
down system that this replaced. A battle of wills ensued, with some of the chiefs
trying to force their subjects to spend money in certain ways. Ordinary commu-
nity members often asked LIRDP to challenge the chiefs on their behalf. LIRDP
recognized that it could only lose by getting caught in the middle of this political
struggle, and simply insisted on financial transparency, enabling and insisting that
communities produced accurate accounts and made these widely available within
the community at least four times per year. The conflict over money raged for at
least four years, and LIRDP staff were harangued for many hours at formal meet-
ings with chiefs, and sometimes by politicians and bureaucrats. After four years
these conflicts somehow faded in the course of interactions between the commu-
nities and their chiefs.
The new LIRDP approach did not arise organically from within communi-
ties, but was designed by external programme staff, and then explained village-
by-village through a process of participatory constitution development followed
closely by experiential learning when each VAG was facilitated through a three-
day process of budgeting their money, running elections and paying out cash
dividends. Although this neo-liberal democratic approach was imposed on local
communities, who had little capacity to aspire to an approach they had never seen
before, it was absorbed almost seamlessly. Indeed, the chiefs took their dissatisfac-
tion with this democratic approach to the national Policy Committee, who ruled
that people should be allowed to vote on which approach they preferred. A poll
was organized in one village in Chief Mnkhanya’s area. In an energetic process
over 130 people supported the new system with only seven votes against it. The
chiefs subsequently objected to such polls as being non-traditional, but the point
had been made.

CBNRM as fiscal devolution and participatory democracy

(1996–2002)
The crucial mechanism for creating participation and financial accountability
was to devolve the allocation and control of 80 per cent of wildlife revenues to
Village Action Groups (see Figure 9.2), and to insist on conformance to face-to-
face procedures for democratic accountability. This also prised financial control
away from the chiefs. When face-to-face meetings became to big too handle,
214 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

communities sub-divided themselves, and through this organic process each

chiefdom was divided into between 3 and 11 VAGs. The Project redefined its role
as facilitating participatory democracy by emphasizing the flow of information
(e.g. finances, wildlife off-take and prices), insisting on conformance to key demo-
cratic principles, and providing supporting training and facilitation (e.g. constitu-
tion formation and reinforcement). The Project ensured compliance with the new
democratic procedures, but did not interfere in the VAGs’ choices about spending,
except that fiscal management was participatory and money was accounted for.
Some programme staff and government officials struggled to accept this hands-
off role. Individual members of the community were placed at the centre of all
decisions, while ensuring (through 45 quarterly community assemblies and the
6 ADCs) that their decisions were informed by quality information and regular
discussions and presentations on constitutions, roles and responsibilities, and
members’ rights, financial expenditure and wildlife utilization.
The overall management system was loosened by devolving decisions to ordi-
nary people and allowing them the full choice of how to use their money, including
household cash.8 However, procedurally, the system was tightened; revenue was
only made available to communities once they had conformed to requirements for
face-to-face budgeting, face-to-face control of previous finances, the transparent
financial records necessary for this and annual elections. Accountability was
further strengthened as committees were downwardly accountable to the member-
ship and upwardly accountable to LIRDP, and to the ADC and the district-level
Luangwa Integrated Rural Development Authority (see below). Key mechanisms
were, respectively:

1 well-organized quarterly village assemblies;

2 conformance monitoring implemented by the programme that summarized
oversight of each community using a simple one-page checklist.

At the VAG Annual General Meeting, at least 60 per cent of the community met
face-to-face to decide how to spend their money. They compiled a simple budget
and work plan, elected new leaders, signed off on financial and progress reports,
and updated and revised the membership register. At quarterly general meet-
ings, actual expenditure was compared to agreed budgets and work plans with
support from LIRDP staff in the form of financial and technical audits. Thus,
ordinary people made decisions and checked that they were implemented. These
arrangements enabled the communities to give instructions to their village-level
committees, instructions which could not be changed without their authority
as reinforced through these assemblies. This helped prevent committees from
changing budgets, prolonging the terms of office bearers, terminating member-
ship and hiding information.
The result was energetic acceptance of the programme, a burst of community
projects and voluntarism, and a drastic reduction in poaching in Luangwa. An
important lesson imported from CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe (Child et al, 1997;
Rihoy et al, this volume) and confirmed in LIRDP was the power of household-
level cash dividends, with some 20,500 people benefiting directly each year.
Although this was often criticized by bureaucrats as amounting to only US$10 or
 The Rise and Fall of Community-Based Natural Resource Management 215

so annually, it was critically important, not only to cash-starved households, but

also in symbolizing community ownership and authority, in bringing communities
together to resolve their own problems, and in linking benefits directly to wildlife.
This linkage was emphasized with a careful and full accounting of all wildlife off-
take and income in every community using flipcharts, in marked contrast to the
unexplained sources of local benefits as occurred during the previous programme
phase.
While a four-level hierarchical structure that looked good on paper was officially
accepted, the primary levels of actual decision-making were the VAGs and the
LIRDP itself, with the ADC performing light functions and the LIRDA becoming
almost irrelevant. We describe the roles of the different layers of local governance
during this phase of LIRDP in greater detail below.

Institutions at district level

The Lupande Integrated Rural Development Authority (LIRDA) was a district-
level assembly chaired by the chiefs with representation from indunas, councillors
and LIRDP project staff. It was supposed to be a policy body debating principles
and key decisions, but conflicts between LIRDP and chiefs over fiscal devolution,
and between chiefs over the share of revenues, rendered this entity virtually non-
functional. As noted, the chiefs had rejected the principle that wildlife revenues
should accrue proportionally to the local communities that lived alongside wild-
life, and which produced the wildlife used for trophy hunting, and wanted funds
shared equally across the six chiefdoms of the ‘Kunda nation’. However, the chiefs
adjacent to the park, where agriculture was less successful and human–wildlife
conflict more serious, soon began to lobby for a greater share of benefits, and this
and other conflicts made it difficult to bring the chiefs together.9

The six chiefdoms

At chiefdom level, the role of the Area Development Committee (ADC) was restricted
by cutting their share of the budget to 4 per cent to cover administrative costs, meet-
ings, travel expenses and allowances. The role of ADCs was redefined as the coor-
dination of VAGs and ensuring compliance to the agreed programmatic principles
of democracy, transparency and accountability. The ADCs were encouraged to use
village general meetings to raise awareness of problems and ask the people to take
appropriate action but had no power to alter the budget of any village.

Village Action Groups (VAGs)

The foundation of the programme during this phase was the 45 VAGs, where
individuals assembled face-to-face to make decisions about wildlife management,
revenue distribution and project development. With control over 80 per cent of
the wildlife income generated in Lupande GMA, VAGs became vibrant organiza-
tions. On average, the VAGs apportioned their income, very roughly, as follows:

• 10 per cent for administration;

• roughly 10 per cent (but up to 14 per cent by 2000) for wildlife manage-
ment including the employment of some 78 village scouts, patrolling and the
construction of wildlife dams;
216 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

• roughly 40 per cent for household cash dividends;

• roughly 40 per cent for social projects including the construction or renova-
tion of schools, wells, clinics, teachers’ houses, and shelters and investments in
sewing machines, food and even football clubs.

In six years, some 232 projects were built compared to, perhaps, ten (there were
few records) grain-storage sheds, classrooms and clinics during the previous
programme phase, which had been built on behalf of the communities and often
associated with conflict and incompletion. Notwithstanding the allocation of
60 per cent of the communities’ income as cash benefits, wildlife management
and administration, the number of projects increased by a factor of well over 20,
presumably because of increased accountability, voluntarism (e.g. brick-making,
digging, carrying water), and using scarce cash only for items such as metal
roofing and door frames (Dalal-Clayton and Child, 2003). In addition, communi-
ties began to set aside land for wildlife conservation and attitudes towards wildlife
improved measurably (Lubilo, 2007). Nevertheless, some officials and traditional
leaders regularly complained that development was being squandered because
people took a proportion of their revenues as cash and, sin-of-sins, sometimes
bought beer with those dividends.
Constitutions were crafted carefully so that power lay with individuals, who
were empowered to change their leaders, approve all financial decisions, request
and require financial and technical reports and other information. People met
quarterly to review performance through reports from the chair, treasurer and
secretary. The process of participatory revenue allocation and tracking provided
a strong foundation for improved natural resource governance. People met under
the tree at the centre of villages to decide how much money to take as cash or
to invest in projects or administration (e.g. meetings, allowances, transport and
communication). The cash distribution signalled a positive and independent
choice for the local community and enhanced power to manage their own affairs.
Consequently, people learned how to account for cash, develop infrastructure and
service provision projects and to manage wildlife. This built strong proprietary
interest in the programme and created confidence amongst local people.

The collapse of participatory democracy (2002–present)

Restructuring NPWS from a government department into the self-funding
parastatal Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) seriously damaged CBNRM in
Zambia. A poorly conceived transition meant that ZAWA often could not pay its
own staff’s salaries, and institutionalized a bureaucratic dependence on revenues
from GMAs, effectively extracting resources from Zambia’s rural poor. ZAWA
officials used the organization’s financial crisis, which saw staff go for several
months without salaries, to undermine the extant LIRDP approach to wildlife
management, and to argue against communities receiving cash dividends. This
was exacerbated by a trophy hunting ban put in place nationally between 2001
and 2003, which not only affected ZAWA’s finances, but meant that communi-
ties went without income for two years, so that ZAWA’s new policy of not giving
communities revenue from wildlife was less obvious.
 The Rise and Fall of Community-Based Natural Resource Management 217

The transformation process which replaced NPWS with ZAWA was rancorous,
lengthy and associated with political intrigue, as different factions struggled for
control of Zambia’s wildlife. Legally, ZAWA was established through the Zambia
Wildlife Act No. 12 of 1998, followed by a commencement order issued in 2000.
This legislation provided a firmer legal basis for CBNRM through newly legis-
lated Community Resources Boards (CRBs). Unfortunately, the framework for
CBNRM in the Act provided a lot of administrative detail about how CRBs were
to function (with little room for flexibility), but missed the lesson that account-
ability arises through well-organized bottom-up processes. ZAWA established
representational CRBs at the scale of approximately 10,000 people, defining
accountability from the top-down but without any logistical capacity to imple-
ment requirements such as regular audits. The Act could nevertheless be inter-
preted to entrench further devolution using subsidiary legislation and guidelines,
but in practice was used to recentralize CBNRM both nationally and locally, as
well as to extract income from wildlife living in rural areas. To understand why it
played out in this way, we describe the transformation process in more detail.
The rapidly improving financial and technical performance of LIRDP in
the late 1990s, and of tourism in Zambia more generally, excited consider-
able donor interest in protected areas as an option for economic development.
Delighted by their success in Luangwa, the Norwegians sought to scale this up
by supporting the transformation of NPWS into the parastatal ZAWA in the
hope of extending progress countrywide,10 and especially to Kafue National
Park, one of the country’s other major wildlife areas. The challenge was to
create new rational-legal institutions to replace the personalized rule within a
state with a heavy interest in the wildlife sector and its patronage possibilities.
The potential gains in economic growth, poverty reduction and wildlife conser-
vation were considerable.
Inexplicably, the Norwegians, who led this multi-donor push for reform,11
changed their management model in the midst of this complicated transition
from NPWS to ZAWA. They phased out external technical assistance, and
stopped ring-fencing and protecting South Luangwa to demonstrate their
solidarity with ZAWA. But most importantly, they reinterpreted their defini-
tion of ‘recipient responsibility’. The strategy of facilitating LIRDP to develop
objective-orientated, measurable annual and four-year plans, holding LIRDP
accountable to the performance metrics in these plans, and insisting that the
purpose of the project was to ‘benefit Zambians at a household level’12 was a
major factor in the turnaround of LIRDP. Norway’s programmes in Luangwa
(and also through direct payment to scouts for antipoaching efforts in Kafue)
clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of linking funding to measurable perform-
ance. Possibly influenced by a general return of donors to basket funding rather
than project support in the early 2000s, Norway (and others) began to fund
ZAWA centrally yet with far less emphasis on linking payments to performance
than before. Providing money to headquarters, with weaker links to metrics of
performance, enabled ZAWA’s managerial culture to orient less towards tech-
nical delivery (and decentralization) and more towards political and patronage
ends and centralization.
218 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

During the negotiations over aid support to ZAWA, a small group of advocates
attempted to persuade the donors to use their financial muscle to support ZAWA,
but on condition that ZAWA protected the rights of communities to benefit from
wildlife on their lands (DSI, 2002). In the event, ZAWA hauled in money from
both the donors and the communities, with the associated collapse of considerable
investment in CBNRM by both ADMADE and LIRDP.
ZAWA recruited key staff from LIRDP, especially those with competencies
developed outside the government system, but their technical skills were not up
to the political intrigue of the ZAWA transformation and they were eventually
lost from the system. At the same time, Norway phased out its last two tech-
nical assistants. This broke up LIRDP’s management team, and little capacity
remained to support local rights and interests. At the same time, the ZAWA trans-
formation lacked technical capacity, especially but not only related to CBNRM.
Institutional memory was eroded even further by simultaneous staff changes in
the Norwegian Embassy which, as mentioned above, may have largely accounted
for the emphasis on local benefits and accountable performance being dropped
in favour of granting large-scale financial support to ZAWA. Norwegian priorities
and rhetoric also changed radically.
In the early 2000s, LIRDP was lauded as a flagship programme to the extent
that Norway’s Environmental Action Plan highlighted the ‘conservation and
sustainable use of ecosystems’ and ‘giving local communities, including indi­
genous people, access to natural resources and the fair and equitable sharing of
the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources’. Norwegian offi-
cials suggested that Norway wanted to become the premier supporter of commu-
nity conservation. However, this was rapidly dropped in favour of a focus on
climate change, while in Zambia, commitment to CBNRM was replaced with
new rhetoric that cast doubt on the effectiveness of CBNRM.13 Consequently,
as Zambia’s wildlife sector was transformed with considerable donor investment,
the Luangwa communities and CBNRM more broadly had fewer technical and
political supporters.

From Village Action Groups to Community Resource Boards

Despite the experiences over the previous six years in Luangwa that clearly demon-
strated the advantages of participatory democracy over more remote and large-
scale representational governance structures, ZAWA has shown a preference for the
latter. ZAWA institutionalized a system of Community Resource Boards across the
country, effectively re-establishing the ineffective top-down approach associated
with the first phase of LIRDP. The main nominal change in the CRBs, in compar-
ison to the first phase of LIRDP, is that chiefs are supposedly distanced from the
operations of the CRB which, however, coincide administratively with chiefdoms.
Participatory democracy in the Lupande GMA, based on VAGs, was replaced
by a representational organization comprised of officials elected from the commu-
nity over a vastly larger area. Community assemblies all but ceased, and informa-
tion is no longer flowing at the village or household scale (Lubilo, 2007). The
underlying cause is the re-introduction of a representational form of governance
and the recentralization of wildlife finances and associated loss of transparency
 The Rise and Fall of Community-Based Natural Resource Management 219

and accountability. In June 2002, ZAWA called together the chairs of Zambia’s
60 CRBs to discuss revenue-sharing. The workshop report (Mwape, 2002) states
that the meeting agreed to share revenues as follows:

• CRBs 45 per cent;

• patrons (chiefs) 5 per cent;
• ZAWA 40 per cent;
• Government/Zambia Revenue Authority 10 per cent.

This report notes that based on this revenue-sharing formula, local communities
will effectively receive considerably more money than they used to receive before
(Ibid.)
However, participants who were subsequently interviewed noted that the work-
shop was confused and did not reach a consensus for ZAWA to retain 40–50 per
cent of wildlife revenues. The distortion went further, with ZAWA failing to mention
that this proportion applied only to trophy fees and that it intended to retain 80 per
cent of concession fees, or some 70 per cent of GMA gross wildlife income.
The flow of revenues was also centralized. Instead of being paid directly into the
community bank account in Lupande, hunting fees are now collected at ZAWA
headquarters in Lusaka. With ZAWA sometimes unable to meet its own salary
bills, it is hardly surprising that communities are paid out somewhat sporadically.
Moreover, payments are not associated with a full accounting of wildlife off-take,
further breaking the links between wildlife use, benefits received and account-
ability in decision-making.
In 2007, we interviewed some 463 individuals in the Lupande GMA, as well as
key informants amongst traditional leaders, government officials and the tourism
sector (Lubilo, 2007). The VAGs had collapsed, with few meetings, loss of income
to communities and individuals, lack of projects, and weakened systems of checks
and balances. Local communities were no longer in charge, and the sense of propri-
etorship and procedural accountability had been lost. The absence of constitutions
made it difficult to organize CRBs and local people are of the opinion that there is
too much scope for corruption in a system that has been recentralized under the
control of a small élite. Indeed, almost nothing has been done to build the capacity
of CRBs or to address their accountability to the village scale. LIRDP has lost its
technical expertise in CBNRM, including a cadre of trained Zambians. At the
national level, ZAWA did away with the directorate dealing with communities in
GMAs. Finally, the donors driving the transformation of the wildlife sector no
longer appear strongly committed to CBNRM.
The failure of CRBs has seriously eroded the confidence of the communities in
the new system. The system of regular financial auditing of community accounts
had collapsed, and performance is unlikely to differ from similar CRB systems
around Kafue National Park, where no money benefits local people and over
80 per cent of income is not accounted for (Malenga, 2004, p363). The 2007
survey showed that CRBs have failed to provide information on wildlife income or
expenditure to people, public meetings had all but ceased, and CBNRM activities
were limited to routine committee meetings. Indeed, the transition from partici-
patory to representational governance reduced the number of people with some
220 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

knowledge of wildlife income and expenditure from an average of 72 per cent to 20

per cent (Table 9.2). It is interesting to note that in Malama CRB the proportion
of people with an understanding of finances was large unchanged or even slightly
increased (from 50 per cent to 56 per cent of the sample). Malama CRB, with less
than 100 households, retains the scale necessary for participatory governance and
decision-making.

Table 9.2 A comparison of information on finances in communities between the

‘participatory’ (1997–1999) and ‘recentralization’ (2007) phases
Name of CRB 1997–99 (40%+) 2007 (All + Some)

Jumbe 80% 16%

Kakumbi 93% 12%
Malama 50% 56%
Mnkhanya 53% 14%
Msoro 66%
Nsefu 78% 11%
Overall % 72% 20%
n 851 451

Note on methodology: In 1997–99 community members were interviewed to assess if they understood
roughly 0 per cent, 20 per cent, 40 per cent, 60 per cent, 80 per cent, 100 per cent of community wildlife
finances. In 2007, community members were asked if they got ‘all’, ‘some’, ‘none’, ‘didn’t know’ information
about community finances.

Recentralization has reduced local people’s participation, largely destroying the

spirit of voluntarism that had been developed. Interviews suggested that although
people supported CBNRM they thought that the Luangwa programme was on
the verge of collapse because the CRB and ZAWA made all decisions on the use of
funds. This undermined a strong sense of community ownership; instead of some
75,000–100,000 meeting days discussing wildlife (see Table 9.1), people now shun
conservation meetings because they do not see meaningful direct benefits which
would warrant their commitment – only 4 per cent of people said they got cash
benefits in 2007 compared to nearly all adults seven years previously. This malaise
is not limited to Lupande GMA. Across the country we generally observe little
participation or agitation even when ZAWA delays the release of funds to CRBs.
Within-community accountability has broken down, but so has the accountability
of ZAWA to the communities where wildlife income is generated.
Chiefs are held in high esteem in Zambia, where their role is enshrined in local
government legislation, as well as the Zambia Wildlife Act of 1998, which recog-
nizes chiefs as patrons to the CRBs. The hope was to satisfy chiefs with non-
administrative powers and a 5 per cent honorarium, but in practice they again
influence the use of funds, and are said to be a major factor in the misappropria-
tion of funds by CRBs, just as they were during the top-down phase of LIRDP.
Despite legal niceties and their honoraria, chiefs are said to ‘collect huge sums’
 The Rise and Fall of Community-Based Natural Resource Management 221

from the CRBs (see Lubilo, 2007). ZAWA has also given chiefs the mandate to vet
people who stand in elections whether at VAG or CRB level.
Local people nevertheless agree that chiefs have an important role to play in
CBNRM by encouraging community mobilization, voluntarism and participa-
tion, and having the power to allocate land for settlements, farming and other
uses. However, many lament the loss of the system whereby, if chiefs wanted extra
money from the community for such activities as vehicle maintenance, they were
allowed to present their budget proposal to each village Annual General Meeting,
with some villages agreeing to the requests and others refusing. Indeed, people
agree that the chiefs had adjusted somewhat to the principles of participatory
democracy, and even played a part in contributing to strengthening local partici-
pation. While the chiefs have taken advantage of the loss of accountability to reas-
sert patrimonial governance practices, they are also complaining about the loss of
local control of funds and ZAWA’s unreliability in disbursing these.
The reaction to changes in CBNRM in Lupande GMA amongst government
officials is mixed. Those responsible for working in the communities on a daily
basis express concern that ZAWA has effectively undermined a decentralized
system which was delivering some positive outcomes for local people and for wild-
life management. However, more senior officials are impressed with the current
status quo and overall ZAWA favours representative rather than participatory
democracy where CRBs have a committee that is elected every three years.
In summary, the replacement of village-level VAGs with CRBs eroded account-
able and participatory local governance with less accountable, higher-scale institu-
tional arrangements. It recentralized financial management in a way that facilitates
greater élite capture and precludes prior forms of individual benefits through cash
dividends. The local communities in Lupande GMA lost over 70 per cent of their
income, all VAG accounts were closed, the weakening of local institutions led to
renewed alienation from wildlife resources and heightened tensions between local
communities and governmental wildlife officials.

Political dimensions of CBNRM in Zambia

The recent history of CBNRM programmes in Luangwa represents a microcosm
of the struggle over ‘good governance’ in African development, and in particular
efforts to replace personalized neo-patrimonial systems with governance based
on property rights, markets and the rule of law (Hyden, 2006). The differences
between impersonal and institutionally-based governance on the one hand, and
personalized or neo-patrimonial rule on the other (North et al, 2009), greatly
affect whether the macro political-economic environment enables or disables the
emergence of effective local governance.
Our political interpretation of the collapse of participatory wildlife govern-
ance in Lupande GMA is based on personal experience in a time of consider-
able inter-factional intrigue. Our preliminary observations suggest that more
political-economic research is needed to pull back the curtain on how natural
resource policy and governance decisions are actually made. Nevertheless, the
logic of our argument is consistent with the neo-patrimonial and personalized
222 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

nature of the Zambian state. Formal community institutions that had begun to
work shifted power towards ordinary people, but were dismantled, either purpose-
fully or through ignorance. This undermined emerging processes of participa-
tion, accountability and fiscal devolution, but opened the door for neo-patrimonial
capture of valuable resources. The Zambian state is not monolithic, with some
professionals favouring technically viable policies that promote the public good
(Simasiku et al, 2008), but in the end emerging impersonal institutions of trans-
parency, accountability and democracy (as developed in Lupande GMA) threat-
ened patronage systems and did not survive. Taking advantage of the confused
transition of NPWS to ZAWA, influential individuals at local and national levels
were able to weaken effective local controls over wildlife. ZAWA took advantage
of declining protection of grass-roots institutions by foreign donor supporters to
absorb some 70 per cent of hunting income that, it could be argued, rightfully
belonged to communities living with wildlife. Moreover, an emerging process of
institutionalized neo-liberal economic and political participation has been super-
seded by new configurations of power that marginalize community members and
privilege personal relationships between leaders in the wildlife sector, political
patrons and clients at the local level (including chiefs). Personalized power rela-
tions regained the upper hand over formal institutional rules.

Conclusion
This case illustrates the quantum performance advantages associated with face-to-
face scale and participatory democracy at the village level compared to larger-scale
representational systems of local governance. However, it also shows how susceptible
emerging local regimes are to changes in the macro-political environment. Thus,
Zambia’s shift from a one-party state to multiparty democracy in the early 1990s
opened the door for the brief emergence of participatory democracy in Lupande,
fortunately for long enough to be able to measure the superior performance of this
system in terms of generating local benefits from wildlife. During this period, the
personal relationships between politicians and businessmen in the allocation of state-
owned resources such as wildlife were briefly in disarray, while Norway’s influence as
a major donor in a donor-dependent economy enabled it to ring-fence LIRDP as a
neo-liberal community conservation programme from dealings in Lusaka. However,
the patrimonial logic of the gatekeeper state soon re-exerted itself. By the late 1990s,
politician–business relations and patronage networks were re-solidifying, even as
the era of multiparty democracy brought notably little reformation of political rights
and governance patterns in the Zambian state (Simon, 2005). Simultaneously, and
ultimately unfortunately, foreign donors re-initiated centralized basket financing
mechanisms which inverted the direction of accountability and re-empowered the
centre at the expense of ordinary people at the margins. For instance, instead of
South Luangwa’s budget being dependent on its own performance, and ZAWA
headquarters needing to facilitate a surplus, the donors began to fund ZAWA head-
quarters, which naturally began to expand in line with the resources provided, and to
arrogate decision-making power to itself. Unfortunately the surge in funding aimed
at transforming the wildlife sector into an engine for economic growth focused
 The Rise and Fall of Community-Based Natural Resource Management 223

on building the state wildlife agency, and actually disenfranchised communities in

GMAs. Systems of local accountability that were working well in Luangwa were
rapidly dismantled. Face-to-face institutions like VAGs were replaced by represen-
tational CRBs, despite data that showed this was clearly a retrogressive move, at
least from the perspective of wildlife and communities. Money that was accruing to
people who were poorer by a third than others in Zambia (Simasiku et al, 2008) was
redirected to keep a bureaucratic institution alive.
Murphree (2000b) concluded a decade ago that successful community-based
conservation remains elusive because it ‘has not to date been tried and found
wanting; it has been found difficult and rarely tried’. Similarly, the experience
from South Luangwa demonstrates that we know how to design institutions that
simultaneously promote measurable improvements in wildlife conservation, live-
lihoods and democratization. However, efforts to operationalize such approaches
often fail because they are incompatible with the political-economic status quo.
An old system of doing things characterized by political logic and informal and
personalized rule trumps the evidence that carefully institutionalized devolution
and participatory governance can generate both conservation and development.
Is this not also the general challenge of the development state in Africa?

Notes
1 Although the emergence and maintenance of democratic governance is invariably
subject to violent conflict and negotiation, on economic grounds it is hard to argue that
democracy is not worthwhile given that all of the world’s 30 countries with a per capita
income exceeding US$20,000 are democracies, except for four small oil-producing
states (North et al, 2009).
2 These concepts are developed in some detail by North et al (2009) and in the African
context by Hyden (2006).
3 ‘Induna’ denotes a senior official and advisor appointed by the traditional leader or
chief, and is a position of some power in rural communities in Zambia.
4 When LIRDP was absorbed by ZAWA in about 1998, it was renamed South Luangwa
Area Management Unit (SLAMU). For purposes of simplicity and clarity, we use the
acronym LIRDP uniformly throughout the chapter to refer to the programme both
before and after this change.
5 Patterson’s aerial survey data in the mid–late 1990s suggested that elephant popula-
tions in Kafue National Park had recently declined from 8,000–10,000 to about 4,000–
5,000. These results were never made public.
6 This conclusion emerged from a series of participatory rural appraisal exercises carried
out in the Lupande communities in 1996. Further, LIRDP was unable to compile a list
of these projects nor an accounting of them. For example, one chief sold a lot of meat
from the culling programme and money was never accounted for. Similarly, when the
chiefs sold the bus from Malambo Transport the money was not accounted for.
7 This advisor was one of the chapter authors, B. Child.
8 See Peters and Waterman (1982) for a useful conceptual framework of ‘loose’ versus
‘tight’ management systems.
9 Interestingly, and perhaps sensing the inevitability of this principle, Chief Msoro, who
resides well way from the park, set aside a large area of wild land, invested in water and
antipoaching to develop his wildlife resource, and began to seek private partners.
224 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

10 In September 2000 the Government of the Republic of Zambia and the Government
of the Kingdom of Norway signed a Memorandum of Understanding concerning
Development Cooperation that prioritized (1) good governance (2) basic education
(3) the road sector and (4) environmental management with the main focus on wildlife
management. Norway commissioned a confidential review of the wildlife sector because
of its concerns about political manoeuvring and went ahead following a recommenda-
tion that the worst option was not to try to address the sector.
11 Donors investing in the wildlife sector included Norway, Denmark, US, the World Bank
and UNDP/GEF.
12 Opening statement by Norwegian representative, Mr Magne Grova, at LIRDP Annual
Meeting, 2001.
13 Personal observation by the authors.

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 10

External Agency and Local Authority:

Facilitating CBNRM in Mahel,
Mozambique

Marta Monjane

This chapter presents a case study of community-based natural resource management

(CBNRM) in Mozambique, using the locale of Mahel in southern Mozambique. The
chapter first provides a brief overview of the conceptual evolution of CBNRM in
Mozambique in the post-civil war (1992–present) period and subsequently explores
the linkages and implications of institutional and governance assumptions for CBNRM
implementation and effective communal management of natural resources.

The evolution of CBNRM in post-civil war

Mozambique
Community-based natural resource management encompasses a range of concepts
and terms such as ‘community conservation’, ‘community-based conservation’ and
‘park outreach’, all of which aim generally to promote greater local involvement in
natural resource management (Hulme and Murphree, 2001; Fisher et al, 2005).
The overall thrust is to ‘give those who live in rural environments greater involve-
ment in managing the natural resources (soil, water, species, habitats, landscapes
or biodiversity) that exist in the areas in which they reside (be that permanently
or temporarily) and/or greater access to benefits derived from those resources’
(Hulme and Murphree, 2001, p4).
Perceptions of the positive impacts of CBNRM initiatives elsewhere in southern
Africa, particularly neighbouring Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE programme, were
critical to the emergence of CBNRM in Mozambique. CBNRM was perceived
as a pragmatic approach for providing local people with environmentally sound
and economically sustainable alternatives to destructive land use; a strategy to
promote forest and wildlife conservation; and a form of local democratic govern-
ance (Salomão, 2002; Nhantumbo et al, 2003; Salomão and Matose, 2007).
228 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

In the 1990s, CBNRM took shape as a stimulating and challenging develop-

ment and research concept. Many discussions were held among Mozambican
officials and academics on two key themes: first, how to involve local people in
natural resource management; and second, what appropriate practices should be
disseminated by the extension services in order for local people to obtain economic
benefits from the country’s vast natural resources in a sustainable fashion (Ribeiro,
2001). Welcomed by funding agencies, these new ideas were soon converted into
practice, being incorporated into both development and research projects, and
CBNRM began to influence the reformulation of national policies in the post-war
period (Anstey, 2005).
From 1992, and over the next decade, the former rhetoric of paramilitary-style
state management of protected areas was transformed into one of local commu-
nity participation in wildlife and forest management (Anstey, 2001). Community
participation was seen as being essential for the success of projects. Community-
based initiatives started to proliferate with support from both government and
donor agencies. The first experiences came from the Tchuma Chato project in
west-central Mozambique and the Chipanje Chetu project in Niassa Province in
the far northern part of the country (Johnson, 2004; Anstey, 2005) and by 2004
over 60 CBNRM initiatives had been already established in Mozambique (Couto,
2004). CBNRM was formally recognized by the government through provisions
of protection of community rights to land and natural resources, in the Land Law
(1997) and in the Forestry and Wildlife Law (1999).
From its inception in the early 1990s until the present, the Mozambican approach
to CBNRM has evolved, largely based on in-country contextualization and
analysis, recognizing that its adoption was based in wildlife-based initiatives and
experiences from other countries in the region (e.g. Namibia, Botswana, Zambia
and Zimbabwe). In these countries’ programmes, financially-based economic
incentives were central to promoting local incentives for conservation, whereas
in Mozambique the abundance and richness of wildlife resources remains rela-
tively limited. Initially viewed as a sectoral strategy (forestry or wildlife) CBNRM
came to target interventions around community organization, capacity building
and empowerment for natural resources planning and use. Two key questions
confronted CBNRM initiatives at the time:

1 the extent to which the government was prepared to devolve the rights of the
management of natural resources to local communities;
2 the extent to which communities were prepared to take the responsibility for
sustainable management of natural resources.

The existing legal framework presented gaps in the operational mechanisms

available to respond clearly to these questions. Unlike the land rights campaign
before and after the 1997 land law reform, which focused on wide dissemination
of information about people’s rights and obligations in relation to land access and
tenure, the awareness of access and tenure rights in relation to forests and wildlife
was limited in part due to the fluid and rapid policy change related to forest and
wildlife resources, and partly because of limited capacity for its implementation.
By 2000, Mozambique’s CBNRM approach progressively evolved from a strong
 External Agency and Local Authority 229

sectoral and conservationist emphasis, to a broader rural development strategy,

and as such was perceived to require a more integrated development approach
(Mansur and Cuco, 2002). The CBNRM model (Figure 10.1) developed in
Mozambique attempts to recognize the importance of existing local institutions;
highlights the need for partnerships between conservationist and development
interests and agencies; takes account of the legitimate needs of communities for
deriving tangible benefits from natural resources use; and promotes effective
devolution of decision-making rights to appropriate local-level bodies.

CBNRM in the Mahel community

Socio-economic and ecological context
Mahel is an administrative unity within Magude District, located to the northwest
of Maputo Province in the southern part of Mozambique. Mahel covers an area
of approximately 33,000 hectares and is registered under the 1997 Land Law as
belonging to the people of Mahel (Mahel centre and ten sub-villages), through
the recognition of customary rights (see Tanner et al, 2006 for background on the
land tenure context). The population of Mahel is estimated at 1,560 inhabitants
grouped in 560 households.

Source: Mansur and Cuco, 2002

Figure 10.1 General elements of the CBNRM model in Mozambique

230 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

The Mahel community relies considerably on natural resources for its liveli-
hoods. Charcoal production is the main community-managed income-generating
activity in the area, while animal husbandry plays an important role in providing
household income, with varying levels of importance depending on household
wealth. The average income per capita in the community is estimated at US$0.37
per day (Shepherd, 2008). Other livelihood activities and sources of income
include small-scale agriculture and local commerce. Mahel faces severe periodic
droughts, and a general lack of an appropriate commercial network and employ-
ment opportunities are characteristics of the area.
The vegetation of Mahel is characterisitic of the southern African Mopane
ecosystem, characterized by the predominance of the Mopane tree (Colophospermum
mopane). The Mopane flora is not particularly diverse in terms of tree species,
but it is estimated that the ecosystem holds nearly 2,000 vascular plants. Wildlife
found in the area include large mammals such as elephant and lion, in reduced
numbers, and a relatively great richness in avifauna.
Mahel has been targeted for many years for illegal logging and heavy poaching.
Human–animal conflicts constitute a problem in the area and water shortage is
severe and a key livelihood concern.

Initiation of CBNRM in Mahel

Following the national land and natural resource policy reforms in the late 1990s,
which generally promoted devolution of rights and participatory management of
natural resources, the richness of wildlife was seen to offer promising opportunities
for community-based ecotourism and associated services in Mahel. The engage-
ment of local communities in wildlife management, conservation and benefit
sharing, looked highly promising as a way to reduce illegal logging, human–wild-
life conflicts and conserve biodiversity while improving the livelihoods of local
people.
It was against this background that a project led by the Ministry of Agriculture,
with financial support from the Government of The Netherlands and the technical
assistance of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), was
initiated in Mahel starting in late 1999. The project aimed to support community
organization for the management of natural resources in the area. Two central
specific objectives were to establish a community-managed game farm, initially
planned to cover 14,000 hectares, and to promote sustainable local charcoal
production.
With support from the FAO project, the Mahel community was officially
registered as an association, giving it legal form, in 2004. The project supported
activities ranging from local organizational development through establishment
and training of resource user groups, including community scouts, charcoal,
beekeeping, sawing, agriculture and livestock groups. The FAO project initiated
the definition and demarcation of the community’s land area and the process for
acquiring the land certificate for that area. Later in 2005, the Department of Land
and Forestry partnered with the Mahel community to develop and implement
a two-year follow-up phase of the FAO project with financial support from the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Small Grants Programme.
 External Agency and Local Authority 231

In late 2007, IUCN launched the Livelihoods and Landscape Program (LLS)
in Mahel with the intent to build on the initial efforts of the FAO project. The
main goal of the LLS programme in Mahel was to contribute to the integrated
management of the community land and associated forest and wildlife resources,
with the view of attaining improved livelihoods and conserving natural resources.
Specifically, LLS intended to focus on facilitating local organizational develop-
ment processes for managing the community game farm and to support the estab-
lishment of the game farm infrastructure.
At the inception of the LLS programme, the active local organizations were
the registered Community Association, which operated through a management
committee, and the charcoal production groups (charcoal producers and commu-
nity patrols) who worked under direct supervision of the committee leaders. Other
resource user groups established during the FAO project were dissolved, allegedly
due to organizational and institutional issues and/or the lack of markets.
A participatory planning process was carried out, through which interventions
were identified and implementation initiated. The community committee and
government officers jointly welcomed the initiative. The participation and commit-
ment of committee members (with the exception of the Committee President)
and the government representative indicated a good collaboration and relationship
between the local association and the district government. The district govern-
ment representative took a leading role in the programme implementation and
liaison with facilitator agencies.
The first challenges arose at the stage of strengthening community organiza-
tional structures established during the inception of CBNRM in Mahel, and the
facilitation of private sector partnerships with the communities. Requests to review
relevant documentation on association and committee statutes as well as the draft
agreement with the private sector were not successful, suggesting lack of trust
towards the facilitators. Further challenges were faced in the design and establish-
ment of the game farm infrastructure, following the hiring of a private ecolodge
owner to provide strategic guidance and technical expertise. This was perceived
as a threat by the community committee to the existing agreement between the
communities and a private investor.
The process and outcomes of carrying out a combined wealth-ranking exer-
cise; training on participatory planning, monitoring and evaluation; and action
learning sessions indicated the presence of governance and institutional issues in
Mahel that posed fundamental challenges to CBNRM implementation and had
serious implications for effective communal management of natural resources. It
became evident that there were problems with a number of assumptions made at
the outset of establishing CBNRM in Mahel as well as with the process of imple-
menting the various project components.

Revisiting assumptions about CBNRM

The establishment and implementation of CBNRM in Mahel followed the
approaches and assumptions which were widespread at the time, particularly
with reference to CBNRM as implemented elsewhere in southern Africa. Several
assumptions are highlighted here:
232 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

• the need to create new local organizational structures to manage natural

resources;
• external agencies as a neutral facilitator and with the know-how and responsi-
bility to build operational capacity at the local level;
• the relevance of collective natural resource management as a livelihood
strategy for targeted communities;
• the community as a homogeneous group with common shared interests in
natural resources management;
• the existence of an enabling legal framework and political context for natural
resources conservation and devolution of rights to local-level institutions.

Need and ability to facilitate the establishment of local organizational

structures to manage natural resources
Central to the initial establishment of the CBNRM initiative in Mahel was the
need to create a local organization responsible for overseeing the management
of the collective use of natural resources in the area. The formation of such an
organization was guided by, amongst others, principles of democracy, inclusive-
ness and representation. The approach has been to sponsor new organizational
structures and place emphasis on forming committees and resource user groups
rather than exploring and developing the existing local institutional base of shared
norms and behaviours.

The external agent as neutral facilitator

The facilitating agencies, all of which were large-scale, transnational organizations
operating through national programme offices, framed within their own organiza-
tional and institutional arrangements and knowledge, often portrayed themselves
as neutral agents in the process of forming local organizations. The facilitation
process, however, by means of providing guidance, drafting organization statutes,
training and other inputs, is shaped by these organizations’ own beliefs, political
concerns, knowledge and organizational and institutional arrangements. These
sources of bias may have a positive or negative effect in different contexts. In addi-
tion, communities often do not perceive the facilitators as neutral. This is certainly
the case in Mahel, where the community has clearly expressed the view that the
facilitating agencies have their own agendas. These include using communities to
justify expenditure of funds and using the social surveys to gather information for
the sole purpose of writing articles and publishing the findings elsewhere.

The local community as a homogeneous group with common interests in

managing and conserving natural resources
Both the Land Law of 1997 and the Forestry and Wildlife Law of 1999 define
‘local community’ as a group of families and individuals living in a limited territo-
rial space, with the size of a locality or smaller, and who wish to safeguard common
interests through the protection of their areas of residence, agricultural land,
forests, sites of cultural significance, grazing fields, water sources, hunting and
expansion areas. Stemming from the above and in spite of the subjectivity of its
interpretation, two key factors led to the assumption that there would be a common
interest on the part of the Mahel ‘community’ in managing natural resources and
 External Agency and Local Authority 233

ensuring more sustainable use. Firstly, Mahel traditional jurisdictional boundaries

coincide with the limits of the Mahel administrative entity. Secondly, the ongoing
hunting, charcoal, human–wildlife conflict presumably affects the entire commu-
nity, and as such provides an incentive to revert the accrued benefits from capture
by outsiders to the local community.

National decentralization and devolution processes provide an adequate

framework to enable CBNRM
A significant number of strategic policy documents developed during the 1990s
created a general perception of there being an emergent enabling institutional
environment for CBNRM in Mozambique. This policy narrative highlighted
the value of rural poor and local communities in the sustainable management of
natural resources (Anstey, 2001).
At macro-level, the Constitution of the Republic of Mozambique expresses
that the state aims to promote the rational use and valuation of natural resources,
sustaining resources for future generations, and determining conditions of their
use while safeguarding national interests. The National Sustainable Development
Strategy (EADS) promotes the equitable access, management and exploration
of the land and other natural resources in such a way that they maintain their
functional and productive capacity for future generations. The Action Plan for
Absolute Poverty Reduction (PARPA) also highlights the importance of environ-
mental conservation and the sustainable use of natural resources in relation to
poverty reduction and calls for sustainable management and balancing the inter-
ests of communities, the private sector and the state on the use of natural resources
and the environment.
At the sectoral level, the legal reforms affecting environment, forestry, wild-
life, land and local government have all been key in enabling CBNRM develop-
ment. The Environmental Law (1997) provides the legal framework for the use
and management of environmental resources for sustainable development. The
Land Law (1997) safeguards the rights of communities to settlement, agricultural,
forestry, pasture lands and water sources to support their livelihoods. The Forestry
and Wildlife Law (1999) makes provision for rights and benefits of the forest-
dependent communities including subsistence use, participation in co-manage-
ment, consultation when transferring rights to third parties, and returning to
communities of 20 per cent of forestry logging fee/tax revenue and a percentage
of fines received from law enforcement. Under the 2005 local government legisla-
tion, the local leadership or community authorities are recognized by the appro-
priate government representative, and are legitimated by the local communities
usually based on historical lineage.
234 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

What actually happened, and why?

Theory and practice in local resource governance
Sponsoring community organization: Understanding local
power structures
Social and economic life in Mahel is governed by the local authority comprising
the traditional leader (régulo) and an advisory group of elders (madodas). Formal
local governance bodies comprise the formal Community Association repre-
sented by the Community Committee for Natural Resources Management (led
by the traditional leader, in spite of the law on local governing organs clearly
stating that the local leaders cannot hold dual positions) and the local govern-
ment representative (Chief of the administrative post of Mahel). While a socio-
economic study had been undertaken at the outset of the CBNRM initiatives,
this study did not identify nor assess the local institutions and actors involved,
which, as was later realized, are key to natural resource governance in the area.
It became evident that there were insufficient insights into and understanding
of the history and context, particularly with regards to ‘people processes’ in
Mahel.
From the roles, responsibilities and duties established under Mozambican
local government legislation it is clear that the legal authority to govern the
development of the administrative post rests with the head of the administrative
post nominated by the government, while the traditional authorities have more
of a supporting role and act as the intermediary body between the govern-
ment and the communities. The law does not clearly vest authority and deci-
sion-making power with the local traditional leader (régulo) and the traditional
authorities (madodas) or with the community organizations and/or association.
The lack of a clear legally bound distinction with regards to the mandates of
these different local actors results in conflicting interpretations of the duties
and responsibilities between the different actors and the apparent overlap of
these rights and responsibilities. This lack of clarity around roles and bounda-
ries of authority inevitably led to serious tensions and power struggles at the
local level.
In Mahel, tensions revolved around the committee’s activities, including tension
between committee members, between the community and the local government,
and between committee members and the external facilitation team and part-
ners. The tensions evolved around determining the appropriate authority to host
the programme, the appropriate decision-making body on matters related to the
Mahel program, and the leading role of the local government representative in
affairs pertaining to the community committee and the local association. These
conflicts also related to the lack of clarity around the custody and ownership of
the material and equipment delivered to support the game farm infrastructure
establishment.
The relationship between the local government representative (Chief of Post at
Mahel) and the traditional leadership (régulo and madodas) has been and continues
to be difficult, appearing to be a struggle for power, status and control over
resources within the community. Committee members explicitly demonstrated
 External Agency and Local Authority 235

their lack of trust towards the local government representative and engaged in a
serious argument that led to breaking off communication between the two parties.
This led to the local government representative deciding to move away from the
site and not participate in the training and the activities that were being carried
out under the programme.
Relationships within the committee are opaque and difficult to fully understand
from the outside. The committee president dominates proceeding and does not
allow for free expression of views by the other members. While there were some
incidents where his authority was challenged, these were rare and often fleeting.
Some individuals apprehensively raised the issue of the (nominally illegal) dual
role currently being played by him as committee president and traditional leader
(régulo) but this challenge quickly faded during subsequent conversations (Pabari
and Monjane, 2009).
In addition, there was a distinct reluctance by the committee (particularly the
committee President) to convene discussions with the wider community about
the game farm. The wealth-ranking process also revealed that three sub-villages
which were significantly affected and had a stake in the game farm were being left
out of the developments and the decision-making processes of the Community
Association, which itself was centred on an élite group of individuals from central
Mahel village comprising the traditional leader and other committee members
(Ibid.).

Challenging external facilitators

One of the reasons Mahel was selected as a site for CBNRM was that there had
been previous initiatives in the area that LLS could build upon, which included
the FAO project and UNDP Small Grants projects. It was later discovered that
the way in which these projects had been implemented had important impli-
cations for the LLS activities, many of which were negative in the sense that
the committee had perceived that the funds were being used mainly for indi-
vidual gain through daily meeting allowances and expectations that LLS funds
would be channelled directly to the committee to manage and utilize as was done
before.
Limited insights on documenting and understanding the processes and
outcomes of past projects, and the perceptions of local communities, led to tensions
between the committee, IUCN project facilitators and the local administration. It
was evident that there was insufficient trust by the committee, particularly the
committee President, of the facilitators, whose role and legitimacy were was chal-
lenged in a variety of ways.
Such challenges were manifested through various insinuations around IUCN’s
interest in the game farm, relations with private investors and the ownership of
information used for research papers. It emerged that some of the reasons behind
the local lack of trust included the hiring by IUCN of a private game farm owner
to provide technical advice and assist with some of the initial activities. Prior to
this, the committee had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with another
private investor and seemed to feel that the technical advisor brought in by IUCN
threatened their arrangement with the latter.
236 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

Different perceptions and interests in natural resources

Stemming from the local governance issues outlined above, it became clear that
in Mahel there are different perceptions within and between communities on the
importance of the area intended to be used for the game farm. There is a general
lack of trust that the game farm will actually bring benefits to the wider commu-
nity, partly as a result of the shortcomings of various other local projects and
programmes that have not yet provided tangible benefits in this regard, as well
as lack of clarity at the local level on the market feasibility of the game farm, and
finally due to existing institutional issues in the area.
The members of sub-villages adjacent to the game farm area have also expressed
concerns in relation to the game farm boundaries and land use implications. The
initial 14,000ha have been reduced by 2,000ha, apparently by a decision taken by
the régulo/committee President to provide land for charcoal production and grazing.
However, this area favoured mainly the central sub-village residents of Mahel.
The three sub-villages on the northern boundary of the game farm area have been
requesting an additional area for grazing by further reducing the size of the game
farm, but the community committee or the régulo has not yet decided on the matter.
Further concerns relate to lack of transparency on the use of existing local reve-
nues derived from the 20 per cent of forest tax revenue and charcoal production
received by the community from the central government, and a widespread scep-
ticism if the game farm goes ahead about whether it would actually benefit the
wider community and not simply select local élites.

Rethinking assumptions
Institutions and organizations
The approach in Mahel, as in many other CBNRM initiatives, has been to
sponsor new organizational structures and emphasize the establishment of formal
local committees and resource user groups, regardless of their sustainability in the
absence of project support (Gilmour, 2000). The process in Mahel, by eventually
deriving a better understanding of the committee composition through discus-
sions held with the wider community, revealed that there was not a wide level of
acceptance or trust in the committee. This drove home the realization on the part
of the facilitators that the Association was not representative of the community as
a whole and was not inclusive in its decision-making processes.
The individual actors within the committee were recognized by the wider
community because they were also the traditional leaders. However, the organiza-
tional structure, rules and regulations of the committee and the Association were
not, and did not fit with the traditional norms and customs. Mahel’s experience
suggests that the traditional local governance institution, with its own set of rules,
authority and power was more accepted by the wider community. This clearly
points out the relative importance and relevance of local (indigenous) institu-
tional arrangements, whether formal or informal, and their functions (the insti-
tutional base of shared norms and behaviours) on natural resources management
compared to the creation of new formal organizations.
 External Agency and Local Authority 237

Limitations of the legal framework

Mozambican legislative reforms provide for the protection of community access
rights to natural resources, including land, forestry, wildlife and fisheries. However,
the various laws governing these resources regulate the extent and nature of
community access in significantly different ways.
While the Land Law enables the transfer of real rights to land (which can be
subject to transaction), the Forest Law erodes those by restricting resource use
to non-commercial subsistence levels. The potential for commercial gains from
forest resources remains dependent on the successful application for a concession
or a simple licence, thus effectively putting communities on the same playing field
as the private sector (Johnstone et al, 2004).
In addition, local government legislation attempts to decentralize power but sepa-
rates the role of local natural resource management organizations from the role of the
local authorities, granting the former advisory functions only in relation to natural
resource management. This somewhat excludes the local organizations, established
in order to manage communal natural resources, from actually exercising effective
decision-making power in relation to communal forest and wildlife resources.

‘Neutrality’ and external facilitation

External facilitating agencies are not neutral and more often than not, come with
their own biases and interests which influence, in one way or another, the shape
that externally-introduced resource management initiatives take at the local level.
From the principles governing the formation of local organizations (democracy,
transparency, representation and inclusiveness) to the institutional arrangements
(often based on legal statutes) used, a range of external preferences are inevi-
tably imposed by the external agent. In the process, the external agent often is not
cognizant of imposing norms and behaviours whose local recognition, adoption
and enforcement are not only overlooked, but framed to the specific organiza-
tional, institutional and operational arrangements and knowledge of the external
agent itself. These impositions can positively or negatively influence the existing
local context and the outcomes of the interventions, but inevitably reshape local
power relations in important ways.

Implications for CBNRM

In southern Africa, community-based natural resources management projects
have often been externally driven, with the ideas of community conservation
imposed on local communities and societies. For instance, Barrow and Murphree
(2001) note that, with some important exceptions, the prevalence of community
conservation programmes in Africa is mostly a product of initiatives by interna-
tional conservation agencies and conservation professionals, state governments
and international donors.
What emerges from the experiences in Mahel are lessons relating to the
agency and influence of externally-driven programmes and patterns of project
238 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

management, planning, mobilization and implementation on the part of

supporting NGOs and donor agencies. Additionally, the Mahel experience also
demonstrates the importance of having the skills and knowledge to engage effec-
tively with local political processes including personal and informal relationships,
power and group dynamics and conflict management, as well as the more tech-
nical processes related to natural resource management. This suggests the need
for continued stronger linkages between conservationists and social sciences; had
such linkages been established at an ealier stage in Mahel, many subsequent prob-
lems and challenges might have been avoided. This also calls for greater internal
reflection within external agencies in terms of their structure and mode of opera-
tions in planning, implementing and delivering on intended outcomes. It became
clear that there was a mismatch between the intended outcomes and the actual
capacity to deliver in Mahel.
The existing local power relations and internal dynamics in Mahel, within the
committee, between the committee and wider community, as well as between
the committee and government representatives inhibit open dialogue and collec-
tive decision-making processes. There are numerous case studies and examples
of challenges that often emerge in similar situations, such as tensions and open
conflict arising from real or perceived inequitable decision-making power and/or
distribution of benefits and costs arising from natural resource uses.
The lack of trust between the different actors at the local scale is problematic
and extends to the external facilitating agencies. ‘Trust’ between individuals and
groups is a key element of local social capital that can help enable collective deci-
sion-making proceses and thus CBNRM. The absence of an environment where
community members can voice opinions inhibits sharing information, holding
local governance organs and leaders accountable, and resolving local conflicts.
There is a need to improve the capacity of external agents to act as ‘honest
brokers’. This is particularly important where the role of a mediator is poten-
tially instrumental for resolving challenges emerging from existing local power
relations. This requires rethinking our ‘theories of change’; taking into account
our own institutional frameworks and their potential to influence positively or
negatively the existing context and how they could best fit with communities
and particularly assumptions that particular formal institutional arrangements
are necessary or applicable. External agents need to be able to present clearly
the programme and ensure the message is understood and widely communi-
cated to the relevant stakeholders; to understand and negotiate relationships
between different forms of power as part of the process; to understand diverse
forms of knowledge; to clearly identify locally-agreed norms and processes
and where appropriate work to strengthen existing institutions as opposed to
focusing on ‘sponsored’ organizations; to better understand the various groups
and actors within the area and pursue explicit commitments by communities
through participation with tangible inputs to the programme; and to develop the
capacity to inform policy and to bridge the gaps between formal and informal
institutions.
 External Agency and Local Authority 239

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Johnstone, R., Cau, B. and Norfolk, S. (2004) Forestry Legislation in Mozambique: Compliance
and the Impact on Forest Communities, Tera Firma Lda in association with the IIED Forest
Governance Learning Group, Maputo, Mozambique www.policy-powertools.org/Tools/
Engaging/docs/Mozambique_study_Johnstone_et_al.pdf Accessed 1 October 2009
Mansur, E. and Cuco, A. (2002) ‘Building a community forestry framework in Mozambique:
Local communities in sustainable forest management’, in A. Sherwood (ed) Second
International Workshop on Participatory Forestry in Africa. Defining the Way Forward:
Sustainable Livelihoods and Sustainable Forest Management through Participatory Forestry,
18–22 February 2002, Arusha, Tanzania, FAO, Rome
Nhantumbo, I., Norfolk, S. and Pereira, J. (2003) Community Based Natural Resources
Management in Mozambique: A Theoretical or Practical Strategy for Local Sustainable
Development? The Case Study of Derre Forest Reserve, Sustainable Livelihoods in Southern
Africa Research Paper No. 10, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton
Pabari, M. and Monjane, M. (2009) ‘PM&E community training report in Mahel, June
2009,’ IUCN Livelihoods and Landscapes Programme, IUCN, Maputo, Mozambique
Ribeiro, A. (2001) Natural Resource Management Policy in Mozambique: An Overview,
Marena Research Project, Working Paper No. 7, University of Sussex www.geog.susx.
ac.uk/research/development/marena/pdf/wp7.pdf Accessed 2 October 2009
Salomão, A.I.A. (2002) Participatory Natural Resource Management in Mozambique: An
Assessment of Legal and Institutional Arrangements for Community-based Natural Resource
Management, Draft Working Paper, Institutions and Governance Program, World
Resources Institute, Washington, DC
240 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

Salomão, A. and Matose, F. (2007) Towards Community-based Forest Management of Miombo

Woodlands in Mozambique, Centre for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia
www.cifor.cgiar.org/miombo/docs/CBNRMMozambique1207.pdf Accessed 2 October
2009
Shepherd, G. (2008) The Ecosystem Approach: Learning from Experience, IUCN Commission
on Ecosystem Management, IUCN, Gland, Switzerland
Tanner, C., Baleira, S., Norfolk, S., Cau, B. and Assulai, J. (2006) Making Rights a Reality:
Participation in Practice and Lessons Learned in Mozambique, LSP Working Paper 207,
FAO, Rome
 11

Adaptive or Anachronistic?
Maintaining Indigenous Natural
Resource Governance Systems in
Northern Botswana

Masego Madzwamuse

Introduction
This chapter reviews the interactions between indigenous natural resource govern-
ance systems of the Basarwa/San1 communities of northern Botswana’s Okavango
Delta, and external resource governance interests and discourses, including formal
community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) initiatives. The
chapter highlights the challenges facing local politically marginalized communities
in maintaining their resource governance systems in the face of power imbalances
and national-level debates over resource use.
Although local and indigenous communities such as the Basarwa are said to
have knowledge that could contribute to sustainable natural resource governance
(Berkes, 1999; Berkes and Folke, 2002), these communities continue to be alienated
from the use and management of natural resources in their areas. As this chapter
demonstrates, traditional communities have always practised adaptive resource
management which is essential for building the resilience of social and ecological
systems. Even with good examples of local knowledge and institutions capable
of sustainably managing natural resources (Gunderson, 1995; Berkes and Folke,
1998a, 1998b; Gunderson, 1999; Ostrom, 1999), such evidence is not enough to
guarantee increased participation and involvement of local communities in natural
resource governance. Communities are often far removed from the decision-
making structures responsible for natural resource management at national level,
despite the dependence of local livelihoods upon such resources. Recent insights
on attributes of governance systems and capacities to manage resilience in social
and ecological systems acknowledge the fact that decisions about how to manage
resources are political and are often influenced by agendas that shape the contexts
242 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

within which actors contest decisions that determine access to resources (Ostrom,
2003; Lebel et al, 2006). However, the political aspects of natural resource govern-
ance have not been adequately explored, particularly in the realm of community-
based natural resource management.
The material presented in this chapter is based on a study involving two months
of qualitative data collection carried out in Khwai and Xaxaba in May 2000
and March 2001 (Madzwamuse, 2009). Secondary household survey data was
collected from the Every River Project in 2001, focus group discussions and key
interviews were held with members of the communities of Khwai and Xaxaba,
two Basarwa communities comprising about 419 and 78 people, respectively,
located in the Okavango Delta. Key informant interviews were held with experts
on Basarwa research, NGOs and government officials. The key informants were
drawn from the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) Community
Service Division, DWNP staff based in Maun and Khwai, NGOs active in the
Delta (Conservation International, Kuru and Kalahari Conservation Society),
private sector and fellow researchers. A total of 17 people were interviewed using
this method. The study is also based on an extensive review of anthropological
research on the Basarwa and a review of literature on CBNRM in Botswana and
other parts of the region. Some of the analysis is based on the observations of the
author as a participant in the National CBNRM Forum from 2001 to 2006.

Background on the Basarwa

The ethnic Basarwa have been historically associated with a hunting and gath-
ering lifestyle which is significantly different from Botswana’s dominant Tswana
ethnic group and the less dominant Kalanga, both of whom have historically been
associated with an agro-pastoral way of life. While hunting and gathering is noted
as a central marker of the Basarwa’s cultural identity, it is also noted that they
have for centuries engaged in mixed economies involving agriculture, herding and
small-scale rural industries in the form of craft production (Motzafi-Haller, 1994;
Taylor, 2000; Twyman, 2000). The language the Basarwa speak is simplistically
referred to as SeSesarwa, although there are in fact several different languages
indigenous to the Basarwa. Much of the interest in the Basarwa has arisen from
their remarkable adaptation to one of the harshest environments in the world, the
Kalahari Desert (Saugestad, 1998). Their ability to survive in an environment that
for large parts of the year provides no surface water has depended on a locally
appropriate combination of hunting and gathering techniques and a form of social
organization facilitating the flexible use of large territories based on patterns of
seasonal changes (Lee, 1972; Cashdan, 1993; Madzwamuse, 1998; Saugestad,
1998). A much less-known group of the Basarwa is the so-called River Bushmen
who live in and around the Okavango Delta (Heinz, 2001; Bolaane, 2004a). The
River Bushmen include groups such as the Bateti, named after the Boteti River;
the BaXhanikwe, found north of the Delta (e.g. Xaxaba), the BaBugakhwe to the
south and middle of the Delta (e.g. Khwai), and several smaller groups like the
Bagumaii who live scattered throughout the Delta area (Tlou, 1976). The groups
found in the Okavango Delta make up roughly 20 per cent of Botswana’s Basarwa
 Adaptive or Anachronistic? 243

population of 55,000, while the rest of the Basarwa population is found in the
more arid Gantsi and Kgalagadi Districts.2
Interaction with other ethnic groups has often been and continues to be to the
disadvantage of Basarwa communities, and in turn translates into both political and
economic marginalization. A central problem has been the failure by other groups
to recognize hunting and gathering as a legitimate land use, which has ultimately
had far-reaching consequences for the Basarwa, such as loss of land and land
rights. The cultural differences between the Basarwa and the dominant Tswana
agro-pastoral society have been important in defining the relations between those
two groups, and the way each relates to and uses land. The agro-pastoral Batswana,
for instance, came to dominate the hunter-gatherer Basarwa, imposing a system of
land tenure that gave precedence to the agro-pastoral use of land. This has been
reflected in the definition of land rights in Botswana’s Constitution and in the
Tribal Land Act of 1968 and its 1993 Amendment. The cultural dominance of
the Tswana has further influenced the economic policy directions in the country
wherein national policies are influenced by political élites’ bias towards the live-
stock sector (Taylor, 2007; Rihoy and Maguranyanga, this volume). Culture has an
influence on policy formulation, interpretation and implementation, particularly
the cultures of the dominant social and political groups (Peters, 1994). This has
been evident throughout the history of natural resource governance in Botswana.
As a result the livestock producers’ interests intersect with development policy,
resource use policy and national politics (Ibid.). I later argue that this is one of
the reasons why communities targeted by CBNRM programmes do not have a
significant political influence on the shape of national CBNRM policy decisions.
Drawing on the developments around land policy in Botswana, most government
officials and policy-makers have assumed that the Basarwa did not have a clearly
defined traditional land use system (Ng’ong’ola and Moeletsi, 1995; Ng’ong’ola,
1997). Because of the problem of defining land rights, tracts of land ‘belonging’ to
the Basarwa were incorporated into state lands, national parks and game reserves,
wildlife management areas, and even ‘private’ lands such as the Tribal Grazing
Land Policy (TGLP) ranches (Alden Wily, 1994; Saugestad, 1998; Bolaane, 2001;
Ellis, 2001; Madzwamuse, 2007; 2009). The lands belonging to the Basarwa were
regarded as ‘vacant lands’ and parcelled out as TGLP farms. This has resulted
in Basarwa being landless and consequently increasing their poverty given that
land is the basic means of production for rural households that depend on agri-
cultural production or the gathering of wild foods in order to survive (Ratcliffe,
1976; Arntzen et al, 1982; Alden Wily, 1994; Mogwe, 1994; Selolwane, 1995).
Alden Wily (2006) argues that such developments do not necessarily arise out
of ignorance about tenure on the part of policy-makers, but that in fact these are
convenient moves enabling state-building administrations of the colonial and post-
colonial eras to secure vast areas of common property for themselves, particularly
where high value resources are present.
Government policy can be seen as a formalization of British colonial actions
when Botswana was a protectorate under British rule. Cecil Rhodes settled Boer
and English pioneers on the Gantsi ridge in the western part of the country, who
were intended to act as a buffer against German expansion from South West Africa
(contemporary Namibia) (Ng’ong’ola and Moeletsi, 1995). During colonial rule,
244 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

native reserves were mainly delineated for the Tswana-speaking tribes or commu-
nities. Crown land (land retained under the Bechuanaland Protectorate admin-
istration) essentially consisted of those areas belonging to Basarwa, Bakgalagadi
and other voiceless minority ethnic groups not incorporated into the recognized
Tswana tribes and territories. Furthermore, by virtue of living on what was
referred to as Crown land, the Basarwa were those most directly affected by the
evolution and implementation of conservation laws. The Wildlife Conservation
and National Parks Act of 1992 reduced Basarwa peoples’ access to their tradi-
tional territories and, together with land policies discussed above, trapped the
Basarwa into smaller areas that could not accommodate their traditional livelihood
strategies (Madzwamuse, 2009). By criminalizing one of the central markers of
Basarwa identity, hunting regulations such as the Fauna Conservation Act and the
Unified Hunting Regulations of 1977 symbolically marginalized Basarwa from
mainstream society (Taylor, 2000). The numerous and complicated rules and
regulations of those laws were formulated and implemented without consultation
with the Basarwa, nor with sufficient regard of the importance of hunting and
gathering to the affected communities (Ng’ong’ola and Moeletsi, 1995). Even
though the Basarwa occupy most of the Wildlife Management Areas where the
bulk of CBNRM activities are taking place (Rozemeijer and van der Jagt, 2000),
the CBNRM policy has done very little to adequately address the needs of the
Basarwa and the security of resource tenure issues in general (Madzwamuse,
2007).

Indigenous natural resource governance systems

Discussion of indigenous natural resource governance systems often generates
discomfort amongst CBNRM practitioners in southern Africa who are concerned
with the danger of local chiefs usurping all rights and benefits at the expense of
the ordinary members of the local communities. These reservations stem from the
conflation of traditional management systems with the role of chiefs and/or tradi-
tional authorities and the somewhat tainted history of chieftaincy and its colonial
ties in southern Africa (Murombedzi, this volume). I look beyond the traditional
leadership structures, using the case of the Basarwa to highlight the broader rele-
vance of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS), norms, values and practices that
are tied to conservation. While chiefs have played a central role in governing the
use of natural resources in Botswana, this aspect will not be examined here as this
was not part of the indigenous governance structures of the Basarwa.
As with many other indigenous societies, the Basarwa’s adaptive strategies for
using natural resources were based on traditional ethics, norms and rules – both
formal and informal – that governed the use of land and natural resources (Spinage,
1992). These systems reflect what Berkes (1999) terms a knowledge-practice belief
complex which involves local knowledge of land, plants and animals; embodies
land and resource management systems; defines social institutions and reflects a
certain worldview capturing the religious beliefs about the use of the resources and
ritual practices associated with them. Thus the Basarwa’s traditional governance
systems embody a holistic view and approach to natural resource management,
 Adaptive or Anachronistic? 245

which is central to the realm of communal governance of natural resources and

community conservation.
The Basarwa’s traditional management strategies were designed to be respon-
sive to a highly variable climatic environment involving fluctuations in resource
availability, with water being the most important resource determining settle-
ment patterns and the size of communities. Tenurial rights and access to land and
natural resources were restricted to members of a group with a given territory.
This membership and accompanying tenurial rights were obtained through birth,
marriage and residence (Madzwamuse, 1998).
The Basarwa’s traditional strategies for managing natural resources included
seasonal mobility, detailed ecological knowledge and appropriate skills to capi-
talize on this knowledge. Flexibility was a key strategy that the Basarwa used in
relation to group size and social organization, leadership structures and resource
use in order to respond to changes in their local environment (Madzwamuse and
Fabricius, 2004; Madzwamuse, 2009). Anthropological studies on the Basarwa
living in the Kalahari by Cashdan (1983) and Barnard (1992) on the G/wi,
!Xo, !Kung and Naro reveal differences in the strategies pursued by various San
groups. The !Kung who lived in areas with permanent water sources exploited
natural resources in more fluidly composed groups, involving two or more clans
that came together in the dry season to exploit permanent wells. In the wet
season, when water and food were abundant, the !Kung dispersed into smaller
(family) groups. The territories of the !Kung overlapped with each other, with
areas rich in natural resources being used by more than one clan. The clans
would disperse deep within their territories in the summer when resources were
more abundant. The G/wi, who occupied areas with less rainfall and resource
abundance, did the opposite in managing access and using natural resources.
They congregated in the wet season and dispersed in the dry season, as they did
not have any permanent water sources to exploit in the dry season. Flexibility
in group size was employed as a strategy to adjust to seasonal changes and the
consequent availability of food and water (Madzwamuse and Fabricius, 2004;
Madzwamuse, 2009).
The !Xo lived in areas where natural resources were most sparsely and least
predictably distributed, and therefore tended to be more territorial than the other
groups. For this group, territoriality not only operated at the clan level but also
extended to groups that were related to each other through kinship, friendship
or ritual bonds (Barnard, 1992). The !Xo dispersed in both wet and dry season
and scarcity of resources necessitated smaller community sizes (Ibid.). The Naro,
on the other hand, lived in areas well-favoured with water and natural resources,
making them less territorial, compared to the !Kung, G/wi and !Xo. Because of
abundance in food resources and water, the Naro did not need to disperse at any
time. The group congregated in both dry and wet seasons (Cashdan, 1993).
Another element important to the traditional adaptive strategies of the Basarwa
was the size of territories within which natural resources were accessed and
seasonal mobility was employed. The Basarwa who lived in resource-abundant
areas moved within relatively smaller territories compared to those who lived in
resource-poor areas. In other words, seasonal mobility was more extensive for the
!Xo compared to the three other groups.
246 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

Clearly defined rules and territories governed access to natural resources amongst
all Basarwa communities, with tenurial rights obtained through birth, marriage
and residence. Cashdan (1983), for instance, notes that among the BaXhanikhwe,
kinship controlled access to land, whether for resource exploitation or residence.
Cashdan found that people sought permission to use land where they had close
relatives, and consequently permission was rarely if ever denied. Furthermore,
sanctions for trespassing existed and were used when needed. The rules operating
in these institutions differed from clan to clan, in response to micro-environmental
factors that influenced the way in which people used natural resources. There was
considerable movement across territory boundaries and between social groups,
such that groups would typically have overlapping rights and access rights to more
than one territory.
Although research on the settlement patterns of the Basarwa in the Okavango
Delta is scant, one can safely assume that seasonal mobility was not as extensive as
it was for the !Xo and other desert Basarwa because of the abundance of resources
and availability of permanent water sources. In fact Bolaane (2004b) states that
the BaXhanikhwe and Babugakhwe did not follow defined annual cycles similar to
those of Basarwa living in the Kalalahari. Those more sedentary Basarwa commu-
nities rather followed movements according to trade-offs between being close
to stretches of permanent water and the desire to avoid areas infested by tsetse
fly. The movements of the BaXhanikwe and Babugakhwe were nevertheless still
within their territories.
An interview with village elders in the Xaxaba community revealed examples
of rules and practices that governed access to natural resources amongst some
of the Basarwa groups in the Okavango Delta. Describing local rules governing
hunting rights, the elders in Xaxaba noted that outsiders would have to seek
permission from a group in order to gain access to wildlife within the Xhanikhwe
territory. Permission was not sought from the group leader alone but also from
the ancestors. One of the elders in the Xaxaba community described the process
as follows:

Bayei3 would bring with them maize, sorghum and other gifts to the locals when
seeking permission to hunt or collect medicinal plants in a territory which belonged
to the BaXhanikwe.The first person to receive these visitors will then give the Bayei
a place to rest for the night. The following day in the morning they would be taken
to the clan leader where their request is made official. They would state, ‘we have
come to seek permission to hunt and we bring with us gifts in the form of food’.The
food would be prepared and shared with the rest of the clan. The next day, strong
Xhanikhwe [another term for BaXhanikhwe] men are selected to accompany the
visitors on their hunting expedition. It was necessary for the visitors to be escorted
because they did not know their way around the said territory, i.e. where to find
different types of animals.4

By accompanying the visiting hunters, the Xhanikhwe made sure that their rules
were not broken. They ensured that there was no hunting of expectant female wild-
life or of productive male animals and that the visiting hunters did not go beyond
the boundaries of the Xhanikhwe territory. This way they retained the power to
 Adaptive or Anachronistic? 247

decide where and how much hunting was to take place, again as recounted by a
Xaxaba elder:

The visitors and the Xhanikhwe men appointed to accompany them would take
guns and go to a sacred tree known as Kgaka where a fire is made and the ances-
tral spirits are contacted to safeguard the men on the hunt. After this the Basarwa
would take the Bayei to an island where the hunting is going to be; they did not
hunt female animals, only old male animals were hunted. The animals would then
be skinned and meat dried at the hunting site; the kill would all be given to the visi-
tors.The land was protected [said with emphasis]; people who hunted without being
given permission were, if found, required to give an explanation and state who had
given them permission to hunt.

The above not only highlights territoriality but also a point noted by Berkes
(1999), which is that often where traditional ecological knowledge and manage-
ment systems are concerned, the ecological aspects cannot be divorced from
social and spiritual realms. Elders in Xaxaba emphasize that natural resource
governance was beyond the powers of ordinary individuals in the community,
and was vested in those with supernatural powers, such as rainmakers, trance
dancers with healing powers, and so forth. Elders also gave examples of taboos,
which were embedded in natural resource management systems and livelihood
strategies in general. They spoke of what they term Setema, referring to people
who had the powers of lions. They said if someone spilled water as they were
returning from the river where they collected it, lions would surround the village
that very evening. Those with the powers of the lions would then have to apolo-
gize on behalf of the wasteful person(s), and only then would these lions go back
to where they had come from. The fear of attracting lions to the village deterred
clan members from wasting water. The lions could also be attracted to the village
by someone returning to the village with thatch grass after sunset. To avoid this,
the grass collectors were required to leave the grass outside the village and bring
it in the morning or any other time during the course of the day. Such beliefs
deterred people from being wasteful and encouraged sustainable natural resource
management practices. For example, among the G/wi, animals are kx’oxudzi
(things to be eaten), but they are N!adima’s creatures (that is, God’s creatures),
and ‘As his property they must be respected, not abused’ (Silberbauer, 1981,
cited in Spinage, 1992, p31). They may be killed in self-defence or for food or to
avoid an attack that is believed to be imminent. The G/wi disapprove of what is
seen as greedy hunting, fearing that it will displease N!adima and they will suffer
unpleasant consequences in some way (Ibid.).
Other rules governing the use of natural resources involved observing ceremo-
nies marking the arrivals of the first wild fruits. The elderly women in Xaxaba5
stated that the very first fruits, berries and honey of the season (usually in late
October and early November for most fruit species) were collected and burnt so
that the smoke could go up to the ancestors, as a tribute to them (Madzwamuse,
2009). Thereafter, the remainder of the collected fruits would be given to old
women and to successively younger age groups. By the time the youngest group
has had its share there would be an abundance of fruits in the wild, and the
248 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

members of the community would then be free to go out and collect the fruits at
will. This, they said, ensured that fruits were collected on a large scale only when
there was enough supply to avoid over-harvesting (Ibid.).
Often, when highlighting the importance of traditional institutions in governing
resource use, we are confronted with the question of the relevance of these systems
to contemporary resource management scenarios. Lewis (1993) points out the
limitations of using the term ‘traditional’, as it may be dismissed or denigrated by
those in positions of power and authority as the custodians are considered as no
longer ‘traditional’. Such views assume that traditional systems are static and fail
to change with the times. ‘Traditional’ does not imply an inflexible adherence to
the past, it simply means time-tested and locally adaptive systems (Berkes, 1999).
This type of knowledge is cumulative and dynamic, building on experience and
adapting to changes (Ibid.). In the case of the Basarwa, while seasonal mobility
may no longer be a feasible strategy because of the prevailing land tenure system
in the country and patterns of economic development and population growth,
seasonality and fluctuating resource availability remain realities which face the
Basarwa and other local communities. Therefore, in contemporary times, in order
to respond to these fluctuations and take into account traditional adaptation
strategies, a fair amount of flexibility is needed on the part of government poli-
cies. Government could for instance secure access to dryland resources found in
protected areas for certain parts of the year.
While one is careful not to make exaggerated claims on the relevance of indi­
genous knowledge systems a more relevant question to ask is: do modern forms
of knowledge such as science and modes of governance provide space for locally
adapted practices and institutions? In modern Botswana, indigenous management
strategies, rules and regulations have been rendered largely irrelevant. Privatization
of land, agricultural and livestock policies and modern conservation laws have
alienated local communities from the direct management of land and natural
resources and undermined traditional management systems.

Indigenous knowledge systems and external

resource governance interests
CBNRM and interactions with indigenous
knowledge systems
The previous section highlights how indigenous management systems have
contributed to resource conservation, demonstrating that the Basarwa and other
local communities have always practised community-based natural resource
management in a substantive sense. These practices were undermined by broader
external measures governing the use of land and natural resources, such as various
agricultural and conservation polices imposed on the Basarwa by the colonial and
post-colonial nation-state. In most cases this process led to a breakdown of local
governance institutions, thereby resulting in open access to resources in communal
areas. Local management systems continue to be overlooked in the current imple-
mentation of CBNRM in Botswana.
 Adaptive or Anachronistic? 249

In the early 1990s CBNRM was introduced in Botswana as a rural development

and conservation strategy, based on experiences from neighbouring countries
such as Zimbabwe and Namibia and strong external donor support (Rihoy and
Maguranyanga, this volume). The aim of the CBNRM programme, as captured in
the CBNRM Draft Policy of 2001, was to improve the living conditions of people
residing with natural resources so as to improve their attitudes towards wildlife
and demonstrate the value of conserving those resources for future generations.
Local communities were supported to set up legal entities in the form of commu-
nity-based organizations (CBOs) or Village Trust Committees (VTCs). The
VTCs were tasked with managing natural resources within a designated Wildlife
Management Area and Controlled Hunting Areas as well as to oversee CBNRM
activities on behalf of the community.
The VTCs are required to manage CBNRM programmes using participatory
processes sanctioned by district government authorities (Madzwamuse, 2009).
In this instance acceptable participatory processes refer to the kgotla which in
itself is not a Sarwa construct but rather a Tswana institution. Not only do the
cultural practices of the Tswana influence policy as indicated by the Land Act and
the TGLP, but this also extends to what is regarded as acceptable definitions of
traditional democratic spaces and practices within CBNRM. The challenges and
experience in this regard are more pronounced in the case of the Basarwa who are
politically marginalized in the context of the Botswana state. Peters (1994) notes
that the kgotla does not necessarily grant a culture or class free space to engage
with and influence decision-making, and that participation in these fora is highly
stratified, with the result that the voices of the marginalized are not heard in this
space.

The case of Khwai

Khwai is situated on the northern border of the Moremi Game Reserve within a
Wildlife Management Area and 140km from Maun (see Figure 11.1). The settle-
ment is almost exclusively Basarwa (Babugakhwe) with a history of hunting and
gatherering. The village arose from the settlement of various small family groups
resettled following the establishment of the Moremi Game Reserve in the 1960s
(Alexandra, 1993; Madzwamuse, 2009). In the mid-1990s the group was forced
to relocate once again when the boundaries of the Moremi Game Reserve were
extended (Alexandra, 1993).
The settlement has a population of 419 with an average household cash income
of P2,100 (~US$350) per month, the bulk of which is earned during the tourism
peak season (Madzwamuse, 2009). In 1996, the Khwai community formed a CBO
and was allocated a concession area covering 1,815km2. However, as described by
Rihoy and Maguranyanga (this volume), the CBNRM activities in Khwai were
delayed and did not begin formally until 2000. The community lease was withheld
by local authorities on the grounds that the constitution drawn up by the commu-
nity was discriminatory. The constitution required non-Basarwa persons to apply
for the Trust membership whereas the Basarwa themselves were not required
to apply. The members of the Khwai community had taken it upon themselves
to define and restrict community membership as a strategy to possibly protect
themselves from domination by other ethnic groups (Madzwamuse, 2009). This
250 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

Source: Madzwamuse, 2009

Figure 11.1 Map indicating the location of Khwai and Xaxaba

provision was not allowed by the district authorities responsible for sanctioning
participatory processes at the community level and issuing land leases to the
CBOs. The district authorities were reluctant to support a CBNRM initiative built
exclusively around cultural identity (Bolaane, 2001). The Khwai community was
left with no choice but to amend their constitution and they were consequently
allocated a hunting quota for their concession in 2000.
Having overcome the first obstacle concerning their constitution, Khwai
embarked on a number of CBNRM activities which included marketing part
of their hunting quota to commercial outfitters, subsistence hunting for part of
their quota and trading in crafts and thatching grass (see Table 11.1). Internally,
the community continued to tap into aspects of their traditional management
practices, particularly with regards to the harvesting and trading of thatch. The
 Adaptive or Anachronistic? 251

residents of Khwai formed a committee that controls the collection of thatching

grass to ensure that harvesting does not take place outside the June to September
period (Madzwamuse and Fabricius, 2004; Madzwamuse, 2009). However,
with limited legal and policy backing for the use of veld products, the residents
of Khwai could not control access by members from outside their commu-
nity. The community generally had difficulties reaching consensus on matters
relating to the use of natural resources, with widespread conflicts on decisions.
In a focus group discussion with Department of Wildlife and National Parks
(DWNP) officials in Khwai, the officials argued that it would be difficult for
the Khwai community to successfully run their own CBNRM projects because
there is a lot of conflict at community level, mostly in connection with the ques-
tion of who has the right to be a member of the community.6 A community
mapping exercise carried out with the residents of Khwai also revealed the
source of these tensions as revolving around group membership legitimacy.
Respondents repeatedly made reference to ‘old’ Khwai and ‘new’ Khwai within
the village. ‘New’ referred to areas where recent settlers lived, and even after
20 years of being part of this community their rights to access resources in
Khwai were being questioned by members of the community (Bolaane, 2001;
Madzwamuse, 2009).

Table 11.1 Annual benefits derived from CBNRM activities in Khwai and Xaxaba
Annual Benefits in Pula (1P=~US$0.15)

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

Khwai – 1,200,000 600,000 1,211,533 389,000 1,272,900 1,318,560

Development
Trust
Okavango 750,000 1,100,000 1,200,000 1,300,000 2,213,545 1,767,155 1,855,655
Kopano
Mokoro Trust

Source of Data: CBNRM Status Reports 2003–2006

At an operational level the Khwai community continued to face other challenges

in implementing CBNRM activities and working with external agencies in the
form of local government, NGOs and private companies. The community gained
a reputation for being a ‘difficult’ community and often dominated the agendas
of the National CBNRM Forum and the Ngamiland District Forum. In 2003 a
case study that was commissioned by the CBNRM National Forum revealed the
tendency by local élites in Khwai to use community benefits for individual benefits
(Potts, 2003). This overshadowed what started off as a struggle for self-determina-
tion and control of the operations of the affairs of its governing trust with minimal
interference from what they regarded as external agencies. The case of financial
mismanagement in Khwai would have far-reaching policy and political implica-
tions, contributing to the recentralization of national CBNRM policy in Botswana
in subsequent years (Rihoy and Maguranyanga, this volume).
252 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

The case of Xaxaba

Xaxaba settlement is on an island referred to as Sedibane or Ncoega by the locals
(see Figure 11.1). It has a small population of 78 people consisting of Basarwa
(from the Xhanikhwe group), Bayei and a few Batawana. The average household
income is P1,600 (US$267) per month and like Khwai fluctuates depending
on the performance of the tourism industry. The tourism industry also has an
impact on the population size of this settlement. Xaxaba has been described as a
transient community hosting mobile people seeking employment in surrounding
camps who leave as soon as their contracts end. A national census carried out in
1991 counted 212 people and subsequent surveys in 1999 estimated the popu-
lation at 400 (Cassidy, 1999). The more permanent residents of this settlement
claim to have originated from Tsobaoro, which is modern-day Chief’s Island, one
of the islands in the Okavango Delta (Madzwamuse, 2009). The villagers were
attracted to the current location by the construction of the first safari camps in the
Okavango in the 1960s. The elders in the village confirm that the settlement was
part of their traditional territories.
Xaxaba was originally omitted when the CBNRM programmes started in
Botswana in 1993. To rectify this situation the Xabaxa community was included
in the trust charged with managing the Ngamiland 32 wildlife use concession, in
concert with five other settlements (Ditshiping, Quxau, Daonara, Xharaxao and
Boro). The trust in question is the Okavango Kopano Mokoro Trust (OKMT)
which has been allocated an area of 1,223km2 and has a total membership of
2,400 people. This trust has been operational since 1997 and is involved in a
number of commercial activities ranging from selling a trophy hunting concession
to safari operators, managing a campsite, and selling grass, reeds and palms. As
a result of being included in the OKMT, the government also withdrew Special
Game Licences in Xaxaba which had a profound effect on the food security of
several households (Cassidy, et al, 2001).7 In 2000, Xaxaba received P15,000
(US$2,500) from the proceeds of OKMCT which was used to open a commu-
nity shop. Subsequent benefits were used to purchase a vehicle and boat for the
community (see Table 11.1 for revenue generated).
Apart from VTC members, most of the residents of Xaxaba who were inter-
viewed about CBNRM did not seem to fully understand what it was about, or
even how they should be involved in decisions on the use of funds derived from
CBNRM projects.8 One of the old women interviewed stated, ‘It is not our
money, it is for developments [referring to infrastructural development] in the
village.’9
What I observed during my last stay in Xaxaba in March 2001 was that the
elderly members of the community did not attend VTC public meetings, and thus
gained only second-hand information on what the affairs of the VTC were. By
the time this information reached them it was either incomplete or distorted. The
VTC board members are not well-known to the general membership of the CBO.
This has led to mistrust, accusations of misappropriation of funds and to tensions
between the residents of Xaxaba and other members of OKMT (Madzwamuse
and Fabricius, 2004). DWNP and PACT (2001) in their CBO assessments
concluded that it is difficult for a multi-village CBO to achieve acceptable levels of
participation and benefit-sharing, yet up to this day the membership and structure
 Adaptive or Anachronistic? 253

of OKMCT remains unaltered. The grouping of these villages was not informed
by prior understanding of how these communities relate to each other in terms
of resource use, access and rights. The decision was based on proximity to a
Controlled Hunting Area demarcated by government agencies.
Regardless of CBNRM activities being in place, the residents of Xaxaba,
similarly to Khwai, still complain about the difficulty in controlling access to
natural resources in their locality by outsiders. Some of the resources and terri-
tories that were previously accessible only to clan members are now open access
resources. For example, in both villages leaves of palm (Hyphaene petersiana)
used for crafts, reeds, water lily (Nymphaea nouchali, referred to as Tswii by
residents) and thatch grass in their area are also collected by people who come
from as far as Maun for commercial purposes. The residents of Khwai argue
that in the past, when their clan was comprised of BaBugakhwe alone, coop-
eration at community level was very high, resulting in easier management and
control of resource use. They also argued that within their community they are
in a position to regulate the collection of thatch grass, but they are not in any
position to control outsiders who are accessing the natural resources in their
area. The reason is that their local rules are not supported by the present legal
system. The 1993 amendment of the Tribal Land Act of 1968 gave all citizens
of Botswana the right to acquire land and settle in any part of the country,
regardless of their tribal affiliation. This change, according to the communities
of Xaxaba and Khwai, has complicated matters in terms of natural resource
governance. An elderly resident of Khwai in her sixties described these changes
as follows:

...we were just on our own; the BaBugakhwe and our clan were composed of family
units; that way the use of natural resources was easily managed. In the past, coop-
eration at community level was high, but now it is felt that things are different. For
instance, having collected thatching grass and agreeing to sell it at a certain price,
some people may change the price without consulting the rest of the community.
Decisions are no longer made collectively at community level but rather increas-
ingly at an individual level.10

CBNRM implies active participation by local communities whereas the reality on

the ground does not reflect that scenario. Sullivan (2002) argues that, in practice,
CBNRM is a mere continuation of past conservation policies because the policies
and projects are largely driven by external agents who tend to overlook local aspi-
rations and regard communities as homogeneous entities.
While at the national level issues of local financial accountability and good
record-keeping have dominated policy debates, at the local level communities are
more concerned about issues pertaining to self-determination, identity and group
definition. These concerns, as demonstrated by the case of Khwai and Xaxaba,
include controlling their own group and/or community definition and controlling
access and resource use in their ‘territories’.
254 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

Challenges facing Basarwa in maintaining

adaptive resource governance systems
Displacement of traditional management systems
Traditional institutions have been replaced by modern rules and regulations and
in contrast to the traditional local institutions, which were governed by the respec-
tive Basarwa communities, new institutions in the form of VTCs are externally
driven and defined. There are also differences in worldviews between outsiders
and local people. The procedures for setting up VTCs are stipulated by the govern-
ment, donors and other support organizations. Requirements include developing
a written constitution and making use of the kgotla system as a forum for public
consultation and participation, both of which are foreign concepts imposed on
the Basarwa communities. These draw very little from local norms and practices,
particularly with regards to tenure arrangements and rules governing access to
land and natural resources. One of the factors determining effective resource
governance is the power and control people have over their relationship to these
resources (Twyman, 2000). As the preceding sections have shown, power and
control over natural resources have been removed from the Basarwa. They are
continually dispossessed of their lands and access to resources by conservation
laws and regulations in the Okavango Delta region, and a combination of conser-
vation and livestock policies in other parts of the country. Even with the intro-
duction of CBNRM, communities remain passive recipients of benefits and they
are not involved in active management or decision-making. The communities are
allowed to enjoy increased utilization of natural resources but government retains
the ultimate authority to protect species and ecological systems and continues to
regulate their use (CBNRM Draft Policy, 2001).
Alden Wily (2008) notes that customary interests cannot be recognized in their
own right without at the same time recognizing the existence of the (customary)
regimes which sustain them. It is not adequate to establish local trusts or CBOs
without taking into account and building on traditional resource governance
systems. This includes accepting the heterogeneity of such local systems. A funda-
mental issue here is that devolving user rights to wildlife will have limited impact
while communities’ land tenure remains insecure. A policy direction that alien-
ates communities from managing their land – for example through privatization,
TGLP farms, and protected areas – is not compatible with efforts to enhance
community participation through CBNRM. In other words, CBNRM needs to be
reconciled with land tenure reform by creating space for community rights to land
and natural resources (Madzwamuse, 2007; see also Murombedzi, this volume).
The power to make decisions and manage natural resources is still vested in the
state. There have been problems with regards to devolution of authority in many
parts of southern Africa (Hulme and Murphree, 2001; Jones, 2003; Fabricius et al,
2004). In Botswana, the government sets quotas and issues permits and commis-
sions, and approves management plans for most uses of wildlife. Jones (2003)
argues that in Botswana and Zambia, communities tend to be passive recipients of
the quota as well as the associated income, without engaging in active management
as the state retains considerable management authority. Murphree (2003) argues
 Adaptive or Anachronistic? 255

that devolution which separates responsibility from authority is fatal to institu-

tions. As Rihoy and Maguranyanga (this volume) detail, there have been a wide
set of barriers to devolution of authority over wildlife and other natural resources
in Botswana, which continue to limit local rights to make decisions about rules
governing use and the distribution of benefits.

Limited space for and acceptance of indigenous

knowledge in CBNRM
There is a general reluctance to embrace indigenous knowledge in CBNRM as
practised in Botswana by both government officials and many mainstream conser-
vationists. Berkes (1999) argues that the use of indigenous knowledge is often
inherently political because it threatens to change power relations between indi­
genous groups and the broader society. Indigenous knowledge provides a compel-
ling argument for conceptual pluralism and more participatory community-based
alternatives to top-down resource management (Ibid.). Acknowledging indigenous
knowledge has political implications for the Government of Botswana and other
governments in the region. Limited institutional capacity of local communities is
often cited as a reason for not devolving rights and authority to local communi-
ties. Instead of focusing and building on the local communities’ strengths and
existing forms of knowledge, their capacity constraints have taken the centre
stage in determining policy outcomes. The recentralization of natural resource
management structures in Botswana, as highlighted by Rihoy and Maguranyanga
(this volume), is justified by the shortcomings of local communities in managing
the affairs of CBOs. Policy-makers and the national CBNRM discourse seldom
pay attention to the positive attributes that these communities bring to the table.
Botswana’s CBNRM programme effectively seeks to fit community management
practices into a set of pre-conceived bureaucratic norms and structures, rather
than adaptively crafting governance arrangements to local institutions, customs
and knowledge.
A deeper awareness in policy and planning of local knowledge and practice
may foster culturally resonant, ecologically appropriate and socially inclusive
dialogue regarding resource governance and development in general (Sullivan,
1999). Developing national conservation objectives appropriate for the local
context implies a shift in approach that acknowledges the existence and value
of cultural knowledge relating to a range of natural resources other than large
mammals (Ibid.). Shackleton and Shackleton (2004) echo the same sentiment,
noting that resource management interventions need to focus on the role of
all natural resources in local livelihoods, suggesting that such an approach will
ensure that the CBNRM agenda is guided by local priorities and needs rather
than conservationist paradigms and interests. Sullivan (1999) argues that a lack of
focus on details of how people currently use and manage natural resources results
in an untapped potential of the value for biodiversity conservation of associated
knowledge related to these resources. Communities bring significant knowledge
to the table, but these local assets have been consistently undervalued in the past
(Taylor, 2000). In general, indigenous knowledge holds much promise for insights
and applications provided it is not used out of context (Berkes, 1999).
256 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

As noted earlier, the attitudes of most biological scientists and natural resource
managers to traditional knowledge are often dismissive (Johannes, 1989, quoted
by Berkes, 1999). Thus marginalized peoples not only have to struggle against
the most powerful in both economic and political terms but they must also face
the dominant role of externally-rooted forms of science in debates over resource
use (Keeley and Scoones, 2003). The drive for a space for indigenous people and
indigenous knowledge is taking place at a time when many indigenous groups,
Basarwa included, are increasingly linked to new forms of market-based commerce
and may be compelled to engage in activities that differ in type and intensity from
traditional patterns (Berkes, 1999). While communities are required to be static
in their development in order to be considered ‘traditional’, many indigenous
communities including the Basarwa have been engaging in mixed economies for
decades. What is required is trade-offs that balance conservation and development
objectives of local communities.

Restricted access to natural resources

Surrounded by tourism lodges and the Moremi Game Reserve, the residents of
both Xaxaba and Khwai are no longer able to engage in their traditional seasonal
movements as a means to cope with resource scarcity. They feel that they are
‘fenced in’ and helpless to adapt to these imposed boundaries. The older residents
note that during the colonial era hunting was allowed throughout the year as long
as permission was sought from the colonial government. In the opinion of several
people interviewed, life was a lot better then.11 Today they have to rely on hunting
safaris for meat from animals shot for trophies, on DWNP for meat from problem
animals, and illegal hunting for subsistence. With the expansion of the Moremi
Game Reserve to include the Boro River, the community of Xaxaba argue that the
areas they can use for gathering grass, reeds and firewood, and for fishing, have
been reduced significantly. The statement below captures their frustration with
these restrictions.

It seems animals are more important than the human beings; you can judge from
the sort of sentences people get for poaching.11

The current CBNRM activities are not considered adequate compensation because
of the distance between the village and the area allocated to OKMT, the CBO to
which they belong. Furthermore, even under CBNRM, community participation
is confined to the periphery; the resource-rich areas are protected and there is
no space for active co-management with the communities. The Central Kalahari
Game Reserve presents a good example where proposals for community use
zones within the park were rejected by the Botswana government.
This restricted access does not only manifest itself in access to resources for
subsistence livelihoods but it also translates to lost opportunities for communi-
ties to meaningfully benefit from lucrative income-generating activities such as
eco­tourism. The Basarwa are on the losing end precisely because their rights are
not recognized and the leasing arrangement under CBNRM, wherein only usuf-
ruct rights are accorded and the security of these rights is at the mercy of the state,
 Adaptive or Anachronistic? 257

does not adequately address this. As argued by Alden Wily (2008), if these areas
remain government lands, the majority of the rural poor are deprived not just of
their land rights but also of a critical capital base which could help them step out
of poverty.

Competition for resources with more powerful groups

Some studies have shown that the existence of Basarwa settlements in the Okavango
Delta and particularly in tourism areas puts them in a position of direct competi-
tion and conflict with a more powerful tourism industry. The tourist lodges market
the area as a pristine wilderness, rarely making reference to the traditional and
historic occupants of the Okavango Delta. A survey of safari lodges in the Delta
revealed that, out of 15 lodges or camps, the brochures of 14 make no mention
whatsoever of local peoples or culture. Instead the majority illustrate the luxu-
rious interiors of the chalets, and the type of wildlife-related activities tourists can
engage in (Damm et al, 1997). In such competition the Basarwa are often on the
losing end, as they have less political power compared to the tourism industry
(Taylor, 2002; Mbaiwa, 2004). Despite the wealth being generated in their area,
the daily tasks associated with searching for a livelihood often remain as difficult
as ever for many of its inhabitants (Taylor, 2002). To the elderly members of the
Xaxaba community, CBNRM has replaced subsistence hunting, which not only
fitted their lifestyle but was the central marker of their identity, with a dependence
on government welfare (Madzwamuse and Fabricius, 2004; Madzwamuse, 2009).
During my field-work many echoed the phrase ‘re a Sheta’ (direct translation: ‘we
are struggling’) when making reference to their livelihoods.
Although CBNRM has brought substantial financial resources to marginalized
communities, and opportunities exist for them to profit from the sustainable use
of natural resources or tourism, Taylor (2002) highlights the fact that the inhab-
itants of these areas have generally found it difficult to engage effectively with
an industry that is controlled far from their locality. Taylor attributes this to the
reality that despite some of Botswana’s most remote areas also becoming lucra-
tive sites of capitalist production through the growth of the tourism industry, the
very same rural regions have remained areas of economic deprivation, especially
if one examines the benefits that accrue to the local inhabitants. Mbaiwa (2004)
has narrowed this situation down to what he terms ‘enclave tourism’, which in the
Okavango Delta is characterized by foreign ownership of tourism facilities, repa-
triation of funds and a failure to effectively contribute to poverty alleviation at the
local or district level. Of the tourism facilities in the Okavango Delta, 53.8 per cent
are foreign-owned, 27.7 per cent are jointly owned and 18.5 per cent are owned
by citizens (Mbaiwa, 2002).
The share of tourism revenue that local communities such as the Basarwa
capture is minimal. Due to low literacy levels the Basarwa’s ability to access
employment in the tourism sector is limited. Thus safari operators tend to employ
non-community members as noted by the residents of Khwai. The facts appear
to support this; a study carried out over a decade ago revealed that Khwai resi-
dents held only 9 of the 74 non-management posts in the three tourism lodges in
the vicinity (Taylor, 2002). Competition from non-locals also extends to trade in
258 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

crafts. Lodge employees sell their baskets through the curio shops at the lodges to
the tourists, negatively impacting craft sales in Khwai.

Struggling for local representation in the policy arena

The Basarwa are peripheral to the political arena in Botswana, and thus do
not have a strong influence on decision-making processes and policy formula-
tion. It has only been within the past few decades that the Basarwa have been
able to self-organize in a formal political sense. The earliest San community-
based organization to be established was the Kuru Development Trust in
1993, which aimed to support residents of the D’Kar settlement in the Gantsi
District. In 1996 the organization expanded its operations to provide support
and to facilitate the establishment of CBOs in other San settlements. This led
to the birth of the Kuru Family of Organisations which includes the Trust
for Okavango Cultural and Development Initiatives (TOCADI) and Letloa,
both operating in Ngamiland District. The aim of their Land, Livelihoods and
Heritage Programme as captured on their website is to support San communi-
ties in northwest and western Botswana with sustainable development through
CBNRM, land and cultural resource mapping. Other significant organizations
include the First People of the Kalahari (FPK) established in 1993 as the first
totally San interest group, and the Working Group for Indigenous Peoples of
Southern Africa (WIMSA) Botswana set up in 1996. WIMSA, Kuru Family of
Organisations, FPK and other development and human rights organizations,
such as Ditshwanelo, pursued a progressive agenda to secure the land rights and
development of the Basarwa. The University of Botswana and Tromso University
set up a Basarwa Research Programme which has supported multidisciplinary
research on various aspects of San issues in the country. However, the outcomes
of these processes were not adequately used to inform the CBNRM policy
debates, for instance the outcome of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve case
(CKGR) which highlighted the struggles of the Basarwa to retain control of
their ancestral lands as described below.
FPK and WIMSA spearheaded and won a court case between the Government
of Botswana and the residents of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in which the
San opposed government-driven removals and fought to retain their rights to live
within the reserve. Initially San-based organizations and human rights NGOs had
responded to the relocation of the Basarwa from the CKGR by forming a negotia-
tion team which met with government for the first time in mid-1997 and continued
for many years with little success (Taylor, 2007). Although the Central Kalahari
Game Reserve had been created in 1961 as a nature reserve and to protect the
rights of 5,000 San and other groups living within its borders, the Government of
Botswana had since the late 1990s embarked on a move to relocate the residents
of the park. This move was influenced by conservationists concerned with over-
hunting and veterinary control in the reserve, and the government also claimed
that it was becoming increasingly expensive to provide services and development
for the residents within the park. As a result, government removals began in 1997
and intensified in 2002 when services such as water, medicine, food deliveries and
social welfare to the park residents were cut off.
 Adaptive or Anachronistic? 259

FPK, with the controversial support of Survival International, took the

government to court in 2002 in what has been noted as possibly the longest
and most expensive court case in the history of Botswana (Taylor, 2007).
Survival International had throughout the court case embarked on an antago-
nistic campaign wherein they linked the relocation of the Basarwa to diamond
interests in the country and labelled the move by the government as genocide.
The campaign by Survival International not only stirred animosity on the part of
government but it also caused divisions among the country’s citizens, and most
importantly within San organizations and other partners (such as Ditshwanelo,
a local human rights organization) in their campaign to have their rights recog-
nized (Mphinyane, 2002; Saugestad, 2006a, 2006b; Taylor, 2007). The campaign
by Survival International diverted attention from the real issues at hand. The
key problem the case exposed is that of an authoritarian and patronizing model
of socio-economic development, based on the value systems of the dominant
group which had been applied for years not only on the CKGR residents but also
to San and other minorities all over Botswana (Saugestad, 2005; Solway, 2007;
Taylor, 2007). The court case was concluded in 2006 with a ruling allowing the
return of the San to their ancestral lands. Several observers have noted this as a
qualified victory which does not necessarily extend to the broader struggle of the
San for their land rights. This observation is based on the government’s narrow
interpretation of the court ruling wherein only the 189 individuals listed in the
court applications were allowed to return to the park without permits (Saugestad,
2006b; Taylor, 2007).
Although the evolution of the San organizations referred to above coincided
with the development of CBNRM in Botswana, they did not actively engage with
broader CBNRM processes through the National CBNRM Forum, with the
exception of TOCADI and Letloa, two NGOs belonging to the Kuru Family of
Organisations. As a result, the issues pertaining to the struggle for the Basarwa’s
land rights and the challenges that they face in implementing CBNRM did not
enter the mainstream debates on CBNRM policy. Drawing from the case of
Khwai and Xaxaba, the Basarwa still felt marginalized from the management of
natural resources despite CBNRM programmes being in place. At the local level
the communities were struggling for self-determination, identity and recognition
of their local institutions and management practices, but issues of this nature were
not adequately captured and highlighted in the national policy arena through the
existing networks.
Apart from San-based organizations not actively engaging in the CBNRM
Forum, the Forum itself shied away from highlighting the issues of the San/
Basarwa, particularly during the contentious CKGR court case, because of the
high political sensitivities surrounding that challenge to the Botswana state’s
authority. The court case began in 2002 and ended in 2006, also a critical
period for the CBNRM policy wherein the 2001 draft was being considered by
Government. The composition of the National CBNRM Forum was in some
instances problematic, particularly when the body was faced with sensitive issues,
as the group included representatives from key government departments who
did not want to be seen to be advocating positions which were not in line with
government thinking.
260 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

While it is accepted that the challenges the Basarwa face are shared by other
communities participating in CBNRM, these challenges are more pronounced
with respect to the Basarwa. The Basarwa not only rely on a diversity of livelihood
strategies that directly depend on the use of natural resources, but they are also
faced with an array of difficulties that most of their neighbours and fellow citizens
do not encounter to the same degree (Saugestad, 1998; Suzman, 2001a, 2001b;
Taylor, 2002). They are subjected to higher levels of poverty and dependency on
welfare in the form of food aid or pensions; have low levels of basic literacy; weak
representation in political and administrative structures, and limited capacity to
advocate their own interest at a national, regional or local level; and a sense of social
and political alienation from the mainstream, compounded in some instances by
social discrimination and prejudice (Taylor, 2000; Suzman, 2001a, 2001b).

Struggle for identity and cultural recognition

The Basarwa in Botswana suffer marginalization through cultural exclusion.
Policies are largely driven by agro-pastoral production systems of the dominant
social groups while ignoring the resource-based livelihoods of ethnic minorities
and most of the rural poor. Furthermore, the government refuses to recognize
the Basarwa as indigenous peoples, or accept their cultural and socio-economic
circumstances as markedly different from those of the rest of the population even in
cases of development initiatives that are specifically targeting the Basarwa. Tracing
the history of San development through the Remote Area Dwellers Programme,
Saugestad (2006a, p173) sums up the issue as follows:

...by disregarding cultural characteristics of the San, cultural knowledge became by

definition irrelevant. As underdevelopment and poverty were seen as contemporary
manifestations of their ‘nomadic disposition’ indigenous knowledge was not only
ignored it was devalued. It was not so much that the San were ignorant they had
the wrong sort of knowledge.

In Botswana as well as Namibia, there is a clear need for a substantial adjustment

in policy in order to meaningfully improve the status of the Basarwa relative to
others. Moreover these adjustments will require the recognition of an ethnic and
cultural component to the Basarwa’s social, economic and political marginaliza-
tion (Gordon, 1992; Saugestad, 1998; Suzman, 2001a). In support of the above
view, Riddell (2002) states that, as a result of the failure to define and agree on the
definition of both indigenous peoples and minority peoples, a number of states
do not recognize minorities as distinct and separate. Therefore, the minorities
are not recognized in law; and if they are not recognized in law, it is difficult to
promote and advance their rights. It is therefore imperative that the governments
of Botswana and Namibia acknowledge these differences and deal with the issues
of the Basarwa accordingly. The failure to do so, to date, has as indicated resulted
in further political and socio-economic marginalization of the San peoples.
Suzman (2001b), however, argues that greater scope exists in the pursuit of San
rights issues within a framework of human rights, as opposed to making reference
to international agreements pertaining to the rights of indigenous peoples, as the
 Adaptive or Anachronistic? 261

term ‘indigenous’ is problematic in the context of southern Africa. With regards

to the rights of minorities, there needs to be a focus not merely on equality before
the law but on the need for some sort of preferential treatment for minorities
in order for them to be treated such that equality of opportunity can become a
reality (Riddell, 2002). In relation to CBNRM, this calls for open-mindedness on
the part of governments to different models of CBNRM, for example the model
proposed by the Khwai community, which has so far received very little support
(Bolaane, 2004b). Although the Government of Botswana has been reluctant to
pursue this approach (Saugestad, 1998; Suzman 2001b), it is viewed that:

…special rights do not constitute privilege as they are rooted in the rule of equal
enjoyment just as is non discrimination….If group rights are rejected and prefer-
ential treatment denied, the equal enjoyment of human rights of minorities will not
be realised.
(Alfredsson, 1998, quoted in Riddell, 2002, p9)

The problem, however, is that Botswana does not pursue a rights-based approach
to development which requires a move from civil and political rights to embrace
social and cultural rights. Botswana instead pursues a growth-led approach to
development which as noted by Taillant (2002) unfortunately leaves many behind.
Nthomang (2001, p133) citing Gill (1998) sums up this situation by noting that:

…social policies of African governments (Botswana included) are based on tradi-

tional liberal capitalist values and philosophies that underpin economic policy as
well as personal factors, stereotypes and attitudes that promote hegemony of the
dominant groups in society...

Nthomang (2001) further notes that social policies and plans are social constructs;
they reflect the deeply rooted values and sectional interests of those powerful in
societies (government élites, private companies) who influence policy formulation
and implementation. CBNRM is not immune to these processes, and its conser-
vation and development goals often cause it to clash directly with these inter-
ests. Ultimately it is not the voice of the politically marginalized peoples like the
Basarwa which prevails in policy outcomes but that of government élites and those
who have direct access to decision-making structures.

Conclusion
CBNRM in Botswana strives to achieve both conservation and development
objectives. The majority of the CBOs targeted by the programme are Basarwa
communities and yet their needs and issues remain peripheral to policy processes
and outcomes in this area. Suzman (2001a) argues that, in the context of develop-
ment, flexibility and participation are closely related concepts. For a programme
to be meaningfully participatory, it must be flexible enough to accommodate
what may be unpredictable local responses and desires. It should also be flexible
enough to allow for the beneficiaries of any programme to respond creatively to
262 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

any new challenges or problems that may arise. This is particularly important for
Basarwa communities, in which the cultural gap between development agents and
target communities is often the cause of conflict and confusion (Ibid.). However,
the political and economic dynamics at play within CBNRM may not provide
the space required for the Basarwa to have a voice. The interest and influence of
the private sector and the political élite are far too powerful to overcome without
a dual approach that links efforts and processes that are geared at empowering
the Basarwa and building their capacity. CBNRM practitioners and the National
CBNRM Forum need to engage more closely with the various NGOs and bodies
that are pursuing the interests of the Basarwa. A human rights and social policy
perspective needs to be strengthened within CBNRM. It was on the basis of
the human rights perspective that the Basarwa won the CKGR case against the
Government of Botswana. However, this case and similar situations around the
world indicate that it takes more than just a human rights and social policy agenda
to win such battles.
Stevens (1997) notes that in many parts of the world the lands belonging to the
indigenous peoples are often the last remaining places of rich biological diversity.
As a result these lands are often sought after as sites for national parks, World
Heritage Sites, international biosphere reserves and other types of protected areas
(Ibid.). Where co-management arrangements exist between the state and indige-
nous people these are often born out of conflict involving the struggle of indigenous
peoples to resist state and private resource appropriation, to defend locally-based
livelihoods and maintain their cultural identities (Castro and Nielsen, 2001). In
most cases it takes heightened levels of conflict for co-management arrangements
between the state and the local communities to be established (Ibid.). Nettheim et
al (2002) observe that in the case of the Maori in New Zealand a history of conflict
with European settlers saw a progression from rough equality, to denial and assim-
ilation, to a special place of Maori in New Zealand, and ultimately to limited rights
of self-determination and management of natural resources. Negotiated claims
led by the Maori themselves have returned some lands to the Maori as well as
provided economic compensation for historical loss of those lands.
However, as Castro and Nielsen (2001) argue, politically and economically
disadvantaged rural groups, including indigenous peoples, often face great difficul-
ties in negotiating agreements with the state and other powerful stakeholders. In
such cases the indigenous people would benefit from partnerships and assistance
from organizations with the capacity to negotiate on their behalf. Dangwal (1999)
argues that the Van Gujjars community in India managed to secure their rights over
the Rajaji National Park as a result of receiving assistance from a local NGO called
Rural Litigation and Entitlements Kendra, coupled with the local people initiating
change themselves. In the case of Botswana, where civil society is generally weak,
the CKGR advocacy case relied on an international NGO (Survival International)
but the partnership complicated matters. The international NGOs were accused
of meddling, fuelling conflict and threatening the economic development of the
country by both the state and citizens (Mphinyane, 2001; Saugestad, 2006a; Taylor,
2007). The involvement of Survival had a muting effect on the voice of the Basarwa
(Mphinyane, 2002) as well as leading to divisions within the San-based organizations
and other partners (Saugestad, 2006a, 2006b; Taylor, 2007). While international
 Adaptive or Anachronistic? 263

solidarity can yield positive results, experiences from elsewhere indicate that the
struggles of indigenous peoples have yielded sustainable success in cases where the
indigenous peoples themselves are at the forefront of these struggles.
While the natural resource management field has made advances in embracing
the role of local communities in conservation through the latest developments in
common property theory and resilience thinking, among other realms, these devel-
opments have not adequately incorporated the importance of political processes
such as those that shape resource governance in Botswana. A critical factor is that
local sustainable use and governance systems are often incompatible with higher-
order political and social interests that shape resource governance in contemporary
society. If indigenous resource governance systems are to be sustained, there is a
need to address such political issues on both theoretical and practical grounds.

Notes
1 Basarwa is a collective term that is used in Botswana to refer to the San, the Khwe
(Khoe), Bushmen or people of hunting origin (Hitchcock and Biesele, n.d.; Saugestad,
1998). While these terms are all contested due to their historical origins, I use the
terms Basarwa/San interchangeably depending on context. For instance, the term
Basarwa has been used by other scholars when discussing contemporary policy issues
in Botswana as this is the recognized official term, and San when discussing historical
material and issues that are shared by other San communities in neighbouring countries
such as Namibia and South Africa (Saugestad, 1998). I have adopted this approach
even though the term Basarwa itself carries a negative implication of ‘those who do not
have cattle’ (Mogwe, 1992). This term perhaps will help to drive home the point to
marginalization by cultural exclusion. The term San has academic origins having been
used by the Havard Kalahari Research Group as a replacement for ‘Bushmen’ which
was regarded as sexist and having negative social connotations (Saugestad, 1998). I
stay clear of the term Bushmen which is regarded as derogatory in Botswana. The
Basarwa themselves have suggested various collective names, for instance First People
of the Kalahari have suggested N/oakwe a Naro term meaning red people in contrast to
the black Bantu-speaking people, while some have suggested ‘First People’ (Hitchcock
and Biesele, n.d.; Saugestad, 1998). The Basarwa also refer to themselves by the names
of their individual groups such as the !Xoo, Khwe, Xhanikwe, Naro, etc. The debate
on which collective term is acceptable is ongoing. The problem with terminology also
reflects that there are many groups with individual names, and some 10 mutually unin-
telligible languages (Saugestad, 1998).
2 There are some 100,000 San peoples found in 6 different countries in southern Africa
(Angola, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe) the majority of
whom reside in Botswana and Namibia (Hitchcock et al, 2009).
3 The Bayei are said to be the first Bantu-speakers to migrate to the Okavango (around
1750) from their home of Diyei, an area just west of the confluence of the Chobe and
the Zambezi rivers, now within Namibia’s Caprivi Strip (Tlou, 1976). They, together
with the Hambukushu, introduced new technologies in the Delta in the form of fishing
gear and dugout canoes (Mekoro) which enabled further penetration into the swamps.
The Basarwa and the Bayei have a long history of inter-dependence (Madzwamuse,
2009). Other Bantu-speaking groups found in the Delta include the BaTawana (a
Tswana group) and the Dxeriku (Bolaane, 2004a).
4 Interview with Rra Kgalelo (‘village elder’), Xaxaba, May 2000.
264 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

5 Focus group discussion with elderly women in Xaxaba, March 2001.

6 Focus group discussion with game wardens at the Moremi Game Reserve northern
gate, May 2000.
7 Special Game Licences were intended to legitimize subsistence hunting by the poorest
members of population, most of whom were Basarwa, making it possible for them
to hunt legally. With the introduction of CBNRM the Special Game Licences were
scrapped, and replaced with an annual quota given to the village collectively (Hitchcock
and Masilo, 1995; Taylor, 2002). The licences enabled access to the main source of
protein for most of the San households throughout the year. The implications are that
these households now only have access to meat during the hunting season thus nega-
tively affecting food security during the off-season.
8 In March 2001 several focus group discussions were held with the youth, elderly, tour
guides and key informant interviews with the village leadership in Xaxaba.
9 Interview with Mma Monjwa an elderly woman in Xaxaba, March 2001.
10 Interview with an elderly woman in Khwai, May 2000.
11 Focus group discussion with elders in Xaxaba, March 2001.

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 12

Pastoral Activists: Negotiating Power

Imbalances in the Tanzanian Serengeti

Maanda Ngoitiko, Makko Sinandei, Partalala Meitaya

and Fred Nelson

Introduction
Northern Tanzania’s savannahs have long been a hotly contested landscape. During
the colonial era large tracts of fertile land, particularly highland ranges around moun-
tains such as Kilimanjaro and Meru, were appropriated for agriculture or ranching
by European settlers. East Africa’s first state-protected areas for wildlife, most notably
the iconic Serengeti National Park, were created out of savannah landscapes that had
been managed by pastoralists for hundreds or thousands of years. During the past 30
years, state and private interests in wildlife, tourism and commercial agriculture have
continued to increase the pressure on these landscapes and the land and resource
rights of resident communities. As a result, people with pastoralist livelihoods have
faced escalating pressures and continuous challenges to their ability to use and access
their lands and resources. A vast scholarship from the region documents how external
commercial interests in wildlife and land in northern Tanzania have weakened local
communities’ land tenure security, undermining both livelihoods and traditional
natural resource governance regimes (e.g. Lane, 1996; Neumann, 1997; Igoe and
Brockington, 1999; Homewood et al, 2009). As a result, northern Tanzania has
become a general reference point for the global discourse on interactions between
local people and conservation goals, with case studies often highlighting the nega-
tive impacts that external global and national conservation interests have on local
communities’ rights and livelihoods (e.g. Dowie, 2009). Various studies highlight the
role played by western conceptualizations about nature conservation (Neumann,
1998; Brockington, 2002; Goldman, 2003; Igoe, 2004); the importance of wildlife’s
growing economic value through tourism in terms of increasing external interest in
pastoralist lands (Nelson et al, 2007; Sachedina, 2008); and the influence of globali-
zation in terms of both private sector investors’ and NGO networks’ abilities to influ-
ence natural resource policies in African countries (Igoe and Croucher, 2007).
270 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

In this discourse, local communities themselves are usually portrayed as victims,

with limited ability to influence decisions made elsewhere by a powerful array of
external state, corporate and international interests. Although some works high-
light the ways that pastoralist communities in northern Tanzania have been able to
mobilize to confront external interests in order to secure their resources through
emergent advocacy strategies (e.g. Neumann, 1995; Igoe, 2003), there has on
balance been much more attention paid to the ways that communities are margin-
alized by external ideas and interests, than to the ways that local people actively
negotiate these challenges.
Ngorongoro District has long been a flashpoint of tensions between community
livelihoods and wildlife conservation interests.The Ngorongoro Conservation Area
(NCA), which is the single most important attraction in Tanzania’s rapidly growing
tourism industry (Mitchell et al, 2008), has been the site of long-running tensions
between livelihoods, land rights, tourism development, and wildlife conservation
since the area was created a half-century ago (Homewood and Rodgers, 1991;
Shivji and Kapinga, 1998; Honey, 2008).
To the north of the NCA’s borders, the villages of Loliondo Division extend
northwards to the Kenyan border (Figure 12.1). Loliondo borders the eastern side
of Serengeti National Park, and hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and other
animals pass through this area during their annual migration between Kenya’s
Maasai Mara National Reserve and the Serengeti plains. These villages’ lands thus
contain some of the world’s finest terrestrial wildlife habitat. This has given some
villages lucrative new opportunities to earn income from tourism concessions
granted to private investors, but has also resulted in long-running pressures from

Figure 12.1 Map of Loliondo

 Pastoral Activists 271

central government and some private investors for land access and appropria-
tion. The communities’ natural wealth is their greatest asset and greatest source of
insecurity; few villages in Tanzania face the kind of sustained pressure that those in
Loliondo must regularly deal with in order to maintain rights over their customary
lands and resources.
In addressing these challenges, these pastoralist communities actively defend
their claims through a wide range of sophisticated political strategies. Villagers
engage directly in national policy and legislative debates, have a well-developed
understanding of their legal rights and vulnerabilities, and cultivate long-term links
to civil society organizations, private tourism investors and sympathetic govern-
ment agencies or bureaucrats. In the context of Tanzania’s essentially single-party
state (see Nelson and Blomley, this volume), the communities are also sometimes
able to use local and regional party institutions and electoral processes as venues
for advancing or defending their interests.
This chapter examines these local organizational strategies and negotiative
processes, based on the grassroots perspective and experiences during the past
decade of the Ujamaa Community Resource Trust, a local organization whose
work centres on facilitating community-based natural resource management and
policy advocacy at local and national levels. We review the background context of
historic conflicts revolving around natural resource management and land tenure
in Loliondo, before describing a series of specific conflicts that have emerged in
the area more recently. We focus on describing the different interests that underlie
these conflicts and examine how local communities collectively confront and
negotiate with these external interests.

Loliondo: Herds and herders of the Serengeti

The greater Serengeti ecosystem, extending for approximately 30,000km2
across the borders of Kenya and Tanzania, contains the greatest assemblage of
wild large mammals on the earth (Sinclair and Arcese, 1995). Each year over
2 million animals – including over a million wildebeest – move between the wet
season grazing and calving ground of the Serengeti plains and dry season refuges,
particularly Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve. This annual movement of
animals, which also attracts high densities of large predators such as lions and
spotted hyenas, passes across the land of six different state protected areas (five
in Tanzania and one in Kenya) as well as spilling out onto community lands to
the east and west of Serengeti National Park and to the north and east of the
Maasai Mara. Norton-Griffiths (1995) estimates that if the migratory animals
were not able to spill beyond the borders of state protected areas, the herds might
be reduced by about one-third.
The wildlife of the Serengeti ecosystem is not only a natural spectacle, but
an extremely valuable economic asset to Kenya and Tanzania. In Tanzania, the
Serengeti National Park (SNP) and NCA are the cornerstones of a tourism
industry worth an estimated US$1.6 billion in 2008, which has grown dramati-
cally from only US$60 million in total earnings in 1990 (Honey, 2008; Mitchell
et al, 2008). It is no exaggeration to say that the wildlife of the Serengeti
272 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

ecosystem is one of Tanzania’s most important national economic resources,

with wildlife-based tourism one of the fastest-growing national industries
during the past 20 years.
The Serengeti is home to people as well as wildlife. The lands around the
Maasai Mara in Kenya, to the east of SNP in Loliondo, and the entire Ngorongoro
Conservation Area (NCA)1 are home to Maasai pastoralists (Homewood and
Rodgers, 1991). The Maasai manage their lands according to a system of tran-
shumant pastoralism, based on the communal designation of different areas as
dry and wet season pastures which are made available to use according to vari-
able annual patterns of rainfall. This system of movement between pastures and
seasonally available grazing areas and water sources mirrors the movements of
wild animals in eastern African savannahs, and has facilitated the co-habita-
tion of these landscapes by people and wildlife for centuries (Homewood and
Rodgers, 1991). While the Maasai regularly kill predators that prey upon their
stock, and kill lions ritualistically as well, they generally do not eat wild animals
for food except in dire circumstances. These traditional taboos against eating
wild animals, and the maintenance of grazing lands through the use of fire
and exclusion of agricultural cultivation, have contributed significantly to East
Africa’s diversity and richness of wildlife (Western, 1989).
This historic co-existence of people and wildlife in East African savannahs has
become more strained as a result of human population growth, changing life-
styles and economic preferences, and the spread of conservation policies based
on the segregation of people and wildlife through the establishment of national
parks and other protected areas (Homewood et al, 2009). The establishment of
the Serengeti during the colonial era was a formative episode in the evolution
of wildlife management policies in East Africa (Neumann, 1998). The Serengeti
was first established as a game reserve in the 1920s, and designated a national
park in 1940, but resident communities maintained their land occupancy rights
throughout those initial periods. By the late 1950s, pressure was increasing from
European conservation lobbies to establish the Serengeti as a national park on
the model of America’s Yellowstone, where people would not be allowed to live
(Neumann, 1998). Emblematic of this movement were the advocacy efforts of
the founder of the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS), Bernhard Grzimek, who
argued that the Serengeti was a priceless heritage of humankind and preserving
its natural ‘wilderness’ was incompatible with continued human residence within
its boundaries (Grzimek and Grzimek, 1960). In 1959, SNP was re-gazetted,
with adjusted boundaries, and the local communities living there, including about
1,000 Maasai, were relocated to adjacent areas including the NCA and Loliondo
(Neumann, 1998).
Although these events, which set the pattern for subsequent conservation
efforts in Tanzania based on exclusive protected areas free of human settlement,
often come across on the written page as ancient history, consigned to the dusty
archives of colonial administrative records, amongst the people of the Serengeti
this is living history. Amongst the residents of Loliondo’s villages, the events of the
past strongly colour the perceptions of the present where the interactions between
local livelihoods and wildlife conservation are concerned.
 Pastoral Activists 273

Land, wildlife, and livelihoods: Challenges and

opportunities in the 1980s and 1990s
Structural adjustment and ‘land-grabbing’
Another formative period in the lives of Loliondo’s pastoralist communties
occurred during the late 1980s. During the 1980s, following Tanzania’s intensi-
fying economic crisis and the fiscal insolvency of the state from the late 1970s
onwards (Nelson and Blomley, this volume), the country began a transition from
socialism to more open and market-oriented economic policies. This transition
was brought on largely as a result of pressure from foreign donors, particularly the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, who made the loans Tanzania
required conditional on adoption of a structural adjustment reform package
(Campbell and Stein, 1991). In pastoralist areas, the late 1980s gave rise to an
unprecedented period of ‘land-grabbling’ by various élites from both rural and
urban areas (Shivji, 1998). Locally elected Village Councils were granted title
deeds to customary village land areas, which was partly intended to safeguard local
tenure but also effectively enabled Village Councils to sell off community lands
without any formal oversight mechanisms on the part of the Village Assembly
(Igoe and Brockington, 1999).
In Loliondo, as with other pastoralist areas in northern Tanzania, a series of land
tenure conflicts and challenges emerged during this period. A number of land
areas, some only a few hectares and some amounting to thousands of hectares,
were granted under dubious circumstances by Village Councils to outside inves-
tors. Other lands were acquired without following proper procedures for alloca-
tion, or even obtaining any local authorization at all under conditions that would
later lead to allegations of fraud. Many of these land allocations resulted in long-
running conflicts between local communities and higher-level government author-
ities and private investors. In addition, government proposals emerged in the late
1980s to convert much of the Loliondo area, lying as it does in highlands which
receive more rainfall than much of semi-arid northern Tanzania, to large-scale
commercial agriculture. As a result of these developments, by 1989 there were 264
land claims or requests pending in Loliondo Division, covering an area equivalent
to 140 per cent of the area’s total land area (Ojalammi, 2006, p91).

Wildlife use: Hunting and tourism

Land tenure security in Loliondo also faced continued challenges during this
time from wildlife conservation interests. National park authorities attempted to
enforce an administrative ‘buffer zone’ in the 1980s which would prevent local
economic activity in the community lands bordering SNP. Government efforts
to establish this buffer zone were a main reason that communities organized to
obtain title deeds to their lands by the early 1990s. In Ololosokwan village, the
SNP attempted to build a ranger post at Klein’s Gate, ostensibly on the boundary
between the park and the community, but in fact well beyond the park’s gazetted
boundaries on the village’s lands. In 1991–1992, the entire Loliondo area was
allocated by the central government as a hunting concession for a senior official
274 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

and member of the royal family of the United Arab Emirates, which sparked a
national controversy and garnered international media attention because the deci-
sion was made without prior consultation and agreement of the affected villages
(Alexander, 1993; Honey, 2008).
One outcome of these escalating pressures on local lands and resources in
Loliondo was the formation in 1990 of one of the first Maasai community-based
advocacy organizations in the area. The Koronkoro Indigenous Peoples Oriented
to Conservation (KIPOC) was formed by the local parliamentary representative,
Lazarus Parkipuny (Honey, 2008). The formation of this organization was also
linked to broader changes in Tanzania; in 1992 the one-party state was formally
abandoned through a constitutional ammendment providing for multiparty
politics. Non-governmental associations, societies and organizations flourished
following these and related reforms. This return to political pluralism, coupled
with the growing donor influence and investment in Tanzania, much of it targeted
at non-governmental organizations, helped fuel the the rise of advocacy organiza-
tions such as KIPOC in pastoralist areas (Igoe, 2003).
The early 1990s also saw the emergence of another important new development
in Loliondo in the form of the first formal agreements between tourism compa-
nies and villages providing for tourism activities to be carried out on community
lands. These first ventures, initiated in Loliondo in 1991, were driven both by
private sector interest in tourism in these areas, but also by the perceived need on
the part of tourism companies to create direct economic benefits for communi-
ties that would build incentives for conserving wildlife habitat on village lands
adjacent to SNP in the face of competition from agriculture, charcoal burning
and other activities (Dorobo Tours and Safaris and Oliver’s Camp Ltd, 1996).
With Tanzania’s tourism industry expanding at roughly 10 per cent per annum
throughout the 1990s, community-based tourism ventures based on contracts
between villages and private operators became well-established over the course
of that decade.
These tourism ventures provided communities with a direct source of income
from wildlife for the first time, through private investments that were managed
according to village-level contractual agreements. These ventures were important
for the direct village-level income they provided, which increased from a few thou-
sand dollars in the early 1990s to over US$300,000 across seven Loliondo villages
by 2007 (TNRF, 2008).The leading income-earner was Ololosokwan village, which
was home to Conservation Corporation Africa’s (CCA) Klein’s Camp2 ecolodge
as well as several mobile camping operations. Notably, the Klein’s Camp venture
arose from an earlier land dispute which the village was able to contest legally and
through various political channels, forcing CCA eventually to negotiate an agree-
ment with the village, paying it an annual rent for access to 10,000ha as well as
additional fees (Nelson and Ole Makko, 2005). Perhaps just as important as the
income was the fact that these tourism ventures were compatible with continued
use of most concession areas as dry season grazing reserves for villagers’ live-
stock, with the tourism ventures helping the communities to physically document
their use of lands which government policy-makers often alleged were empty and
unused, and therefore should be allocated to more efficient uses.
 Pastoral Activists 275

Contesting ‘community-based conservation’ in Loliondo

By the late 1990s the communities in Loliondo had developed their own systems
for benefiting from wildlife through village-based tourism concession agreements,
although these were in periodic conflict with the hunting concession granted
by government for the entire Loliondo area (Honey, 2008). Villages also devel-
oped land use plans, backed up by formal village by-laws passed by both Village
Councils and the District Council, which formalized the integration of tourism
and pastoralism in defined areas of village land. These local land and resource
management systems faced another challenge from external government and
NGO interests from about 1999 to 2003, when Ministerial authorities and the
Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) attempted to persuade the communities to
form a Wildlife Management Area (WMA) according to Tanzania’s 1998 Wildlife
Policy (see Nelson and Blomley, this volume). The key tension resulted from
several factors. First, at this time (until December 2002), the parameters of WMAs
had not been legally defined and communities were thus faced with substantial
uncertainty. The history of mistrust between local communities and government
conservation agencies and global conservation NGOs in the Serengeti area did
not ease these uncertainties. Many community members and local NGOs believed
that the WMA might simply be an expedient way to place large areas of commu-
nity land under central protection for wildlife, and that any tourism investments
therein would primarily benefit external parties (Nelson and Ole Makko, 2005).
Ultimately the WMA proposal was rejected following a long series of debates
and meetings, including extensive pressure from outside for the communities to
formally agree to WMA formation. It is highly notable that while debate over the
advantages and disadvantages of WMAs in terms of local interests and benefits
continues throughout Tanzania (TNRF, 2008), Loliondo is the only locale that has
actually rejected a formal proposal for establishment of a WMA on village lands.

National policy context: Tourism growth, pastoralism

contraction
The past decade has witnessed the continuing growth of the economic impor-
tance of wildlife tourism in the Serengeti ecosytem, with revenues generated by
SNP increasing from about US$6 million in 2000/01 to over US$20 million by
2006/07 (TANAPA, 2007; Honey, 2008). Since 2006, a number of new tourism
developments have been authorized and constructed in the park, as the govern-
ment has sought to increase the tourist capacity and revenue generation from
the Serengeti. For example, the government has publicized plans to increase the
number of hotel and lodge bed-nights in SNP from the current 950 to about 4,500
by 2012 (Ihucha, 2009).
At the same time, the national policy context for local pastoralists has ranged
from ambivalent to expropriative (Matee and Shem, 2006). New reforms in live-
stock policy and legislation have tended to promote restrictions on the mobility
of pastoralists and more individualized or ‘modern’ ranching models, while land
policy and implementation measures continue to prioritize making lands avail-
able for private investment and securing individual title so that land can be used
276 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

as collateral (Ibid.). Collective tenure over communal properties such as pasto-

ralist rangelands has remained insecure and subject to threats of alienation, despite
Tanzania’s relatively enabling legal framework for communal land tenure. As
Tanzania has pursued a set of development policies designed to increase commercial
investments in high-potential areas such as the Serengeti ecosystem, and the lines
between private investment and public institutions become increasingly blurred
(see Nelson and Blomley, this volume), villages in Loliondo face a continued and
often multiplying set of state and non-state claims to local resources.
This then provides some of the historical context for continuing local struggles
over land rights and wildlife management in Loliondo. The next section reviews
a more recent series of conflicts and debates wherein we examine the strategic
responses of local communities, working with a range of allies and facilitators, to
address the continuing land tenure conflicts that seem to break out over Loliondo
with the regularity, and often the intensity, of the April rains.

Contesting local land and resource rights:

Recent cases from Loliondo
Wildlife legislative debates
The wildlife of the Serengeti ecosystem is the resource that attracts most outside
investors, and thus government authorities’ interest, into the Loliondo area.
This interest is a result of Loliondo’s attractiveness for tourism and recreational
hunting, and its strategic importance for conserving the Serengeti’s migratory
wildlife outside the national park boundaries. During the 1990s, Tanzania adopted
reforms to its wildlife and tourism policies that called for increasing local benefits
from wildlife through community-based tourism and devolved user rights over
wildlife on village lands (Nelson et al, 2007). Starting in 1999, though, the institu-
tional environment began to change in unanticipated ways towards reconsolidating
central control over wildlife and tourism (Nelson and Blomley, this volume).
The Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism made regulatory changes, starting
in 2000, that formally limited the rights of villages situated in designated hunting
concessions, such as exist in Loliondo and most of wildlife-rich northern Tanzania, to
enter into contracts with tourism operators (Ibid.). The regulatory measures released
in 2000 effectively stated that such tourism activities were prohibited inside any
centrally-designated hunting concessions, including those on village lands, without
the express permission of the Ministerial Wildlife Division (Masara, 2000). This
posed a direct and unambiguous challenge to existing village rights to determine land
access and land rights, legally establishing the precedence of central bureaucratic and
national interests in hunting concessions over locally negotiated arrangements.
These regulatory changes signalled a somewhat informal shift in national policy
in relation to local access to benefits from tourism and wildlife, and precipitated a
great deal of concern among local communities and their civil society allies, partic-
ularly with regard to future revenue flows, which by 2001 had become substan-
tial in some villages. Legal opinions were sought by several interested local and
international NGOs to clarify the legality of the regulations in question, given the
 Pastoral Activists 277

apparent conflict of jurisdictional authority between village rights to manage land

under the land legislation, and ministerial authority over wildlife as administered
through trophy hunting concessions (Masara, 2000; Nshala, 2002). The local
response was to wait and see if the regulations would be implemented, and despite
several confrontations in the field between local government officials and tourism
companies, they generally were not, at least in the Loliondo area.3 Implementation
would have provoked a direct confrontation between villagers’ economic interests
and central authorities, which at this time the latter appeared to prefer to avoid. In
subsequent years the number of village-tourism agreements in Loliondo actually
increased considerably, despite the nominal illegality of all these enterprises. This
increased local stakes in controlling wildlife, tourism and land use in Loliondo.
It was not until 2007 that this issue resurfaced in formal policy debates, with the
release of a new set of ministerial regulations (‘The Non-consumptive Tourism
Regulations’). These regulations effectively reconfirmed ministerial authority
to regulate tourism activities on private village lands, but rather than simply
proscribing tourism activities in hunting concessions, the 2007 regulations took a
different approach. These regulations established a formal schedule of payments
that tourism companies operating in these areas are required to pay for different
activities such as walking, camping and establishing lodges. These payments effec-
tively replace existing fees paid by operators directly to villages, who are instead
to be granted a proportion of the revenues paid to the Wildlife Division. Payments
for access to village lands by tourism operators would thus be centralized and
prices and/or fees made uniform across the different village areas, which vary in
their attractiveness for tourism. The central government defended these changes
as being necessary to prevent tourism investors from taking advantage of villagers
who had limited ability to negotiate commercial contracts. For villagers such as
those in Loliondo, whose rapidly increasing tourism revenue flows during the
preceeding decade seemed to indicate a reasonable competence in contract nego-
tiation, the regulations came across as a sweeping disempowerment and loss of
control over revenue generated by local lands and resources.
By the time ministerial authorities released the 2007 regulations, having spent
years drafting these regulations and with a clearer focus on increasing govern-
ment revenues from tourism outside protected areas, government was much more
committed to enforcement. Tourism company payments were expected to begin
immediately and largely cease being made directly to villages. For the villages, a
strategy of passive resistance was not possible since it was the tourism companies
that were being pressured to comply. For those companies, many of which were
high-end foreign-owned businesses, they had few options to resist such regulatory
directives if they wished to continue operating. If villages wished to defend their
claims they would be forced to take a more pro-active approach.
Several strategies were pursued by villagers in Loliondo and elsewhere in
northern Tanzania, where most affected communities were situated given the
importance of tourism in the region. In terms of formal policy engagement, a
process of debate and discussion was initiated between the communities and
private tourism operators on the one hand, and the government on the other, with
facilitation provided by the Tanzania Natural Resource Forum and the African
Wildlife Foundation.4
278 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

At the local level in Loliondo, the villages initiated a process of counter-negoti-

ation. If the Ministry would claim the right to charge fees on tourism companies
on village lands, the villages would re-focus attention on revenue flows from the
holder of the tourism hunting concession situated on the village lands, Ortello
Business Corporation (OBC). Villages and OBC began a contentious process of
negotiating contracts acknowledging OBC’s rights and responsibilities in hunting
on village lands, which had resurfaced as an issue for negotiation largely because
of the pressure the government had applied to the villages through the claims on
tourism income.The negotiation process was complicated and ridden with conflict,
with district government officials intervening to try to control the content of the
contracts in a way favourable to OBC, for example by negotiating with Village
Chairmen at district headquarters instead of publicly at the village level. The
results were equally complex; two villages refused to agree to contracts, deeming
the drafts presented unacceptable, while four villages signed contracts, although
in some cases these were not approved by Village Assemblies but only signed by
Village Chairmen. In Arash village, the village government negotiated effectively
until OBC agreed to sign a contract that recognized the villages’ rights to carry on
land use activities as locally planned and desired in the ‘hunting concession’. This
contract was notable in that it provided formal contractual acknowledgement by
OBC that the village was entitled to carry out tourism activities in its village lands
without external interference.
An even more important legislative process that the villagers in Loliondo
have been forced to address recently has been new national wildlife legislation,
the Wildlife Conservation Act, which was published in the government gazette
in mid-2008, prior to its first reading in Parliament, and eventually passed by
Parliament in early 2009. This Act consolidates and extends centralized control
over wildlife, and lands used by wildlife. Several new provisions in the draft bill,
at its first tabling in Parliament, provided for major extensions of ministerial
authority over land uses on community lands, particularly in pastoralist areas of
northern Tanzania. One measure would have made illegal any livestock grazing
in Game Controlled Areas, which overlap with village lands throughout northern
Tanzania (e.g. all of Loliondo Division is within Loliondo Game Controlled
Area), without authorization of the Wildlife Division. This would have effec-
tively made all pastoralism in northern Tanzania illegal or at least dependent
on the discretionary authority of wildlife officials. Other provisions provided
for new protected land use categories such as wildlife ‘corridors’ and ‘dispersal
areas’ which were to be created outside core state protected areas. Ultimately
the proposed legislation posed a major challenge to livelihood security and land
tenure rights of pastoralist villagers.
The stark nature of the Bill’s provisions prompted widespread village-level
mobilization and engagement with the legislative process, in a way that is rarely
seen in Tanzania. With ministerial officials having produced the Bill with little
public participation, at least at the village level, the entry-point for villagers
was the Parliamentary Environment Committee, which had scheduled a public
hearing on the bill in Dar es Salaam. In order to assure that local concerns were
heard by parliamentary representatives, villagers from Loliondo and other locales
in northern Tanzania, working with civil society coalitions such as the Pastoralist
 Pastoral Activists 279

Indigenous NGO’s Forum (PINGOS), mobilized to attend and organize formal

critiques of the Bill and recommendations for changes. Money to pay for advo-
cacy activities including the costs of travel and accommodation to Dar es Salaam
from northern Tanzania was raised locally, with some villages in Loliondo raising
in excess of US$10,000 through individual villager contributions provided by
cattle sales.
As a result, the public consultation on the Bill was dominated by concerns
from communities in northern Tanzania, with support from various NGOs, and
an additional public consultation was agreed to be held in Arusha. This meeting
provided even more intense discussion of the Bill, with community representatives
stating publicly that passage of such measures would result in loss of votes for both
the ruling party as a whole and individual Members of Parliament more specifi-
cally (Ihucha, 2008a).
When the Bill arrived in Parliament for its second reading and presumptive
passage in early 2009, the debate over the Bill’s provisions was intense, with some
MPs arguing that it provided greater protection for wildlife than the country’s
citizens and demanding a range of changes be made prior to passage (Kiishweko,
2009). NGOs and community leaders continued to pressure northern Tanzanian
MPs to introduce various amendments which addressed key concerns. In the end,
the bill was passed, as is virtually inevitable given the dominance of Tanzania’s
Parliament by the ruling CCM party, but one key amendment was made that
safeguarded village land rights in Game Controlled Areas (URT, 2009). A combi-
nation of local collective action and civil society-led policy engagement helped
spur a vibrant public debate over the Bill and led to at least one important change
aimed at supporting local livelihood interests and limiting the proposed expansion
of centralized authority.

Tourism investors and villagers’ land access

The legacy of the land claims and allocations of the 1980s continues to haunt the
communities in Loliondo in the form of a number of ongoing disputes over certain
properties. In recent years, the most problematic dispute has come to involve the
Sukenya Farm.
The Sukenya Farm is a roughly 12,000-acre property located in Soit Sambu
village in northwestern Loliondo, in the sub-village location of Sukenya. The
property was originally acquired, in circumstances which are still disputed, by the
parastatal Tanzania Breweries Ltd (TBL), in 1984 at the height of the regional
scramble for land in Loliondo. In 2006 TBL, which had never made use of most
of the property for barley production as ostensibly had been the original inten-
tion, sold the lease on the property to one of Tanzania’s leading tourism opera-
tors, Thomson Safaris, at a reported cost of US$1.2 million (Juma et al, 2008).
Thomson purchased the property with the intention of developing a ‘private
nature reserve’ and a tourism tented camp or lodge (O’Kasick, n.d.).
The acquisition of the property precipitated a land use conflict with the local
community. Despite the property’s acquisition by TBL, the fact that TBL had
never used most of the land (TBL was financially insolvent in the 1980s and
was later acquired by South African Breweries when the government divested
280 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

many parastatals) meant that the community continued to use the property in
accordance with customary range management practices for livestock grazing.
The area holds several permanent sources of water and provides grazing to Soit
Sambu villagers and also residents of Engusero Sambu village to the east, and
is also used for moving livestock between these two communities and various
livestock markets. Thus when Thomson took over the property and attempted
to begin development of a nature reserve which, in its operational vision, meant
excluding use by livestock, a conflict was created. Since 2006 the conflict has
intensified, with Thomson working with the district officials and police to prevent
entry of livestock onto the property. This has led to numerous imprisonments of
Soit Sambu village residents, and in one case a shooting where a herder was shot
through the jaw and subsequently hospitalized for three months, although both
Thomson property guards and the police deny responsibility for the shooting
(Nkwame, 2008).
Central to this conflict is not only divergent interests in how land uses are deter-
mined, but also a legal conflict over rights over the property. As Ihucha (2008b)
reports, the ‘tourist firm claims that the land was legally ceded to them by former
owner, Tanzania Breweries Ltd, while the villagers on the other hand maintain that
even TBL itself had acquired the farm in controversial circumstances.’ Specifically,
the villagers claim that ‘the farm was leased to TBL by a group of people who
pretended to be leaders of Soitsambu village, but in actual fact these people have
never been in such a position’ (Ibid.) The precise circumstances that surrounded
the allocation of the disputed Sukenya Farm in the 1980s may never be defini-
tively known, but it is well documented that during this period fraudulent land
allocations were widespread throughout northern Tanzania and in Loliondo in
particular (Shivji, 1998; Ojalammi, 2006).
During the past three years the residents of Soit Sambu have confronted their
most serious land use and land tenure conflict since the 1980s, given the size of
the disputed property in question and its strategic importance for local livestock
producers. The situation may have considerable long-term negative implications
for local livelihoods in terms of access to resources used by livestock through
seasonal rotational grazing patterns. The community has effectively mobilized to
address this challenge, but this mobilization has taken time and required focused
local efforts.
Initially many community members recognized the nature of the problem, and
were angered by loss of access to the property. However, two obstacles to collective
action limited the community’s ability to develop an effective response. The first
was the presence of internal divisions within the community that were effectively
exploited by Thomson and their allies in local government. Soit Sambu village, like
the Loliondo area in general, is largely inhabited by the Purko section (or ‘clan’)
of the Maasai, which is also the predominant section across the adjacent Kenyan
border. However, a small minority section within the area, the Laitayok, is also
present, as is the Loita section.5
In Soit Sambu, the community in general and village government organs in partic-
ular are numerically dominated by Purko Maasai, with Laitayok a distinct minority
within the community. In the year or so immediately after Thomson’s acquisition
of Sukenya Farm, various Purko members of the community’s dominant grouping
 Pastoral Activists 281

began to organize opposition to the company’s plans and presence, in light of the
growing list of local grievances. Some Laitayok residents, however, saw an oppor-
tunity to improve their position by supporting the company. Thomson allied itself
with these Laitayok, hiring community members from this section as employees
on the farm, for example as security guards paid to keep other village residents
from grazing livestock on the property. The situation thus evolved into one where
the community was internally divided and unable to collectively organize to chal-
lenge Thomson’s claim.
The second problem undermining local action was the community’s own
elected village government, particularly the Soit Sambu Village Chairman who
had become unresponsive to the broader community’s interests and grievances.
Because of the Chairman’s power over the convening and agenda-setting of the
village government, this impeded village residents’ ability to use the Village Council
and Village Assembly meetings as a forum for organizing strategies to legally or
politically challenge Thomson’s claim to the disputed property.
Both of these challenges were addressed through formal local political and
electoral processes, backed up with extensive informal negotiation within the
community. The result was the resolution of internal conflicts and a new-found
level of local unity and accountability in Soit Sambu. The division between the
Purko and Laitayok village members was addressed by ameliorating the prevailing
Laitayok sense of marginalization by electing three Laitayok residents to the
Soitsambu Ward CCM (ruling party) Committee, which as the local ruling party
organ is a key political representative body. This unprecedented level of Laitayok
representation in the local party committee (the committee was now evenly split
between Purko and Laitayok members) was the result of a focused campaign
led by a Soit Sambu village resident with a history of activism, both within the
village and working with local NGOs, to convince fellow Purko villagers that the
community needed unity to address its external threats, which in turn required
reaching out and empowering the Laitayok minority within the village in some
tangible way. The result of this move was profound, with many Laitayok soon
joining the Purko residents in a more unified opposition to Thomson’s manage-
ment of Sukenya. Symbolically, a number of Laitayok employed on the farm soon
left their employment at the community’s insistence, including Thomson’s local
community liaison officer.
Once the inter-sectional division was improved, the problem of the Village
Chairman was easily negotiated by the unified Village Assembly. The village infor-
mally, through local social sanctions, excluded the Chairman from the village
government meetings; when meetings were called the villagers simply elected an
acting chair for each meeting. Faced with widespread and constant social sanction
and criticism, the Chairman effectively abdicated his role as head of the village
government and did not stand for re-election at the next Village Council elections
which were held in August 2009.
By overcoming the internal divisions that undermined collective action at the
local level, the village has been able to deploy a wide range of advocacy strate-
gies in its efforts to regain rights over Sukenya Farm. Working with some local
and regional NGOs, community leaders have held press conferences to present
their perspectives on the dispute (Ihucha, 2008b). A delegation of villagers met
282 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

with the Prime Minister to discuss the problem in mid-2008, which resulted in
the formation of a formal government enquiry into the status of the farm and the
nature of the conflict with the villagers (Ibid.). The villagers have also used local
governance organs to press their case. In March 2009, the Ngorongoro District
Council approved a formal motion suggesting ‘that Thomson Safaris Ltd [ … ]
be left with only a few acres for their use in the area’ with the rest of the farm’s
acreage returned to the villagers (Juma, 2009). This motion was further ratified
by the regional administration, with the community’s case at the regional level
pursued by the Ngorongoro constituency Member of Parliament. While the case
remains subject to ongoing local and national deliberations, the community has
developed a unified position and been able to use a range of local and national
governance organs, including elected representatives at village, district and parlia-
mentary levels, to advance their claims.

Protected area boundaries and expansion

A final recent case involving contested resource claims in Loliondo and adjacent
areas involves local attempts to defend their lands from enclosure by state protected
areas. As noted above, the community has been historically affected by the estab-
lishment of SNP and the relatively rigid boundary this imposes with respect to
livestock movements and access to pasture and water. This boundary is also the
subject of long-running conflict and negotiation between the SNP management
authority and the Loliondo villages.
Periodically there have been efforts to effect a boundary extension, in either legal
or practical terms. In the 1980s SNP, as with some other national parks, began to try
to impose a 10km-wide ‘buffer zone’, partly to prevent the encroachment of agri-
culture and livestock grazing up against the park’s actual boundary. More recently
the park has undertaken at various points to re-demarcate its boundary, often in
ways that are not congruent with local understanding of the officially recognized
boundary between park land and village land. In 2008 the SNP formally undertook
a new boundary demarcation exercise which involved surveying the border and
placing boundary beacons on the land. Villagers in Loliondo considered some of
these beacons to be within their village lands, and claimed that the new boundary
did not conform with the official gazetted boundary of SNP. In response, villagers
physically removed and destroyed the beacons. This led to SNP staff, through
their local Klein’s Gate ranger post, arresting several villagers for destroying park
property in the form of the beacons. This precipitated a physical confrontation
between residents of Ololosokwan village and the park ranger post, with several
hundred villagers armed with spears demanding the release of the arrested village
members. Confronted with a choice to back down or escalate the situation into a
likely physical clash, and given that the beacons had been placed on village land
without a strong legal basis for doing so, the park staff chose the former option. A
direct physical confrontation, organized quickly and decisively and backed up by
a clear potential for violence based on villagers’ determination to secure their lands
and resources, was able to prevent the extension of state lands onto community
lands in this instance.
 Pastoral Activists 283

Local negotiations over resource rights in Loliondo

The core theme in the contemporary history of natural resource governance,
conservation and development in Loliondo is one of progressively intensifying
competition between different actors for the area’s resources. This competition is
driven by the increasing value of the area in relation to the growth of the tourism
industry in Tanzania during the past 20 years. The fact that Serengeti National
Park and Ngorongoro Conservation Area are, along with Mount Kilimanjaro, two
of the three most valuable tourism sites in the country and generate hundreds of
millions of dollars in economic activity and investment, accounts for the intensity
of interest in Loliondo and the scale of the challenges facing village-level claims on
land and resources. The link between tourism investment and wildlife conserva-
tion continues to drive the steady expansion of state protected areas in Tanzania,
in a country where 30 per cent of the land is already set aside as exclusive national
parks, game reserves and forest reserves (Nelson et al, 2007). It is important to
highlight that in Loliondo, in contrast to global and national discourse on the
widespread adoption of decentralization, the policy and management trend is
overwhelmingly one of expanding state and external private control over land and
natural resources, and contracting local resource rights.

Diverse actors and shifting alliances

The actors attracted to Loliondo’s natural assets are diverse and form an ever-
shifting mosaic of competing and compatible interests, which result in equally
fluid alliances amongst different groups. Although today there is a clear and rela-
tively polarized conflict between central governmental authorities and villagers
with respect to land and wildlife use, the reality is far more complex than this state–
local tension. In the 1980s and much of the 1990s, local communities, their elected
leaders and state conservation agencies were common allies. The main threat to
both local land use and central conservation interests was the threat of agricultural
encroachment into Loliondo by external farming interests, as exemplified by the
TBL acquisition of Sukenya Farm and many similar land claims or requests made
during the mid-1980s. A donor-funded government conservation programme, the
Serengeti Regional Conservation Strategy, even assisted the villages to obtain title
deeds in the early 1990s to demarcate and secure their lands (Ojalammi, 2006).
The Serengeti National Park authorities, through their outreach efforts initiated in
the late 1980s, helped Ololosokwan village establish a campsite for tourists so that
the community could share in the ecosystem’s tourism revenues as an incentive to
conserve wildlife outside park boundaries.
It was only from 2000 onwards that the Ministry of Natural Resources and
Tourism asserted jurisdiction over tourism activities on village lands and declared
tourism carried out without official sanction to be illegal. The reason for this
shift was the increase in competition for access to valuable wildlife areas such as
Loliondo. By the end of the 1990s, the volume of tourism was rapidly increasing
throughout northern Tanzania. Holders of centrally-allocated hunting conces-
sions faced increasing incursions into ‘their’ areas from non-consumptive tourism
284 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

companies allied to villages through contractual access agreements. Companies

such as OBC in Loliondo began to demand that ministerial authorities prevent this
competition for access and use of these areas. This iterative negotiation between
ministerial authorities and local communities, and hunting operators and tourism
companies, continues to this day and has framed wildlife governance issues and
conflicts in northern Tanzania for the past decade (Nelson et al, 2007).
Villages have been allied with their business partners, the tourism companies,
but only because those companies depend on the villages for access to communi-
ties’ lands. In instances where tourism operations do not respect local land rights
and attempt to control lands through externally-rooted claims, most notably in the
case of the ongoing controversy surrounding Sukenya Farm, the conflicts between
tourism investors and local villages can be as intense and polarized as any others.
NGOs also exhibit diverse allegiances and interests, both supporting and inhib-
iting local interests and agency. The early debate over WMA implementation saw
the villages resisting pressure from the Frankfurt Zoological Society, which has a
long history of supporting state protected areas in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro
ecosystems, to accede to the government proposal (Nelson and Ole Makko,
2005). More recently, community efforts to project their voice into national policy
debates that impact their resource management practices have been supported by
Tanzanian and international NGOs with both natural resource conservation and
human rights orientations.

Framing legitimacy through ‘community-based conservation’

Despite the widely divergent interests evident in Loliondo in relation to land use,
wildlife governance and the flow of resource benefits, and the protracted conflicts
between many parties for access and control of these, it is highly notable that virtu-
ally all parties justify their actions with reference to practising ‘community-based
conservation’. Villagers and their local allies contend that traditional rangeland
management practices embody a form of indigenous ‘community-based conser-
vation’. Tourism companies involved in village-level contracts originally developed
those local agreements as a financial incentive for villages to maintain integrated
livestock and wildlife land uses and exclude agriculture, and thus defend their
arrangements as models of ‘community-based conservation’. Thomson Safaris,
while apparently engaged in a very different type of tourism venture that is not
based on supporting extant pastoralist land use practices, nevertheless portrays
the Sukenya Farm as ‘a community-based conservation area’ which ‘aims to
implement programs for habitat restoration, wildlife preservation, and community
empowerment’ (O’Kasick, n.d.). That the company can describe its activities as
‘community-based conservation’ even while its main interaction with surrounding
communities is characterized by rigorous law enforcement efforts leading to the
violent imprisonment of many community members, is indicative of both the
power and malleability of the set of ideas and imagery that comprise the contem-
porary ‘community-based conservation’ narrative.
Similarly, international NGOs and government wildlife authorities describe
WMAs as a framework for ‘community-based conservation’ even when the
communities themselves reject such a framework due to perceived incompatibility
 Pastoral Activists 285

with existing local resource governance systems. Ultimately each actor in Loliondo
seeks legitimacy for pursuing their own interests within the increasingly wide ambit
of ‘community-based conservation’, a concept which consequently has become as
starkly contested as the lands and resources themselves.

Local agency and collective action

The degree to which natural resource governance in Loliondo reflects local inter-
ests and values is largely a function of local agency in shaping both the physical
landscape and the discursive battle of ideas, and in resisting the impositions of
external interests. Such agency is in turn a function of the capacity for local collec-
tive action, meaning the ability of local groups to organize to influence resource
governance decisions made at different scales. As the various episodes recounted
here show, local collective action is enhanced and constrained by a range of factors
in Loliondo. Within communities, various forms of ethnic, gender or class division
can present barriers to collective action, but these may also be overcome through
focused efforts to strengthen local unity as the recent case of Soit Sambu village in
the Sukenya Farm conflict demonstrates.
The accountability of elected leaders in representing constituents’ interests is a
critical factor in enabling local collective action in pursuit of shared interests, and
is often highlighted as a key factor in the sustainability of decentralized natural
resource governance arrangements (e.g. Roe et al, 2009). Recent experiences
in Loliondo demonstrate the fluid and evolving nature of accountability in local
governance processes. In different villages the performance of elected governance
bodies waxes and wanes during different periods. For example, Soit Sambu village
has used the Sukenya Farm crisis as a rallying point to demand better performance
and representation from the Village Council and its Chairman. In neighbouring
Ololosokwan, by contrast, the past five years have witnessed a marked decline
in village government transparency and accountability in managing tourism
revenues, from what was previously a model example of accountable local deci-
sion-making (cf. Nelson, 2004). As a result, during the 2009 village government
elections the Ololosokwan villagers forced the previous Village Chairman, who
had voluntarily retired from service after his last term ended in 2004, back into
action as the Village Chairman during the current period of heightened conflict
over village lands and resources, in order to ‘rescue’ the community’s leadership
from the troubles of the past five years.
While local factors shape communities’ ability to organize and pursue shared
interests in important ways, the broader national and increasingly globalized
political and economic context also shapes local agency in both enabling and
disabling ways. The single most important political-economic trend influencing
resource governance patterns in Loliondo is the rapidly increasing commercial
demand and value attached to the Serengeti ecosystem in relation to the global
tourism market. In the 1990s the rise of community-based tourism ventures
empowered local communities by providing them with new forms of collective
and individual income through locally-controlled ventures, and achieved this
without displacing the communities’ established seasonal livestock grazing prac-
tices. This income could be translated into political capital, for example by using
286 Local Struggles and Negotiations across Multiple Scales

revenue to take legal action in defence of land claims. During the past decade,
however, the growing value of Loliondo as a tourism destination, combined with
its existing value as a tourist hunting concession, has transformed economic
opportunity into the growing threat of land and resource alienation. To draw on
a point made in much broader global and African contexts by Ribot (2004) and
Alden Wily (2008), respectively, Loliondo’s lands are gradually becoming ‘too
valuable to allow communities to own’, at least within the context of the current
manifestation of the Tanzanian state and its formal and informal development
policies and political-economic configurations. Tanzanian pastoralist commu-
nities today are thus politically marginalized as a result of their own resource
endowments.
At the same time, the increasingly globalized flow of information presents new
opportunities for local advocacy efforts. National and international media and
NGOs play an increasingly visible and effective role supporting local campaigns
and amplifying community-level voices. For example, international NGOs and
networks have played an instrumental role in enabling the Sukenya Farm dispute
to be presented before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination, which in turn has requested formal responses and actions
on the part of the Tanzanian government.6 The ability of communities to engage
with government policy-making processes has been substantially enhanced by the
increasing sophistication of Tanzanian NGOs, stronger NGO coalitions and better
links between NGOs and media bodies.
One final concluding point bears emphasizing. The strategies used by rural
communities in contesting resource tenure conflicts in northern Tanzania today
are diverse and range from informal forms of passive resistance, or as Scott (1985)
famously termed them, ‘weapons of the weak’, as well as sophisticated political
advocacy, lobbying, electoral campaigning, and legal challenges. Indeed, at times
it seems there is relatively little difference in form between the strategies employed
in such a remote rural locale in northern Tanzania, and those deployed in many
activist efforts in western developed nations. Perhaps a greater difference lies in
the democratic context such advocacy efforts take place within, although even this
is changing albeit in non-linear and unpredictable ways. One apparent change
that has occurred in Tanzania lies in the importance attached to formal electoral
processes. In the mid-1990s Pietilä et al (2002) could say of Loliondo that ‘the
elections themselves did not have much importance’ to community members’ lives
and livelihoods. This is clearly not the case today, at least with respect to village,
ward, district and parliamentary representatives. Elections are a focus of local
politics, campaigns and collective engagement, with the potential to create mean-
ingful change in the performance of elected officials and thus of local collective
action in relation to contested lands and resources. These elected representatives
are judged by their constituency in large part based on how well they represent
villagers’ land and resource claims and help prevent higher-level appropriations
from taking place. Struggles over natural resource governance lie at the centre
of democratic contests and these local democratic institutions and processes are
increasingly relevant and influential avenues as local communities organize to
pursue and defend their interests.
 Pastoral Activists 287

Notes
1 Unlike the other protected areas in the ecosystem, the NCA is a multiple-use area
allowing human residence.
2 www.ccafrica.com/destinations/tanzania/kleins/.
3 There was only one locale where the regulations were implemented, in the West
Kilimanjaro area, with the result being charges were brought against a tourism company
engaged in a contract with Sinya village. Eventually this operator was forced out of
the area, resulting in a loss of nearly $40,000 in annual income to Sinya village from
tourism access payments (Honey, 2008).
4 The former is a national coalition of over 2,000 member organizations and individuals
which works to improve accountability in natural resource governance and enhance
local benefits and participation, while the latter is an international conservation NGO
which has invested heavily in promoting community–private wildlife-based tourism
ventures in Tanzania and elsewhere in East Africa.
5 In the past, these sections have been the basis for wars fought between different Maasai
groups, as in the famous Iloikop wars of the mid-19th century when the Ilkisongo section
became dominant throughout north-central Tanzania and pushed other Maa-speaking
peoples to the fringes of the Maasai Steppe. While contemporary violence between
Maasai sections in northern Tanzania is rare, there are some disputes over land and
resource access between the different sections in Loliondo.
6 Letter sent 13 March 2009 from Fatimata-Binta Victoire Dah, Chairperson of the UN
Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination, to His Excellency Mr Marten
Lumbanga, Permanent Representative for Tanzania at the United Nations Office
at Geneva. Available at: www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/docs/early_warning/
Tanzania130309.pdf (Accessed 26 August 2009).

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 Part 4

Looking Forward
 13

A Changing Climate for Community

Resource Governance: Threats and
Opportunities from Climate Change
and the Emerging Carbon Market

Maxwell Gomera, Liz Rihoy and Fred Nelson

Introduction
Climate change is the defining environmental issue of the present era, both a
product and embodiment of the increasing interconnectivity of global economic,
technological and ecological processes falling under the rubric of ‘globalization’.
As a physical process, changes in the global climate present a wide and complex
range of ecological, social and economic implications. Climate change, along with
other different yet linked forms of ecosystem shifts such as deforestation, has
contributed to the growing integration of thinking about the environment and the
global economy. With climate change assuming the central position in the global
environmental discourse, transnational efforts to mitigate the impacts of green-
house gas (GHG) emissions are poised to reshape institutional arrangements for
natural resource governance at local, national and global scales. How this reshaping
takes place is, however, very much uncertain and contingent on ongoing negotia-
tions, changing narratives and discourses, and the ability of different groups of
people, and groups of nations, to influence efforts to regulate the global climate
‘commons’. What is clear, however, is that there are both major risks and opportu-
nities for local resource governance regimes in places such as sub-Saharan Africa,
and that the imperative to address global climate change is shifting the institutional
scale of environmental management to the transnational level, away from local and
even national concerns and controls.
In this chapter we highlight some of the ways in which global responses to
climate change provide potential opportunities and impetus for transforming
African agrarian economies, including local rural economies that have hitherto
remained marginalized from regional and global market-places. We note, however,
294 Looking Forward

that efforts to address climate change, particularly those that relate to land use
issues such as forest management, also have the potential to undermine commu-
nity rights and access to resources. Particularly important in the context of rural
Africa is the effort to incorporate global financing for forest conservation in devel-
oping countries into a post-Kyoto protocol under the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This integration of climate change
concerns with the problem of deforestation, through measures targeting so-called
Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), has
the potential to radically affect the distribution of costs and benefits in relation to
forest management in places such as sub-Saharan Africa. REDD aims to create
new markets for forest-based land uses by channelling resources to developing
nations experiencing high levels of deforestation, and, potentially, local forest-
dependent communities living amidst or along those frontiers of deforestation.
However, without clarity on land and natural resource rights and tenure, there
is a real and increasingly recognized danger that these policy and governance
responses to climate change will contribute to an emerging new ‘scramble for
Africa’ driven by the growing commercial value of rural landscapes for REDD as
well as the conversion of land for growing crops, to supply an expanding bio-fuels
markets, commercial agricultural investments and other natural resource uses.
The situation is further compounded by the characterization of the climate itself
as a ‘global commons’ with as yet unclear institutional structures to regulate access,
responsibilities and benefit streams related to it. Such threats are not unique to
Africa. Reports from the Amazon indicate that bio-fuel production, as one strategy
being advanced as a means to both secure energy supplies and reduce GHG
emissions, is threatening livelihoods of small farmers through displacement for
plantations and pollution of local water resources (Christian Aid, 2009). Bio-fuel
production has also emerged as a major concern in Africa in the context of weak
and contested local land rights and the growing commercial value of rural lands
(Cotula et al, 2008). Despite these growing threats, achieving stabilization of GHG
emissions and supporting the social and economic development of communities in
Africa is not a zero-sum game. Securing local rights to ecological infrastructure and
optimizing new production systems arising from climate change concerns – such
as new energy economies and technologies and ‘carbon farming’ – makes good
economic and developmental sense in many African settings (Stiglitz, 2006).
Much of the global debate on climate change focuses on the political negotia-
tions between developed and developing nations over the new climate governance
regime. However, beyond this arena of international negotiation is the reality that
any new climate-related policy and regulatory measures will be fundamentally
shaped, in their implementation and outcomes, by the institutional and political-
economic context of different national and local settings. Such local contexts will
shape the outcomes of developments such as transnational REDD payments or
bio-fuels investments, in relation to both the local winners and losers as well as the
ultimate impact such initiatives have in relation to their global environmental goals.
With reference to the highly contested arena of rural land tenure and resource
rights as documented by the cases presented in this volume, we highlight some of
the likely impacts of emerging climate governance regimes, as well as the impacts
of climate change itself in a biophysical sense. While many scientists and activists
 A Changing Climate for Community Resource Governance 295

are calling attention to the necessity of ensuring that the principal beneficiaries
of REDD are local communities who inhabit rural African landscapes, there is
a greater need to anticipate the institutional struggles that will inevitably emerge
as a result of the growth of the global carbon market and new ways of assigning
economic value to lands and land uses. There is a basic need for greater political
understanding of these dynamics if REDD and similar strategies are to avoid
a further marginalization of Africa’s rural poor. Drawing on the experiences of
community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), which in southern
Africa go back over three decades, is essential to designing and implementing
climate governance institutions that are able to achieve their aims.

Climate change in Africa:

Implications and adaptation
A fundamental reality in the 21st century is that the environment has assumed
an immense transformative influence over global economies. Climate change
and ecosystem degradation increasingly occupy public and scientific discourse.
Previous assumptions regarding the independence of economic growth and
development from ecosystem services are increasingly untenable. In 2007, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that the relation-
ship between global warming and human (economic) activity is ‘unequivocal’
(IPCC, 2007, p30). The IPCC also estimated that climate change mitigation will
cost the global economy about 0.1–0.2 per cent of gross world product (Ibid.).
Stern (2006) concludes, from an economic perspective, that climate change is the
greatest market failure the world has ever seen and the cost of mitigation today
would be around 1 per cent of gross world product.
The IPCC also predicts that climate change will result in discriminate effects –
with poor countries suffering the most. Africa, the continent that has contributed
the least to greenhouse gas emissions, is the most vulnerable but least prepared for
the challenges that climate change will bring. Food and water security, shelter and
livelihoods, environmental management and biodiversity conservation, the spread
of diseases and population migrations will all be adversely affected by climate
change (IPCC, 2007). Conversely Africa, the continent that is best positioned
to take advantage of renewable energy opportunities, is the one that to date has
recorded the least investment. In 2008, 20 per cent of global investments in energy
were in the renewable energy sector, but less than 5 per cent of the renewable
energy investments were in Africa (UNEP, 2008; Worldwatch Institute, 2009).
It is the poor who are the most vulnerable with the least ability to adapt. Climate
change is expected to compound the many development challenges already
confronting African people (Boko et al, 2007; see Box 13.1) and will constrain
Africa’s ability to achieve the poverty reduction and sustainable development
targets set out in the Millennium Development Goals. Many parts of Africa already
experience highly variable rainfall and other climatic extremes and, although
African communities have developed coping strategies to deal with this variability,
these are likely to fall short of what is required to deal with the impacts of climate
change. Climate change will likely increase conflicts over resources such as water,
296 Looking Forward

Box 13.1 Key predicted climate change impacts in Africa

• 75–250 million people will experience greater water stress by 2020
• Rain-fed agricultural yields could be reduced by up to 50% by 2020 in some
countries
• 10–30% reduction in average river run-off and water availability by mid-century
• Drought affected areas will increase in extent
• Increased risk of extreme weather events leading to natural disasters such as
floods
• Changes in ecosystem structure and loss of biodiversity
• Human health deteriorates as vector-borne diseases spread.
Source: Boko et al, 2007

rangelands and forests, and will place new stresses on the local and national insti-
tutions that mediate those conflicts.
The ability of African institutions (especially local institutions) and people to
adapt to climate change impacts is limited by widespread poverty, fragile ecosys-
tems, weak rights and attitudinal and knowledge barriers within and between
government agencies, political representatives and local communities. Persistent
centralized control over land and resource tenure in particular acts as a major
constraint to local efforts to craft adaptive resource governance regimes that can
enhance resilience in the face of changing environmental conditions. Despite the
serious implications, there is relatively little emphasis on climate security coming
from African governments and civil society.

Correcting global environmental market failures

As noted by the Stern (2006) review, climate change fundamentally represents
a failure of global economic markets to account for the externalities of industrial
production, and is part of a broader set of interrelated environmental market fail-
ures. For example, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment comprehensively docu-
ments the extent of global ecosystem degradation and associated environmental
and socio-economic losses (MEA, 2005). It concludes that human activity has
changed the world’s ecosystems, for the worse, more rapidly and extensively in the
last 50 years than at any other time in recorded history (Ibid., p1).The report meas-
ures the effect of such losses on national economies – concluding that 39 countries
have experienced a decline of 5 per cent or more in net wealth once unsustainable
forest harvesting, depletion of non-renewable mineral and energy resources and
damage from carbon emissions are taken into account, and 10 countries recorded
a decline of up to 60 per cent (see also Worldwatch Institute, 2008). The MEA
thus highlights how the supply of ecosystem services, in all their constituents –
material sufficiency, health, good social relations, security and freedom of choice
and action – is now a key driver of economies and the degradation of ecosystems
represents a barrier to achieving developmental goals.
 A Changing Climate for Community Resource Governance 297

This emerging reality about our ecosystems demonstrates that conservation is

essential for sustaining economic success, particularly in the context of Africa’s
agrarian and resource-dependent communities and national economies (see
Nelson, this volume, Chapter 1). The climate change issue is thus not only about
negotiating an unfolding environmental crisis, but encompasses an economic,
developmental and policy agenda informed by science that requires restructuring
global markets to take account of and internalize GHG emissions and other envi-
ronmental impacts. The ultimate imperative of climate change interventions is to
fundamentally reform global markets and engender new forms of economic inter-
action and accounting for growth and wealth. Central to this process are new
markets and market concepts which are emerging as older conventions are being
transformed. Payments for ecosystem services (PES), based on the conditional
remuneration for ecological assets, goods and services, has emerged as a way to
create viable market signals for the production of economically valuable ecosystem
services (Engel et al, 2008). PES initiatives have assumed centre stage as a poten-
tially critical opportunity for developed countries to pay substantial volumes of
money to developing countries for maintenance of ecological services and assets
valued at the global scale.
PES concepts and frameworks are central to efforts to develop global markets in
carbon that assign a cost to carbon emissions and a value to emission reductions,
and mechanisms for exchange between buyers and sellers of those reductions.
Only a decade ago the carbon market did not exist, but recent years have witnessed
a growth in its value from US$11 billion in 2005, US$30 billion in 2006 to US$64
billion in 2007 (Capoor and Ambrosi, 2008), providing a dramatic example
of how new environmental markets and PES arrangements can be created. In
comparison, net Overseas Development Aid (ODA) to Africa in 2007 amounted
to only US$38.7 billion (African Economic Outlook, 2009).
Carbon markets exist because of regulatory requirements under the Kyoto
Protocol or the voluntary desire of individuals, companies or governments to reduce
their carbon emissions. Carbon markets involve three major market segments:

1 the compliance market, which includes the Clean Development Mechanism

(CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol;
2 other compliance or pre-compliance markets such as emissions trading plat-
forms created by national-level legislation;
3 the voluntary carbon market which mainly trades in emissions reductions that
cannot be traded in the compliance markets.

Notably, the latter includes many emission reductions generated by forestry or

land use activities since REDD was not allowed under the CDM.
Even more novel market concepts and production systems have emerged
largely in response to climate stress. For example, ‘carbon farming’ – the notion
that farmers can be paid for storing increased amounts of carbon by maintaining
agricultural practices and certain plant species which sequester carbon on their
farms – is gaining momentum. Carbon farming can also potentially have high
levels of co-benefits such as improved organic content in the soil and improved
agricultural productivity.
298 Looking Forward

Climate change and the globalization of governance

Climate change is part of a broader discussion about global economic govern-
ance that includes trade rules, security interests and international financial regu-
lation. Just as growing patterns of transnational commerce and financial flows
create both threats and opportunities for African economies, given their place in
the global economic ‘order’ (Ferguson, 2006), a key question for climate change
is how global and national responses can contribute to the economic options of
developing countries. Tensions between protecting local or national interests and
being a ‘good’ global citizen also abound, as fundamental debates between coun-
tries such as India and China on the one hand, and western countries on the
other, suggest. Such tensions can play out in ways that challenge democratic and
local rights. Within the context of climate change discussions in today’s globalized
world, democratic societies are often portrayed as a democratic ‘society of organ-
izations’ rather than of individuals, with politics more than ever a struggle for
power over organized political and social agents.
Climate change discussions are also attracting a new range of global stakeholders
and interest groups to environmental management issues, some seeking to imagine
new patterns of social and political organization under conditions of global inter-
connectedness, and others with interests and goals that conflict with those of local
peoples. The urgency associated with climate change results in discussions taking
place and decisions being made in fora where the interests of rural communities
tend to go unrepresented; and at speeds and with commitments that do not reflect
local realities. This dynamic is introducing potential threats, from what are noble
intentions, to poor people’s livelihoods.
In 2008, the global economy fell into three crises often characterized as the most
significant since the Great Depression of the 1930s. These comprise a financial
crisis, fermented in the American sub-prime mortgage securities market; a fuel
crisis, reflected in the large fluctuations of the price for crude oil; and a food crisis,
reflected in the increase in the prices of grains in many parts of the world. These
crises have underscored the extent to which the global economy has underin-
vested in assets that bring value to society at large and especially how vulnerable
poor countries and communities are to sudden shocks occurring at global scales
and over which most people have little or no influence.
Meanwhile, underinvestment in shared assets fundamental to society – a stable
climate, biodiversity, productive soil, cleaner air and water, renewable energy
sources, waste management capacity, among others – threatens poor countries
and constituent local communities. Estimates suggest that investments on the
order of US$1 trillion can stop greenhouse gas emissions from rising to dangerous
levels, while at the time of writing global fiscal stimulus packages totalling around
US$3 trillion had been proposed or implemented to stimulate the economy and
restore jobs (Jowit and Wintour, 2008). The decisions over such future economic
regimes and regulatory mechanisms do not seem to be explicitly taking account of
poor people’s needs and run the risk of creating in developing countries economic
systems that consume capital, create unacceptable climate threats, perpetuate
extreme poverty and which are inherently unstable.
 A Changing Climate for Community Resource Governance 299

The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s ushered in nearly two decades of
economic globalization. The climate and ecosystems crisis and the recent global
financial crisis create growing demands to address governance challenges whose
origins and solutions lie beyond the boundaries of the nation state. Political insti-
tutions at local and national scales are gradually becoming less relevant, and this
trend seems set to continue well into the future.

Local tenure and global commons: Community

resource rights and climate change
As the cases in this volume detail, the contested status of communally held lands
and resources is central to many existing social and political conflicts in African
countries (Alden Wily, 2008). For the past century or more, most land has been
managed as state property (public land), as a result of the historic appropriation
of rights over land by colonial governments, and the general retention of central-
ized land ownership by independent African governments (see Murombedzi, this
volume). The result is that the ecological assets and infrastructure that support
rural communities’ livelihoods are often legally and practically contested, subject
to competing claims pursued in settings where the rule of law often does not serve
to peacefully mediate such conflicts. This situation favours groups able to rapidly
mobilize resources, and effectively facilitates the continued alienation of resources
to non-local actors with access to power and money. In this context, insecure and
contested land and resource tenure in African countries prevents local groups from
capitalizing on natural resource wealth to develop their economies and also under-
mines incentives for conservation at the local level (USAID, 2004). This problem
is not confined to Africa; globally, up to 2 billion people depend on customarily
managed lands but lack recognized rights to these areas, and at least two-thirds
of all the current conflicts throughout the world are driven in part by contested
claims to land (Alden Wily, 2008; see Nelson, this volume, Chapter 1).
Development and conservation problems linked to insecure resource tenure
and property rights are also central to the likely impacts of efforts to mitigate
the impacts of climate change in African counties (Cotula and Mayers, 2009).
It is through increased exploitation of local communities’ institutional weak-
nesses and marginal tenurial position that global responses to climate change may
pose a significant threat to the livelihoods of rural Africans. Many of the policy
responses being developed to address climate change will give significant new
economic value to land and natural resources, particularly forests. Such values will
be further enhanced by increasing global demand for food, fibre and bio-energy.
As the case studies in this volume demonstrate, governments and private compa-
nies already have multiple incentives to take advantage of insecure local resource
rights and weak frameworks for enforcement in rural areas to lay claim to lands
and resources on which the poor depend for their livelihoods. These incentives
will almost certainly significantly grow over the next several decades. The outcome
may be that rural communities will lose access to their main capital asset – land –
pushing millions of people further into poverty and conflict.
300 Looking Forward

CBNRM and the centrality of local resource tenure

Over the last 30 years, community-based natural resource management (CBNRM)
initiatives in southern Africa have effectively demonstrated that sustainable utiliza-
tion of natural resources based on local management and governance regimes can
be the most economically, socially and environmentally sustainable form of land use
in arid and semi-arid lands (Roe et al, 2009). CBNRM is an approach to conser-
vation and development that recognizes the rights of local people to manage and
benefit from their natural resources. Valuable lessons have been learned relating to
the sustainable governance of the natural resource base in a wide range of biophys-
ical and socio-economic settings. Foremost amongst these lessons is that sustain-
able natural resource management depends on appropriate forms of devolution or
decentralization of control over natural resources to local users (Murphree, 1993;
Roe et al, 2009). This requires local governance institutions that are representative
of and accountable to a local constituency but which also have vertical and hori-
zontal linkages to institutions at higher scales (Murphree, 2000). Equally important
is that legally recognized ownership rights be vested with those locally representa-
tive institutions to ensure appropriate incentives are in place for sustainable use.
The experiences of CBNRM in southern Africa also reflect broader findings
about collective resource governance regimes and sustainable use of natural
resources throughout the world. For example, research carried out over the past
20 years increasingly documents the importance of local rights to make and
enforce rules governing use in relation to sustaining forest cover and produc-
tivity (Ostrom and Nagendra, 2006). This emerging body of knowledge has led to
issues surrounding local rights and tenure coming to play a central role in global
forest conservation efforts, and by extension initiatives to reverse deforestation as
a component of global carbon emission reductions (Agrawal et al, 2008; Sunderlin
et al, 2008; Cotula and Mayers, 2009).
CBNRM is fundamentally premised on the assumption that the ability of local
groups of people to manage resources sustainably is linked to institutional arrange-
ments that confer rights over resources to these groups. But, as is highlighted over
and over again throughout this volume, such rights over land and natural resources
are subject to contests and trade-offs between the various interest groups which
struggle to gain control of these resources. The result of these contestations, both
globally and particularly within African countries, has often been the failure by
communities to secure legally recognized rights (see also Ribot, 2004; Roe et al,
2009). For example, Sunderlin et al (2008) found that despite a continued transi-
tion towards recognizing local forest land access and ownership, only a few of the
30 most forested countries in the tropics (mostly in Latin America) have made
significant changes in community forest tenure since an earlier 2002 study (cf.
White and Martin, 2002). The chapters in this book highlight how multi­faceted
political and commercial interests, in the context of broader global political-
economic and institutional factors, limit the ability of rural communities across
the region to secure rights over resources. As noted in the previous section, the
vested interests of these state and non-state actors are poised to grow in their scale
and influence as greater economic values and a host of new competing interests
are introduced as a result of global responses to climate change.
 A Changing Climate for Community Resource Governance 301

The natural resource and development problems facing southern African coun-
tries in the 1980s and early 1990s, and which gave rise to local formulations of
CBNRM, were generally amenable to localized solutions. Indeed, many innovative
southern African experiments with devolved natural resource governance arose
within a context of relative regional and international isolation for countries such
as South Africa, Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) and Namibia (then South
West Africa) (see Suich et al, 2008). Within this context, environmental govern-
ance tended to focus on ‘cleaning up’ localized problems, developing and commer-
cializing wild resources as complementary sources of income to agriculture. In the
1990s, with increasing value of wildlife enterprises such as sport hunting, ‘farming’
of wild species, photographic safaris and community-based tourism, wildlife
emerged as a major source of transnational commerce. The apparent success of
CBNRM experiments in Zimbabwe and other CBNRM programmes in southern
Africa made wild species more valuable to communities as well as at the national
scale. It was at that point that environmental governance began to attract interests
broader than local communities and national agencies. International instruments
such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)
became major concerns to regional wildlife enterprises and communities, as global
interests in how wildlife was used in other countries emerged to challenge national
programmes and their constituent local resource management regimes (Hutton
and Dickson, 2000).
Today, global processes such as climate change are transforming what it means
to be a ‘local community’ in today’s increasingly complex world and expanding
the suite of global claimants on local resources. On the one hand, this increasing
globalization of environmental conservation would seem to be pulling the locus
of resource governance away from the type of localized regimes that southern
African CBNRM models have worked to promote. At the same time, though, it is
increasingly clear that local incentives, rights and responsibilities are fundamental
to sustainable natural resource governance and thus to the effectiveness of any
new global regimes designed to maintain resources such as forests (RRI, 2008).
We now explore this somewhat paradoxical interaction between global environ-
mental governance aims and local management regimes in relation to efforts to
design a framework for REDD.

REDD regimes: Threat or opportunity?

Forest conservation, and particularly issues surrounding tropical deforestation, has
returned to centre stage globally because of the link between forests and climate
change. Forests are relevant to both mitigation and adaptation dimensions of the
climate issue, but are assuming increasing importance as a component of emis-
sion reduction efforts because of the reality that GHG emissions from land use
changes (mainly deforestation) account for approximately 17 per cent of the total
global emissions, second only to the energy supply sector whose total proportion
is 25.9 per cent (IPCC, 2007). Therefore maintaining and protecting forests and
using wood from sustainably harvested forests is an important way of reducing
one of the main anthropogenic emissions of carbon to the atmosphere.
302 Looking Forward

Forestry is recognized along with other human-induced land use change activi-
ties in the Kyoto Protocol, and the CDM provides for developed nations to buy
emission reduction credits from developing nations from afforestation or refor-
estation projects. Avoided deforestation was however not included in the Kyoto
Protocol; nor is REDD allowed under existing national and/or regional mechanisms
such as the European Union Emission Trading Scheme. The exclusion of avoided
deforestation from the Kyoto regime served to exclude one of the major sources
of global carbon emissions, and at the 13th UNFCCC Conference of Parties held
in December 2007, in Bali, Indonesia, a general agreement was reached to include
REDD activities in the post-Kyoto UNFCCC protocol (Angelsen, 2008).
Despite this general consensus, debate continues to revolve around REDD
including a wide range of general and specific issues. Divergent opinions include
those arguing that REDD would be difficult to monitor or operationalize in a way
that creates viable permanent reductions in carbon emissions without creating
perverse incentives amongst countries that have historically low levels of defor-
estation, to those who believe that avoiding dangerous levels of climate change
would be virtually impossible without an efficient mechanism to contain and
reduce forest emissions. For the former group REDD is difficult to consider in
international and national instruments due to issues such as the permanence of
forest-based reductions, leakage of emissions from one site to another site, and
governance challenges. Proponents of REDD agree that these issues pose diffi-
culty and need creative solutions but are not in themselves sufficient for excluding
REDD in a post-Kyoto climate agreement (see Angelsen, 2008).

Local communities and REDD

Under a post-Kyoto REDD regime, it is anticipated that developing nations will
be paid for the opportunity costs of protecting forests and ecological restoration
of natural forests in order to store more carbon and reduce net carbon emissions.
Much of the discourse surrounding REDD focuses on technical design issues
such as monitoring and verification of changes in forest cover, establishing base-
line rates of deforestation and the scope and structure of payments (Angelsen,
2008). Forest governance issues are also increasingly recognized as critical to any
operational effectiveness of REDD, with Bond et al (2009, p20) noting that:

The successful implementation of an international REDD scheme depends upon

the will and ability of states to govern their forests effectively. There is a well-estab-
lished consensus that failures of governance are underlying causes of deforestation
and degradation…

As such, ongoing negotiations over REDD design include many critical elements
relating to broader local rights, tenure and governance similar to those that
CBNRM initiatives in southern Africa have faced over the last several decades.
For example, the poor reputation of forest-related projects under the CDM has
been linked to the issue of the uncertainty over longevity of forests. Unlike other
forms of climate change mitigation, carbon stored in forests is non-permanent in
that sooner or later, the sequestered carbon will be released into the atmosphere.
 A Changing Climate for Community Resource Governance 303

In the case of forests this could be because of weak governance structures and
accompanying risks of changes in carbon stocks (Engel and Palmer, 2008;
UNEP, 2008).
In addition to broader recognition of the need for effective forest governance
institutions, some observers highlight the key role that local forest governance
regimes must play in order for a global REDD regime to succeed. For example,
Robledo et al (2009) conclude that ‘forest (and carbon) tenure and user rights
need to be in favour of local stakeholders if forest resources are to be used for
addressing climate change.’ The recognition that local forest governance regimes
must provide part of the foundation for effective REDD in developing coun-
tries stems from two basic realities. First, an increasing area of forest, particularly
in tropical developing nations, is falling under local jurisdictions (Agrawal et al,
2008). Estimates suggest that 420 million hectares of forests around the world
are now locally owned and managed – nearly as much as the amount of forest
enclosed within state-protected areas – and that based on current trends about
half of all forests in developing countries will be managed by communities within
the next decade (White and Martin, 2002; Molnar et al, 2004; see also Sunderlin
et al, 2008). Local communities are thus now increasingly in charge of the forest
estate that could form a significant proportion of a REDD regime.
A second critical factor in relation to linkages between global REDD objec-
tives and local forest tenure is the reality that local groups’ increasing share of the
world’s forests is partly a function of communities’ ability to manage forests more
sustainably than public state agencies. State forestry departments often perform
poorly in terms of sustaining notionally protected forests as a result of weak incen-
tives and capacity, particularly in African countries. Such governance problems,
where resource rights are domiciled with organizations that have little to do with
day-to-day management of forests, compound REDD design challenges involving
leakage, monitoring and risks of over-harvesting. Local ability to set and enforce
rules governing forest use is a key factor determining changes in forest condi-
tion in a range of circumstances (Hayes, 2006; Chhatre and Agrawal, 2008). In
places as diverse as Mexico, Nepal and Tanzania, enabling local communities to
secure rights over forest use and exploitation has been the key to forest recoveries
and more sustainable institutional arrangements (Ostrom and Nagendra, 2006;
Sunderlin et al, 2008). This growing body of findings suggests that without situ-
ating issues of tenure and forest rights at the centre of the emerging REDD regime,
the objectives of REDD payments in relation to forests and climate change will
not be attainable (Bond et al, 2009; Cotula and Mayers, 2009).

Carbon claims: The potential for growth and conflicts

under REDD
REDD provides a major opportunity to link global financial flows and environ-
mental priorities with rural African landholders in a virtually unprecedented
manner. Carbon markets are potentially a frontier opportunity that will enable
local communities to participate more in the regional and global economies.
REDD provides an opportunity for the North to pay ‘proper money’ to the South
to maintain forests and for rural African communities to obtain economic benefits
304 Looking Forward

from the ecosystem services that they are best situated to produce. The financial
potential of these ecosystem products is staggering. Eliasch (2008, p213) suggests
that ‘if deforestation is to be halved by 2020, additional public/private finance of
US$11–19 billion a year may be required.’
The Norwegian government recently made available US$2.5 billion for
capacity-building for ‘REDD readiness’, including approximately US$100 million
for Tanzania over the next five years. The World Bank has also set aside a US$300
million Forest Carbon Partnership Facility to catalyse the REDD market, while
the African Development Bank has set up a Congo Basin Forest Fund to support
REDD-related initiatives in the Congo Basin. The United Nations recently set up
a REDD programme to support REDD initiatives. These are just the beginning
of such initiatives.
REDD therefore represents an opportunity to introduce payments for global
ecosystem services on a massive scale. But the crucial question underlying the
sustainability, impact and effectiveness of REDD revenues is: who will be the
beneficiaries of such payments (Robledo et al, 2009)? There is widespread
concern, particularly amongst local activists and indigenous groups, that REDD
might benefit those engaged in logging activities and exclude forest communities
(e.g. Rai, 2009).
As described in the previous section, it is increasingly clear that forest govern-
ance in general, and local property rights and resource tenure in particular, are
essential for a workable REDD framework that links global, national and local
interests and actions. This creates a potentially important paradox for REDD,
one which is eminently familiar to CBNRM practitioners in southern Africa (e.g.
Murphree, 2000; see also Nelson and Agrawal, 2008).
Operationalizing REDD requires clarifying and in some instances securing
rights over land, forests, and carbon production, so that rewards (payments) for
producing forests and carbon can be effectively channelled to producers. For local
producers to obtain financial rewards that translate into incentives for conserving
forests, they need to be able to capture benefit flows as well as to control the forests
themselves. As Bond et al (2009, p21) note, ‘without clear land and carbon rights
the local co-benefits that could help ensure the permanence of forest emission
reductions are unlikely to be realised.’
However, by introducing new forms of financial benefits and economic values
which may be derived from the control of forests, and the carbon those forests
store, revenues generated under REDD stand to generate claims over forests that
will compete with the claims of local communities. As many CBNRM experiences
in Africa have demonstrated (Roe et al, 2009), as natural resources become more
commercially valuable they may attract a wider set of competing actors with incen-
tives to ‘capture’ those resources. The chapters in this volume amply demonstrate
that natural resource governance outcomes are subject to political competition
and linked to the relative powers of different groups or individuals to impose their
preferences on others. Local communities in African polities are often constrained
by a range of structural political, organizational, and informational factors in their
ability to secure rights over such contested resources.
Even in countries that have reformed natural resource tenure, the granting of
local rights has not guaranteed effective local control. As Rihoy and Maguranyanga
 A Changing Climate for Community Resource Governance 305

(this volume) illustrate, in Botswana the government has backtracked on guaran-

teeing access rights to local communities by recentralizing control over natural
resources, in this case wildlife. Whilst in Zimbabwe, the government is failing to
prevent illegal incursions into communal areas. What is clear is that even where
the government may be willing to recognize community rights, political imper-
atives and the interests of the economic élite, as well as technical constraints,
hinder progress.
Ultimately whilst REDD aims to link carbon emission reductions, forest conser-
vation and poverty reduction, it is poised to increase competition over control of
Africa’s forests and landscapes in a context where local communities’ claims are
often easily marginalized. REDD may thus contribute to turning low-value real
estate of the rural poor into the high-value property of the rich. While global envi-
ronmental interests are premised on the ability of REDD revenues to translate into
reductions in local and regional deforestation, political élites in neo-patrimonial
governance systems will likely attempt to capture these revenue flows and use
them to pursue private political and economic interests. It is these private polit-
ical interests, as well as bureaucratic interests in using REDD funds to expand
authority and resources, that will drive the claims of non-local parties on REDD
funds and the forests that they are linked to.
Recognizing and securing rights to land and other natural resources, strength-
ening civil rights and strengthening democratic governance systems will be critical
to ensuring that this scenario does not unfold and that REDD can be effectively
linked to incentives for conserving forests at multiple scales of society (Bond et
al, 2009). This will need to involve mechanisms to ensure that space is created to
enable the voices and perspectives of local people to be addressed. The provision
of stronger tenurial rights will be foremost amongst mechanisms to achieve this,
but as noted above, will be largely incompatible with the interests of many govern-
ment decision-makers. REDD will thus create incentives in the political realm
which may work to undermine its operational objectives and principles.
This paradox is deeply reminiscent of African experiences with CBNRM,
which as amply demonstrated throughout this volume, has struggled with similar
political-economic dynamics. CBNRM initiatives have struggled with these issues
– access and rights, governance, equity, market access and securing involvement
of smallholders in policy negotiations – for some 30 years. And whilst it would not
be true to claim that solutions have been found, there is now a wealth of invalu-
able implementation experience that it is imperative is fed into and used to inform
global and national processes. The governance challenges facing REDD are thus
largely ‘new wine in an old bottle’. Enthusiasm for REDD and PES approaches
more broadly should perhaps be tempered with the knowledge that prior inter-
national interventions to support forest conservation have had limited impacts in
reducing forest loss and degradation (RRI, 2008). This has mainly been due to
ineffective or insufficient efforts to strengthen human rights, clarify resource rights
and encourage the transparency and accountability necessary for equitable markets
and governance arrangements to develop. Pervasive poverty, corruption and social
tension not only have generated violent conflict and a concentration of forest
wealth, but also create a situation where new, additional investments risk catalysing
new discord and conflict unless they are carefully and equitably targeted.
306 Looking Forward

States as brokers of local rights

Eliasch (2008) highlights the strong role that national governments should and
can play in brokering equitable and effective regimes for REDD. There are three
basic roles played by African states in REDD negotiations and implementation.
The first one is in the international negotiations for REDD, and ensuring that the
agreement for a post-Kyoto climate protocol reflects citizens’ interests. Second is
the extent to which the state can act as a broker between interests at national level,
including creating strong incentives for local participation and accountability.
The final role relates to the ability of the state to attract appropriate international
financing.
In all three areas, many African states are in a profoundly weak position. The
examples provided in this volume of natural resource governance dynamics in
eastern and southern African countries all clearly indicate that despite rhetoric
to the contrary, none of these countries, with the possible notable exception of
Namibia, are expanding the space for citizen participation in natural resource
management, and nor do these states have the means to inform and facilitate such
a process. As Pocock (1992) remarked, ‘equality is something of which only a few
are capable’, and certainly equal participation has remained an idealistic notion
in most of post-colonial southern Africa rather than an operational democratic
principle. Neither is there evidence that the countries in the region are playing an
active role in international policy debates, with the exception of South Africa. As
a result, the state in southern Africa is likely to be a net consumer of global policy
prescriptions. The end result will be that the state, and by extension, its citizens
and local communities, will once again lose out.
Second, most states in southern Africa are unlikely to be able to broker equi-
table outcomes. Again, there is ample evidence provided in the preceding chapters
that in many states, such as Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Tanzania, it is in the
instrumental interests of centralized policy-makers to retain authority over natural
resources and limit decentralization. In others countries, such as Mozambique
and Botswana, it is in the economic interests of the political élite to ensure the
contraction of space for communities to extend rights over resources. But in many
cases, even if states’ interests and incentives were different, they do not have the
capacity to prepare themselves for entry into schemes such as REDD without
substantial and strategic forms of external support.
Finally, the capacity of countries in southern Africa to mobilize appropriate
financial resources and ensure that those resources are responding to actual
local needs is limited. Transnational forces are increasingly challenging the tradi-
tional concepts of the state and the rights and duties of citizens within a country
(Ferguson, 2006). National borders are increasingly irrelevant to today’s crises
and emergent forms of global political organization. Technological changes such
as high-speed internet which increasingly includes various communications media
(e.g. audio and video calls and conferencing) render state boundaries, and the
political controls that underpin them, increasingly obsolete. The growing impor-
tance of transnational capital flows suggests an emerging shift in power from
elected governments to private shareholders. Governments now control a progres-
sively lesser proportion of ODA funds than private and market-based mechanisms
such as the CDM.
 A Changing Climate for Community Resource Governance 307

Conclusion
Climate change, in its biophysical, social, economic and institutional dimensions is
poised to exert an immense transformative influence on African societies. For local
communities in rural African landscapes, they will be impacted in manifold ways
and will be forced to adapt to climatic changes according to the financial, human
and natural resources at their disposal. Adaptation clearly depends largely on local
responses in concert with national and global actors and forms of support, and in
many respects the adaptation agenda for rural people is almost indistinguishable
from southern African regional CBNRM approaches of the 1980s and 1990s,
although adaptation demands a more holistic approach than the often sectorally
parochial CBNRM programmes (Murombedzi, 2008).
Mitigation efforts also have a strong link to local resource governance regimes,
primarily through the emerging mechanism of REDD payments designed to stem
deforestation. REDD is unlikely to succeed unless there is a renewed commitment
to securing the rights of local communities to lands and forests, and conservation
strategies that fail to recognize the importance of local interests in forests undermine
the types of long-term local incentives that resource stewardship depends on. At the
same time, REDD will enhance the commercial and financial value of forests in rural
Africa, and is likely to attract a wide range of new public and private claimants. This
trend is already emergent across much of Africa as a result of interest in securing land
for bio-fuels (Cotula et al, 2008), and carbon markets are likely to further catalyse this
contemporary ‘scramble for Africa’. This presents a paradox for REDD: effectively
combating the impacts of climate change requires strengthening of local resource
rights so that communities can capture benefits from those resources, but the greater
those benefits become the more contested those resource rights are likely to become.
Ultimately climate change, even while shifting the locus of debate and govern-
ance to the global scale, is re-emphasizing the centrality of local resource rights
and tenure. Just when community-based resource governance regimes seemed
destined for obsolescence in the age of globalization, local institutions have
become essential to piecing together, from the ground up, effective conservation
measures that can help sustain the climate ‘commons’. As such, the climate change
adaptation and mitigation agenda presents a new opportunity for making greater
progress in terms of decentralizing local rights over resources.

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 14

Democratizing Natural Resource

Governance: Searching for
Institutional Change

Fred Nelson

The aim and focus of this volume has been on examining the ways that institutional
arrangements for governing natural resources have been negotiated in different
African states, across various scales of both society and time. The cases highlight
the political dimensions of natural resource use and governance processes and
how resource management outcomes are related to political and economic inter-
ests amongst particular groups or organizations. The motivation for assembling
these cases has been a practical one: to use comparisons across cases to generate
an improved understanding of how and why natural resource governance reform
efforts play out the way that they do, and to contribute to the development of more
effective strategies for influencing institutional changes which empower local
people to secure their livelihoods, lands and environmental assets. This concluding
chapter attempts to synthesize the key outcomes and patterns from across the
cases in order to capture key lessons and contribute towards more effective reform
efforts in the future.
Several key conclusions emerge. First, although patterns of institutional change
and governance reform are variable and non-linear in nature, the general trend
within eastern and southern Africa is towards reconsolidating central authority
over natural resources and consequently eroding or subverting existing local claims
and rights. This stands in marked contrast to the prevalent narratives of decentrali-
zation and devolution that spread across the region in the 1990s, and the expecta-
tions of further democratization in relation to natural resource governance.
Second, the causes of recentralization across different countries varies, but in all
cases is linked to broader macro-political and macro-economic dynamics within
states and regions. In some cases commercial patterns of investment in tourism
and wildlife utilization have fuelled efforts by central agencies and political élites to
strengthen control over lands and wildlife use. In other countries, notably Kenya
and Botswana, the interplay of particular ideological interests or policy discourses
 Democratizing Natural Resource Governance 311

with political interests and structures has driven recentralization and the margin-
alization of local interests. In all cases, however, it is the continuing concentration
of political authority in the executive branch of the state that effectively domi-
nates policy processes and governance decisions. The current dynamic of recen-
tralizing control over natural resources is thus linked to and reflective of broader
political patterns in African countries. This suggests that natural resource govern-
ance trends at local and national levels may be symptomatic of a wider erosion
or reversal of democratic governance in Africa at present as a result of various
national, regional and global forces. The limitations of decentralization in natural
resource governance reform mirror wider dynamics in relation to African govern-
ance. The chapter also briefly discusses these African governance dynamics in a
broader comparative global context in relation to natural resource decentralization
and institutional change in Latin America and Asia.
The chapter’s final section builds on the analysis of the volume’s contents to
develop some strategic recommendations for facilitating more effectively efforts at
natural resource governance reform in African countries. Current trends highlight
the urgency of rethinking existing modes of external support, revisiting assump-
tions about reform processes, and priorities for further research. New strategies
that build collaborative organizations and processes informed by deep and up-to-
date knowledge of the formal and informal political dimensions of natural resource
policy and governance are urgently needed. Reform efforts themselves should be
treated as experiments in adaptive management, with impacts in relation to objec-
tives constantly evaluated and revised in a cyclical process that generates knowl-
edge which feeds back into collective action processes. Ultimately, developing
more resilient, adaptive and decentralized natural resource governance arrange-
ments in African countries is largely contingent on changing the evolving relation-
ship between states and citizens in ways that promote greater accountability from
central to local actors.

Decentralization or recentralization?
Earlier analyses of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM)
evolutions in eastern and southern Africa highlight the non-linear and unpredict-
able nature of local resource governance changes, in their various social and insti-
tutional dimensions (e.g. Alden Wily and Mbaya, 2001; Hulme and Murphree,
2001; Fabricius et al, 2004a). Natural resource governance regimes are constantly
being negotiated by different parties with competing or complementary interests,
and as the balance of power within society shifts to favour one group or another,
so too do opportunities to access, use, control and conserve resources.
These shifts and oscillations are evident from local to national levels, and occur
both gradually and suddenly. Indeed, a major challenge for a number of the contrib-
utors to cases in this book has been to ensure that changes in local resource govern-
ance dynamics are adequately captured, so that the published analysis accurately
reflects the evolving situation on the ground. This is particularly notable in the case
of Zimbabwe, where local and national political configurations have been in a near-
constant state of flux and uncertainty in recent years (Rihoy et al, this volume).
312 Looking Forward

Despite recognizing that patterns of change are non-linear, many reviews

of natural resource governance carried out since the early 1990s, both in
Africa and globally, generally describe existing dynamics as trending towards
greater local participation and empowerment in relation to tenure and deci-
sion-making. For example, Fabricius et al (2004b, p281) conclude assuredly,
with specific reference to southern Africa, that ‘Governments and donors have
embarked on a process of devolution and democratization of natural resources
from which there is no turning back’. Alden Wily (2000, p1) similarly invokes
a narrative of inevitable democratization of governance configurations across
the region:

The new millennium is witnessing evidence of a social and political watershed in

Africa, and one which is marked by a potent alteration in the relations between
government and people. Through one mechanism or another, ordinary citizens are
beginning to play a greater part in the management of society and its resources.
The change is uneven, hesitant, contentious and contradictory, but nevertheless
underway in a fundamental and unstoppable fashion.

At a global scale, Snyder (2001, p93) claimed roughly a decade ago that ‘we live
an age of decentralization’ characterized by a ‘devolution revolution’.
In marked contrast with such assumptions that initial reform efforts supportive
of local rights and participation in natural resource management would be deep-
ened and consolidated, this volume provides ample evidence of reversals of
devolutionary processes. These reversals notably include wildlife governance in
Botswana (Rihoy and Maguranyanga, this volume), Zambia (Lubilo and Child,
this volume) and Tanzania (Nelson and Blomley, this volume). Whereas Namibia
once seemed like the shape of things to come in terms of its far-reaching wildlife
policy reforms (Jones, this volume), the country’s communal conservancies now
appear more as a conspicuously isolated case of sustained devolution in a region
characterized by broadly reconsolidating centralized discretionary authority. Even
in relatively successful cases, such as participatory forest management in Tanzania,
the limits of top-down policy and legal reforms are apparent in the face of emer-
gent competing, and largely informal, political-economic interests (Nelson and
Blomley, this volume).
Despite the widely documented experience of power and authority over
resources and benefits shifting back from local to national scale, the drivers of
such changes are hardly uniform across the different countries (Table 14.1). In
Tanzania, for example, recentralization of control in the wildlife sector since the
late 1990s is closely tied to the neo-patrimonial character of the state’s governing
network of fused public and private interests, combined with the growing value of
wildlife through tourism and tourist hunting within that context of public–private
patronage (Nelson and Blomley, this volume). Lubilo and Child (this volume)
provide a similar explanation for the recentralization of control over revenues from
commercial uses of wildlife in Zambia, but also note the role played by foreign
donors in changing their approach to supporting natural resource reforms in that
country. Clearly, centralized interests in controlling valuable natural resources
such as wildlife for private economic and patronage purposes remain a critical
 Democratizing Natural Resource Governance 313

determinant of reform outcomes in a number of countries (see also Nelson and

Agrawal, 2008).
In other countries, similar patterns of centralization or recentralization are
evident but are linked more to particular policy discourses, narratives or ideolo-
gies, rather than crude instrumental interests. In Botswana, the trend since 2001
is towards recentralization of benefits from wildlife use on communal lands, but
there is little evidence that private political capture of public resources is a driving
factor (Rihoy and Maguranyanga, this volume). Rather, a complex set of cultural
and political factors, combined with the political weakness of local communities
(Madzwamuse, this volume) and the absence of a strong actor network supporting
local management regimes, underlies contemporary developments in Botswana.
Of particular salience is the ‘diamond debate’ in Botswana which has presented a
fundamental challenge to those seeking to localize management of wildlife.
In Kenya, a combination of centralized political authority, chronic budgetary
deficits on the part of the state wildlife authority, and strong vested interests in
the national tourism industry and international animal welfare lobby work to limit
space for reform and greater local rights to manage wildlife.While reformists linked
to local and community interests were nearly able to achieve a major decentraliza-
tion of wildlife governance in the wake of Kenya’s 2002 general election, and the
political reconfigurations it produced, in recent years wildlife policy reforms once
again point towards expanding central regulatory authority.
The case studies in the volume that focus more on micro-level contests over
resource access and tenure generally tell a similar story. In South Africa, the
Madimbo corridor case suggests that national interests in wildlife tourism and
expansionist transfrontier conservation areas may, at least in some settings, be
prevailing over local efforts to reclaim lands lost during the apartheid era (Whande,
this volume). In northern Tanzania, pastoralist communities continue to experi-
ence constant threats to local land and resource tenure and access, much of which
is driven by expanding state and commercial interests in wildlife-based tourism
(Ngoitiko et al, this volume). Although local people demonstrate considerable
sophistication in devising and pursuing political strategies to defend their claims,
the external balance of political and commercial interests that rural communities
must confront is at times overwhelming.
In Zimbabwe, the macro-political changes of the past decade have had profound
implications for the functioning of the CAMPFIRE programme, promoting more
personalized patterns of local governance and undermining previously account-
able resource governance institutions at the community level (Rihoy et al, this
volume). Nevertheless, it is highly notable that despite the increasingly authori-
tarian political environment in Zimbabwe during the past decade, with numerous
measures passed to reinforce central control over information, resources and
people, direct control over wildlife in communal areas has not been legally or
administratively recentralized as has happened elsewhere. This may reflect the
relative strength of the various local proprietary interests in wildlife in Zimbabwe,
which include district councils, local communities and traditional leaders, all of
whom compete to control wildlife’s value but collectively provide a powerful
constituency against imposition of direct central control (Rihoy et al, this volume;
Rihoy and Maguranyanga, this volume).
 Table 14.1 Key findings from select national cases regarding patterns of change and reform in natural
resource governance, and the underlying drivers of those changes
Country Key Institutional Trends in Relation Drivers of Institutional Trends
to Local Resource Rights
Botswana 1989–2001: Initiation and expansion of • Substantial external donor interest and funding
national CBNRM programme, creating • Strong southern African CBNRM narrative and regional network of policy-makers and
numerous local trusts with user rights over technical experts
wildlife and substantial generation of local • Supportive national context e.g. high quality civil service, rapidly growing ecotourism
income from wildlife-based enterprises industry, stable business environment, limited informal rent-seeking in wildlife industries
2001–present: Centralization of revenues • Growing influence of policy argument in favour of treating wildlife revenues as a national
from wildlife in local areas that previously resource as is the case with diamonds
were captured by local trusts • Allegations of widespread local mismanagement of revenues fuels argument for more
paternalistic central control
• Limited support among élites for common property regimes in rangelands in favour of
individualized cattle production
• Weak domestic constituency for CBNRM due to dominance by foreign donors and
technical advisors
• Weak political influence at local level, particularly amongst San/Basarwa hunter-gatherer
communities who predominate in CBNRM areas
Kenya Entrenched central control over wildlife • Concentration of power in the executive branch leading to historic central control over
with prohibitions on consumptive use since governance decisions
1977; windows for reform widened during • Influential and well-resourced foreign animal welfare lobby committed to an ideological
period following 2002 general election agenda in support of prohibiting wildlife use and maintaining strict central control over
and loss of power by KANU ruling party, wildlife; effective political production of this ‘preservationist’ policy argument at key levels
leading to parliamentary passage of new of government and broader society during the past 20 years
wildlife Bill which was eventually vetoed by • National tourism industry also generally supportive of centralist wildlife governance
the President institutions
Country Key Institutional Trends in Relation Drivers of Institutional Trends
to Local Resource Rights
Namibia Sustained expansion of communal • Political shift from racially-based minority rule pre-1990 to majority franchise, set against a
conservancies (now covering nearly 15% background of devolved wildlife user rights on white freehold properties since the late 1960s
of the country) and increasing local wildlife • Desire from local communities for equal user rights to wildlife as those enjoyed on
revenues within a secure and devolved freehold lands
legal framework since mid-1990s • Strong ideological commitment to devolved wildlife governance framework within
key élite actor network of ministerial policy-makers and national NGOs as a result of
earlier experiences with wildlife population recoveries on private lands and community
conservation initiatives
• Sustained support for conservancy development from foreign donors through effectively
coordinated local/national actor network
Tanzania Forestry sector: Major policy and legislative • Strong donor support for reform coupled with limited incentives on the part of forestry
reforms passed 1998–2002 and steady bureaucracy to expand control over low-value degraded miombo forests and lack of
expansion of communally managed forests a centralized timber concession system for extracting forests’ economic values from
to now comprise over 10% of non- community lands
reserved forest in the country; despite • Informal political resistance, particularly at district level, to enabling communities to fully
enclosure of these forests through secure control commercial forest values through licensed timber sales from locally-controlled
local rights, continued exclusion of local forests; indicates a willingness of government officials to support local enclosure of forests
communities from commercial timber trade but not local control over commercial activities and revenues
Wildlife sector: Recentralization of local • Increasing value of tourism and tourist hunting combined with high levels of institutional
revenues from wildlife-based tourism corruption and rent-seeking associated with wildlife-based enterprises, and a heavily
and expansion of state protected areas centralized tourist hunting concession allocation system
and central regulation onto community
lands; limited devolution of rights and
benefits through formal community-based
conservation initiatives
316 Looking Forward

The cases do, however, also provide important contrasting cases of govern-
ance reforms continuing in ways that shift greater authority to the local level.
Namibia’s communal conservancies, unlike CBNRM programmes in neigh-
bouring Botswana and Zimbabwe, have maintained the region’s most devolved
wildlife governance framework, with broad local user rights over wildlife including
100 per cent of revenues generated. The conservancy programme, grounded in
a strong network of national NGOs, supportive government bureaucrats and
foreign donors, has steadily increased the scope and volume of local benefits,
both commercial and subsistence, from wildlife (Jones, this volume). It is impor-
tant to highlight the importance of several unique contextual factors in terms
of explaining Namibia’s divergent trajectory. First, the reforms carried out in
the 1990s were strongly shaped by the earlier devolution of user rights to wild-
life on white freehold lands in Namibia starting in the 1960s. This provided
strong empirical evidence that such devolved management policies led to wildlife
recoveries as a result of local economic incentives to conserve and produce wild-
life, and convinced a range of key Namibian policy-makers and conservationists
that expanding such measures to communal lands would lead to both economic
and environmental benefits. Majority franchise in 1990 provided the opportu-
nity to do precisely this, and the political imperative amongst the new regime to
extend the same privileges to communal lands as already existed on white-owned
private lands. Foreign donor and NGO support has played an important role in
facilitating the expansion of Namibian communal conservancies during the past
decade, but it is important to highlight that the original crafting of the key wild-
life governance reforms in Namibia was dominated and directed by domestic
actors and constituencies.
In Tanzania, forestry governance reforms initiated in the 1990s and bolstered
through legislative reforms in 2002 have led to a steadily expanding area of forest
under local proprietary control and management. This has led to widespread
ecological recoveries of degraded forests and woodlands through enhanced local
stewardship and enforcement measures. However, it is increasingly clear that even
a relatively enabling policy and legal framework is insufficient to facilitate local
capture of the commercial value of forests, even when those forests are situated
on village lands (Nelson and Blomley, this volume). The core problem in Tanzania
is that despite the enabling policy and legal framework, informal pro­cesses tend
to dominate forest governance at the local level. For example, informal and illegal
trade in forest products is widespread and often creates disincentives for local
government officials to support community forest rights and capture of rents
and benefits. This is a major reason why, despite over a decade of expanding
communally-managed forests, formal village-level commercial exploitation of
these increasingly valuable forests remains almost totally undeveloped. Although
communities in Tanzania have clear legal rights, what they lack, in the Tanzanian
political context, is sufficient forms of power and leverage to enforce and capi-
talize upon those rights.
In summary, the cases highlight the limitations of the natural resource govern-
ance reform processes that have been carried out across the region. Most commu-
nity-based reform initiatives have not had the intended impacts in terms of shifting
rights and authority over natural resources, with a number of initially successful
 Democratizing Natural Resource Governance 317

cases of devolved benefits or tenure being recentralized by national legislative or

administrative measures. The most recent case study material suggests that, on
balance, trends towards recentralization of control over valuable resources such as
wildlife, and land that those resources are found on, are becoming more distinct
across east and southern Africa at present. The next sections further discuss some
of the factors that account for those trends.

Recentralization, markets and

bureaucratic imperatives
Central governments and state agencies continue to play the pivotal role in natural
resource governance dynamics across the region, with more authority, as well as
direct physical control over landscapes, accruing to these actors. This highlights
two basic realities about governance processes in east and southern Africa, which
are relevant not only to natural resource management but also to broader issues of
democratic transformations in political authority.
Firstly, increasing commercial values of resources such as wildlife, forests,
and land itself are increasing the incentives for central governments, individual
élites and private investors to claim jurisdictional control over those resources.
These commercial values are in turn being driven upwards by global patterns of
trade, affluence and scarcity, be it demand for timber and ivory in China or for
eco­tourism destinations in American and European travel markets. Simply put,
the economic stakes in controlling African landscapes are rapidly rising as a result
of a range of global economic changes. Emerging 21st-century markets such as
bio-fuels and carbon will continue to increase these stakes.
Secondly, in the context of increasing competition amongst actors for control
over valuable lands and resources, local communities in rural areas are fundamen-
tally marginalized and disempowered within the region’s existing political context.
This context is characterized by poverty and limited resources and infrastructure,
which inhibit collective action in rural areas, and structural factors which continue
to circumscribe democratic governance processes. Even while multiparty elec-
tions have become the norm across much of sub-Saharan Africa during the past
two decades, the fundamental structural elements of the centralized post-colo-
nial state have often been little altered. Patterns of natural resource governance
and recentralization are simply reflective of broader limitations of democratiza-
tion in Africa during this period (Bratton and van de Walle, 1997; Villalón and
VonDoepp, 2005; Mbaku and Ihonvbere, 2006). The ability of local groups of
citizens to demand rights and accountability remains limited by these enduring
structural impediments.
Despite the power imbalances they confront, local communities across the
region do display considerable capacity for effective collective action and polit-
ical sophistication in confronting challenges to their rights and livelihoods. Local
communities, even relatively marginalized groups such as indigenous hunter-gath-
erers in Botswana or pastoralists in northern Tanzania, are skilled at using both
formal and informal mechanisms to advance their claims, and at working with
national and global networks to gain allies and various forms of support. While
318 Looking Forward

communities have always practised ‘adaptive management’ of natural resources, it

is clear that such adaptive behaviour extends to contemporary negotiations over
resource governance arrangements and processes of institutional change (Rihoy et
al, this volume). The problem is that despite such strategic responses, the current
parameters of citizenship in African states provide limited leverage on non-local
decision-makers; the post-colonial state remains relatively inured from local forms
of sanction.
Thus the expanding penetration of global commerce – and in some cases,
markets for products that did not exist at all a decade ago – into rural landscapes
increases incentives for control over resources by government agencies, political
élites and private entities, and the enduring structural power imbalances in African
states limit local agency in shaping, adapting to or resisting these processes. These
factors lie at the heart of the political-economic processes that underlie current
patterns of recentralization, in a stark contrast to the prevalent narratives of devo-
lution, community-based management and decentralization from a decade ago.
The political-economic terrain upon which natural resource governance arrange-
ments are negotiated has changed considerably and, in contrast to the reformative
period following the end of the Cold War, is not fostering greater space for local
interests.

Privatized states and ordered polities

As noted in the introductory chapter to the volume, the state in Africa has long
been characterized by fused public–private relations and functions, whereby the
state effectively becomes a vehicle for the pursuit of private accumulative interests
by those exercising power (Bates, 1981; Ake, 1996). Such accumulative interests
clearly continue to play a major role in shaping natural resource governance insti-
tutions, and processes of institutional change, in ways that alienate local groups
of people from their lands and resources. As trade and investment grows, these
private patterns of appropriation and accumulation may become more entrenched
and effectively institutionalized. The importance of private capture of public
resources in shaping resource governance decisions is an important element in a
number of the cases documented in this volume.
Nevertheless, it is important to highlight some of the differences in political
dynamics that exist across different states in eastern and southern Africa. It
is implicit that states which are highly privatized are ones where formal insti-
tutions are less influential in a governance sense, and where corruption is
widespread and the rule of law is weak. As Figure 14.1 demonstrates, the
countries in eastern and southern Africa fall into two distinct groupings when
various governance indicators are used to plot their respective rankings. Most
countries in the region are characterized by high levels of corruption and
are around the median or below on the Ibrahim Governance Index, which
scores African countries based on a range of governance factors. However,
Botswana, South Africa and Namibia all have relatively low levels of corrup-
tion and strong rule of law by African standards, with Botswana performing
at a high level by global standards according to Transparency International’s
Corruption Perceptions Index.
 Democratizing Natural Resource Governance 319

Sources: Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2009 and Transparency International, 2008

Figure 14.1 Differences in quality of governance across eastern and southern African
nations as measured by the Ibrahim Governance Index (y-axis) and Transparency
International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (x-axis)

These governance differences are important in relation to natural resource use

and policy-making processes. Essentially, Botswana, South Africa and Namibia
are countries where public officials cannot as easily claim or capture public
resources, in contrast to the highly informal polities of most African states. This
does not mean that these countries are inherently more democratic or decentral-
ized, but it does mean that public officials are likely to make decisions based less
on personalized patronage interests and more out of technocratic or public interest
considerations (Nelson and Agrawal, 2008). All three countries have embarked on
some of the most substantive efforts in the region to democratize land and natural
resource governance, including Namibia’s communal wildlife conservancies and
post-apartheid South Africa’s land reform process (Jones, this volume; Whande,
this volume). In Namibia, wildlife governance reforms in the 1990s were led by
relatively enlightened bureaucrats and their allies among regional and national
NGOs and scholars. In Botswana, even through recent reforms have recentral-
ized control over revenues from natural resources, there is little evidence that this
has occurred because of private accumulative interests in the bureaucracy, but is
rather a function of much broader public debates about governance and sharing
of resources in the country.
Zimbabwe is a highly notable case because it has effectively shifted from being
a relatively formalized and bureaucratically ordered polity in the 1980s and 1990s,
320 Looking Forward

to a state dominated by informal political processes where the rule of law has
collapsed in violent fashion over the course of the past decade.1 This has severely
undermined the ability of many local communities to benefit from wildlife under
the CAMPFIRE programme and led to a collapse of formal wildlife governance
systems in many areas (Rihoy et al, this volume). Despite this, CAMPFIRE has
proven institutionally resilient, with some communities responding to crises by
developing new approaches to negotiating for their rights and interests (Taylor
and Murphree, 2007).
Macro-political context plays a key role in shaping the incentives of different
actors, particularly state actors, to pursue different policy or governance options.
The evidence collected here suggests that governance reforms which decentralize
authority to local actors are more likely to occur in a macro-political environment
characterized by stronger formal institutions, the rule of law and lower levels of
private appropriation of public resources.2 One implication of this is that efforts to
transfer positive outcomes linked to institutional reforms which have occurred in
certain places to other countries with very different governance environments are
unlikely to succeed. Thus while Namibia’s communal conservancies may inspire
advocates of CBNRM and inform project design, as well as empirically informing
broader debates about wildlife management and conservation outcomes, efforts
to encourage other countries in the region to adopt the Namibian model have not
worked and are unlikely to work. This is particularly the case where policy-makers
have strong disincentives to devolve rights and benefits to the local level, as is
the case in Zambia and Tanzania, for example. Namibia’s relatively technocratic
approach to devolving rights over wildlife to the local level, which arose out of its
unique history and political context in the early 1990s, will not produce the same
results in those very different contexts, as over 20 years of community-based wild-
life management reform efforts in Zambia and Tanzania amply demonstrate.

The paradox of the market: Globalization and local rights

Natural resource governance reform efforts seeking to promote CBNRM have
operated throughout eastern and southern Africa on two basic parallel tracks.
Firstly, to increase local economic benefits from natural resources, and secondly,
to strengthen local rights to govern how resources are used. As Murombedzi
(this volume) notes, in much of southern Africa the focus has been on generating
commercial benefits from resources such as wildlife, although this varies across the
region, with for example community-based forest management efforts in Tanzania
initially emphasizing tenure reform over benefit flows (Alden Wily and Mbaya,
2001). A core assumption underlying CBNRM has been that increasing benefit
flows and strengthening local property rights are synergistic; as benefits increase,
this increases the incentives for local investments in resource management (Bond,
2001), while stronger tenure enables communities to control economic activities
and markets based on natural resources. Indeed, this basic model of linking rights
and benefits informs not only CBNRM but wider emerging models of Payments
for Ecosystem Services (PES), which include efforts to establish markets for
biodiversity, water, and forest carbon. Thus a defining characteristic of modern
conservation and development thinking is that the growth of markets, and the
 Democratizing Natural Resource Governance 321

penetration of capital into rural areas in Africa and other parts of the world, is
central to both environmental and poverty reduction challenges (Brockington et
al, 2008).
The problem with this ‘neo-liberal’ narrative on the role of markets in supporting
local economic and environmental interests lies in the politically contested nature
of markets themselves. The neo-liberal discourse assumes that property rights
are either secured, or can be made so through technocratic reform processes that
see secure local rights and resource tenure as an objective. The narrative gener-
ally does not take into account the way that institutions, such as property rights,
which play a key role in shaping participation in the market-place,3 are constantly
being negotiated and renegotiated in the African governance context. It also often
does not explicitly recognize that rising economic resource values increase the
incentives for claims on those resources through renegotiation of institutional
arrangements governing ownership, access and use. In other words, the more
valuable resources become, the greater the incentives for external powerful claim-
ants to alter property rights arrangements. As incentives rise for local commu-
nities to participate in markets for certain resources through growing resource
values, so do the incentives for external actors to appropriate local rights to those
same resources. Africa’s heavily centralized governing institutions enable prop-
erty rights to be restructured in this way relatively easily. Thus because of this
political economy of natural resource governance in African countries, the more
valuable a resource is the greater the likelihood that local resource users will be
dispossessed. Thus the growth of markets can act to undermine local property
rights, even as the growth of markets is understood to depend on securing those
same property rights.
This is a fundamental paradox for nearly all market-based development and
conservation approaches, but it is particularly pronounced in the case of commu-
nally-held and -managed natural resources. Those resources tend to be subject to
much less secure local property rights than individually-owned resources such
as, say, agricultural land (Alden Wily, 2008). Nevertheless, it appears that the
threat of wholesale dispossession of rural agricultural and pastoral communities
in sub-Saharan Africa is currently on the rise from external investments ranging
from bio-fuels and agriculture to mining and tourism. The trends discussed here
in relation to natural resource governance, particularly wildlife, may simply be a
harbinger of emergent trends in the broader arena of land tenure in rural Africa.

African resource governance in comparative perspective

If global patterns of market penetration and commerce are serving in Africa to
weaken local resource tenure and drive the recentralization of natural resource
governance arrangements, it is important to note that this does not appear to be
the case, at least to the same degree, in all other regions of the world. Indeed, RRI
(2009, p7) notes in a review of trends in expanding local forest tenure, referring
to this shift towards local control over forests as a global ‘forest tenure transi-
tion’, that ‘In comparison to other regions of the world, Africa has made very
little progress in the forest tenure transition.’ While many countries in Asia and
Latin America have progressively secured growing areas of forests with local and
322 Looking Forward

indigenous communities, in Africa governments still claim ownership over 98 per

cent of all forests (RRI, 2009; see also Sunderlin et al, 2008).
These resource governance disparities highlight social and political differ-
ences between much of Africa and other developing regions such as Asia and
Latin America, and the implications these differences have on natural resource
management outcomes and institutional arrangements. In much of Asia and Latin
America, there has been a marked expansion in recent years in recognition of
local communities’ territorial rights over lands and forests (White and Martin,
2002; Agrawal et al, 2008). Conservationists increasingly recognize the major
contributions made by local communities in places such as India to biodiver-
sity conservation through local management practices or ‘community conserved
areas’ (Kothari, 2006). Across different regions, local communal management
regimes are contributing to a rethinking of the advantages and disadvantages of
state protected areas in relation to more decentralized institutional arrangements
(Ostrom and Nagendra, 2006).
Some community-based regimes in Latin America and Asia are rooted in long-
standing historical forces and have a strong social underpinning as a result. One of
the most prominent examples is community-based forestry in Mexico, which has
its roots in the Mexican revolution of the early 20th century and has evolved based
on agrarian peasant movements and demands, particularly since the 1970s (Bray
et al, 2005). In India, some local forest management regimes are rooted in histor-
ical resistance to British colonial policies (Agrawal, 2005), but more recent events
also demonstrate the continued potency of rural resource-based constituencies.
India’s 2006 Forest Rights Act provides, for the first time, broad recognition
of the customary rights of forest-dependent communities and represents a major
reformist achievement by advocates of local collective rights to natural resources.
The Act came about following earlier attempts to resolve the status of communi-
ties living in protected areas through nationwide evictions following a decision by
the country’s Supreme Court. This prompted a broad popular backlash, as the
land and resource rights of millions of people were imperilled, and catalysed the
formation of a popular movement geared towards formal recognition of those local
rights. Springate-Baginski et al (2008, p12) highlight the importance of collective
action by rural communities, including links to armed rural resistance movements,
in influencing the adoption of the 2006 Act by the state:

After the attempted evictions in 2002 the ensuing uproar radicalised and mobi-
lised popular movements and a new common cause was recognised between forest
dependent groups across the country…Ameliorating civil unrest in tribal areas also
definitely seems to have been a consideration in enacting the law, as a lack of recog-
nition of forest rights is a major cause for the extensive Maoist movements across
India’s forested tribal regions.

The popular roots of community-based resource management reforms in parts of

Asia and Latin America, both in the past and present, provide a useful comparative
reference point for studies of African resource governance, mainly because such
popular rural influences are so starkly absent from much of Africa. Indeed, the
cases in this volume generally describe policy and legislative processes dominated
 Democratizing Natural Resource Governance 323

by government bureaucrats and foreign donors, and in some cases a few urban
NGOs. While local communities show considerable ability to influence outcomes
at the local level, there appears to be limited national-level engagement or influ-
ence by resource-dependent communities, and in some cases (e.g. Botswana) this
is specifically identified as a major weakness of CBNRM initiatives (Rihoy and
Maguranyanga, this volume).
Two factors in particular bear highlighting in relation to the African context
and its apparent divergence from the politics of natural resource governance in
other developing regions. First, sub-Saharan Africa is now distinctly less demo-
cratic overall than Latin America and Asia. As Figure 14.2 illustrates, levels of
accountability and citizens’ voice in sub-Saharan Africa are considerably below
those of regions such as East Asia and Latin America.4 Second, the influence
of external interests in Africa, particularly foreign aid agencies and transnational
NGOs, is generally greater.5 African governments are the most dependent on
foreign aid of any developing region, and the financial resources that both public
(governmental) and private (NGO) forms of aid are able to mobilize can translate
into significant influence in certain contexts. One impact of this aid dependence
can be the ‘crowding out’ of domestic political constituencies as governments are
more functionally accountable to external donors than their own citizens, and
the domination of policy-making processes by the central state and foreigners
(e.g. Gould and Ojanen, 2003). The recent history of wildlife governance reform
in Kenya is an instructive case of external private NGO influence (Kabiri, this
volume). Experiences with forestry and wildlife reform in Tanzania, and CBNRM
in Zambia, all highlight significant influence by foreign donors, although this influ-
ence is shaped in turn by its interaction with recipient governments’ own political
imperatives.

Source: Kaufman et al, 2009

Figure 14.2 Levels of ‘voice and accountability’ across different developing areas, as
ranked by the World Bank’s Governance Indicators database
324 Looking Forward

Democratization, ‘good’ governance,

and models of change
Recent trends in natural resource governance in Africa reflect challenges
relating to democratization and governance reform in the wider social arena.
Anstey and Rihoy (2009) note that existing contests over natural resources,
and the limitations of CBNRM across the region, reflect broader struggles over
local governance and efforts to build more meaningful democratic processes
beyond periodic public participation in national elections as a manifestation of
democracy.
As scholars such as Shivji (1998) and Boone (2007) point out, the nature of
land and resource tenure has major implications for democratic relations and
meanings of citizenship in African countries. Natural resource decentralization
and related reforms such as CBNRM were, at the global scale, part and parcel
of the spread of democratic governance during the 1990s (Alden Wily, 2000). In
Africa, this period of democratization was particularly dramatic, not only due to
the spread of multiparty elections but also to the end of racially-based minority
rule in South Africa in 1994. The end of apartheid not only liberated South
Africa but also contributed to wider peace and democratic reform in the region
through the independence of Namibia in 1990 and the end of Mozambique’s
long civil war in 1992.
This period of rapid democratic change created major opportunities for recon-
figuring institutional power and authority, including many of the natural resource
reforms described in this volume. CBNRM initiatives fed off and contributed
to broader social and political reforms across the region. This contributed to the
general perception that such natural resource reforms were part of a long-term
process of democratization (e.g. Alden Wily, 2000). At the same time, scholars
and development agencies developed a deeper understanding of the links between
governance institutions and economic development (e.g. North, 1990). This work,
combined with the evident failure of development efforts in sub-Saharan Africa in
the 1970s and 1980s, highlighted the need to transform governance dynamics in
Africa through a range of reforms promoting multiparty elections, strengthened
rule of law, property rights, reduced bureaucracy and curtailed corruption (World
Bank, 1989).
Kelsall (2008) points out that the ‘good governance’ agenda, generally empha-
sizing technocratic reforms aiming to strengthen formal governance measures as
embodied by the rule of law, has made limited progress since the 1990s across
many African countries. The transformative agendas of CBNRM and natural
resource decentralization, more narrowly, and ‘good governance’, more broadly,
thus both emerged in the context of democratic movements during the 1990s
but both appear to be losing traction. This suggests that efforts to democra-
tize natural resource governance, and governance more broadly, are meeting
with common constraints, and that the processes of recentralization of resource
governance documented in this volume may be indicative of broader political
shifts in African societies.
 Democratizing Natural Resource Governance 325

Towards more effective conceptual and practical

models for reform
Developing more effective approaches to promoting natural resource decentrali-
zation, as well as democratization more broadly, requires confronting and negoti-
ating existing structural barriers to change. This volume has described the political
dimensions, and their roots in historical and social forces, of a range of ongoing
institutional processes and reform efforts.
Two key points, with reference to both natural resource reforms and broader
debates over governance in Africa, bear emphasizing. Firstly, natural resource
reform efforts are fundamentally about changing the relationship between the state
and its citizens (cf. Shivji, 1998). This means that initiatives such as CBNRM,
where they involve reconfiguring rights over natural resources, are inherently
linked to and influence broader questions of democracy and citizenship (Anstey
and Rihoy, 2009). Secondly, what is notable about natural resource reform efforts
in many African countries is the extent to which they have not been transformative
in their orientation and in their impacts (cf. Murombedzi, this volume). Thus a
core challenge facing a wide range of activists, conservationists, development agen-
cies and local communities going forward is how to develop more transformative
and impactful models for supporting institutional change and structural reforms.

Models for reform

During the past 20 years, the great majority of natural resource reform efforts
occurring across the region have been designed, initiated and directed by central
government agencies, often with high levels of foreign donor and external NGO
support. The basic model for many of these initiatives, in a highly simplified form,
is illustrated in Figure 14.3a. The salient feature of this operational reform model
is that the key actors are central government, which is responsible for transfer-
ring rights and authority over resources to local communities, and the external
agent (i.e. donor agencies), which provides resources to government to design and
implement reforms. Clearly, where political circumstances favour such reforms,
this model is viable, as generally was the case in Namibia in the early 1990s with
respect to wildlife sector reform, or in Zimbabwe during the initial formulation
and roll-out of CAMPFIRE. However, where political interests at the centre do
not favour democratic or devolutionary reforms, this model is not viable.
Anstey and Rihoy (2009, p46) highlight the problematic assumptions inherent
in this model and in relation to much of the discourse surrounding decentraliza-
tion and devolution, which they claim

…act to privilege the centre as a starting point and create a ‘mental model’ around
which central power and authority are the negotiating start and control the direc-
tion and speed of the process. In privileging the centre they reinforce a bureaucratic
view of the state and a subject rather than citizen approach to democracy.

The point here is that the state often cannot be the starting point for democratic
reforms that involve shifting power relations from the centre to the periphery.
Furthermore, it follows that in struggles over resource rights between local
326 Looking Forward

communities and national élites or state agencies, providing resources to those

centralized actors, as is the case with most donor programmes, is likely to impede
rather than catalyse devolutionary institutional changes.
Figure 14.3b provides a simplified alternative framework for external support to
natural resource reforms that empower local communities, by simply shifting the
locus of support from those who are more likely to resist reform (central actors)
to those who are decentralization’s explicit constituency (local communities).6
Several other basic differences between Figure 14.3a and Figure 14.3b are impor-
tant. First, Figure 14.3a suggests that the process of institutional change is a rela-
tively linear one, whereby rights are transferred from the centre to the local level
in a fairly orderly and technocratic fashion. Figure 14.3b, by contrast, depicts the
interaction between central and local actors as one of non-linear give and take, as
struggles over resource rights occur over time and change according to various
factors. This model is fundamentally non-linear, does not assume that the centre is
inclined towards empowering the periphery, and also fundamentally has no end-
point but recognizes that institutional changes of a decentralist or centralist nature
may occur at any time based on the changing balance of power and changing
incentives amongst groups.
Secondly, Figure 14.3b does not assume that external support is neces-
sarily financial. Shifting external support from central to local actors does not
presume routing large amounts of money to local actors who may not be in a
position to receive such financial aid. Rather, it highlights that the role of external
actors needs to focus more on building local capacity through training, knowl-
edge, organizational support and networking in ways that increase local political
capital and thus local ability to demand accountability (these forms of support
may be routed through intermediary organizations – i.e. NGOs – provided the
political-economic interests of those intermediaries are sufficiently aligned with
and accountable to local communities’ interests). Figure 14.3b is thus a simplified
conceptual and operational model for placing local communities at the centre of
governance reform and gearing external support towards supporting local inter-
ests and capacity.
A final point bears highlighting in terms of the way external support is
organized between these two models. This is that the organizational norms of
many external donors, and particularly multilateral and bilateral government
development aid agencies, strongly favour the centralized (Figure 14.3a) over
the decentralized (Figure 14.3b) model. There are a range of reasons for this,
including continued use of linear planning frameworks and project models
(Wallace et al, 2007), the association of large-scale expenditures with prestige
and promotion within many aid agencies, and the resultant ‘pipeline effect’ that
encourages development agencies to keep funding flowing as planned or budg-
eted (Jansen, 2009). These organizational norms exert a profound influence on
the behavioural choices and policies of development aid agencies (Gibson et al,
2005). To the degree that these agencies are unable to adapt their organizational
preferences and investment patterns to support more decentralized models of
locally-driven reform, there may be a need to de-emphasize the potential for
governmental donor agencies to effectively support natural resource govern-
ance reforms.7
 Democratizing Natural Resource Governance 327

(a)

(b)

Figure 14.3 Simplified alternative models for providing external support for natural
resource decentralization reforms
328 Looking Forward

Ultimately it is essential that natural resource governance reform efforts place

greater emphasis on providing direct support to local communities, and their allies
within civil society, in building their voice and leverage to demand accountability
and to advocate for their rights and interests. Conceptually, the emphasis needs
to be on building political capital at different scales that can work to negotiate for
institutional changes.

Reform and crisis

Natural resource reform processes are generally non-linear, with local and national
opportunities for change opening and closing according to broader political trends
and developments. Most of the major reforms that have occurred in eastern and
southern Africa in relation to natural resource governance institutions have emerged
during periods of macro-political crisis or reconfiguration. Post-apartheid land
reform in South Africa, community wildlife initiatives in Namibia and Zimbabwe,
and land, wildlife and forestry reforms in Mozambique all occurred immediately
following the end of long-term liberation movements or civil wars, in periods char-
acterized by radically new national political orders. In Tanzania and Zambia, periods
of economic crisis in the 1980s and shifts to political pluralism in the 1990s had a
significant influence on natural resource reforms and opportunities for change agents
at local and national levels to promote experimental new institutional arrangements.
In Kenya, the nearest the country has come to overhauling its maladaptive wildlife
governance institutions occurred in the period immediately following the 2002 elec-
toral transition, which saw the defeat of the monopoly on executive authority held
by the Kenya African National Union party since independence in 1963.
Such periods of major transition and reconfiguration break up existing networks
of patron–client relations and political interest groups to create opportunities for
change which may not otherwise emerge. Essentially, reformists are faced with the
task of building political capital (knowledge, networks, coalitions) which can then
be deployed at these strategic moments. It should be emphasized that it is periods
of crisis, which may be political or economic or both, which are key to creating
opportunities for institutional change. By contrast, periods of relative stability are
less enabling of institutional reconfiguration. The present period of recentraliza-
tion across eastern and southern Africa may reflect the relative political stability
and economic improvements that have characterized most of the region, with
the notable exception of Zimbabwe, for the past ten years or so. Such stability
and growth reinforces the position of those in power and discourages reforms
that redistribute power and authority. However, the present period of stability
and growth may give way to future crises due to, for example, rising inequality,
political marginalization of certain groups, or environmental impacts from unsus-
tainable resource use or climate change. Current patterns of recentralization are
unlikely to be sustained indefinitely, but as ever it is difficult to predict future
patterns of crisis and change.

Emerging issues and a research agenda for change

The experiences documented and analysed in this volume, as with any cross-section
of local and national experiences, may be indicative of broader political-economic
trends in sub-Saharan Africa, and perhaps elsewhere in the world, but also may
 Democratizing Natural Resource Governance 329

reflect particular features of eastern and southern Africa. The cases generally
focus on landscapes and wildlife populations valued for tourism, including tourist
hunting, which are particularly a feature of eastern and southern Africa’s savan-
nahs. As described in this chapter, it is the combination of increasing commercial
economic values and global capital flows, combined with the region’s structural
political characteristics, which appears to be driving recentralization of control
over those lands and resources across much of the region, thereby undermining
local efforts to secure rights, tenure and access to benefits. This political economy
of resource governance varies, though, within the region, particularly between
relatively patrimonial, informal states such as Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique;
and the more ordered bureaucratic states of South Africa, Botswana and Namibia.
Wildlife-based tourism may be a key factor in encouraging expanding central
control over lands and resources across both groups of countries, but the political
dynamics have important differences.
A range of questions emerge from these national and regional trends and dynamics,
which have been explored in this volume, in this chapter and in the national and
local case studies, but which would greatly benefit from further research. First, it
is unclear from existing studies to what degree to which the trends identified here
are occurring in other regions of sub-Saharan Africa. Although useful analyses
of natural resource decentralization in central Africa exist (e.g. Oyono, 2004), it
is unclear if existing trends point towards recentralization, or if the local rights
of access to and control over forests are so limited that such recentralization is
unnecessary to maintain and expand central extractive interests. Given the high
economic value of the region’s forests, and the likelihood for that value to increase
under operational rules for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation (REDD), coupled with the weakness of democratic institutions in the
Congo Basin states, reforms favouring decentralization seem highly unlikely.
In west Africa, decentralization to district and sub-district level appears to be
proceeding in some areas, such as Niger (Mohamadou, 2009). However, in much
of the Sahel there are few valuable natural resources – with the exception of under-
ground minerals – which create incentives for direct central control over large
areas. In Senegal, though, Ribot (2008, piv) describes how incentives to control
the charcoal trade continue to circumscribe local rights over woodlands, leading
him to call forestry governance in Senegal ‘a last frontier of decolonization’.8
Inevitably there are many similarities and differences between different regions,
and comparative studies between eastern, western, southern and central Africa are
generally of great use, particularly between French- and English-speaking nations
(e.g. Roe et al, 2009; Torquebiau and Taylor, 2009). Within countries, greater
attention needs to be paid to connecting natural resource governance outcomes
and local political ecology analyses to broader political-economic factors and
trends. Are trends in natural resource governance in African countries indicative
of broader advances and retreats in local and national democratic governance, or
are valuable natural resources particularly resistant to reform?
As global markets for African resources such as wildlife (tourism), bio-fuels
and agricultural land, and forests (timber and carbon) spread and grow, changing
economic incentives and market relations will continue to influence political
contests over rights and tenure. How these changes play out in different local and
330 Looking Forward

national contexts will continue to be a priority for research, and for linking that
research to ongoing efforts by social movements, local communities, activists and
civil society organizations to influence institutional change.

Conclusion
Today, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the emerging reality is
that natural resource governance regimes grounded in local interests, incentives,
indigenous knowledge and adaptive governance capacity are needed more than
ever in order to address global processes of ecosystem degradation operating at
wide and interconnected scales. Climate change is emblematic of this challenge.
While the impacts of climate change are global in nature, and difficult to predict in
their precise timing and spatial extent, adaptation and mitigation will both depend
heavily on local actions. It is therefore a major challenge for all actors, from local
to national to global scales, to strengthen local resource governance regimes. At
present, the existing configuration of political-economic incentives across much
of eastern and southern Africa is leading to recentralization of rights and authority
in ways that are unlikely to support resilient and adaptive resource governance
systems. The core challenge is to transform existing institutional incentives from
a scenario in which increasing resource values and patterns of trade create greater
incentives for further central control and capture of resource rents, to one where
such values can reinforce local rights, voice and collective action. This transforma-
tive challenge is political in nature and stands as a priority bridging development,
conservation and democratic interests and constituencies.

Notes
1 This is evident in Zimbabwe’s decade-long freefall in nearly all governance indices,
to its present ranking as one of the most corrupt and badly governed countries in
the world. Although the changes in Zimbabwe should not be understated, its current
ranking probably owes more to the nature of the changes that have occurred in the past
nine years, than to the quality of governance in Zimbabwe as such.
2 This echoes Ruitenbeek and Cartier’s (2001, p23) suggestion that devolution is ‘an
emergent property of a democratising society’. See also Oyono (2004, p108), who
comments in reference to forestry reforms in Cameroon that, ‘there is no chance for
democratic decentralisation when representatives of the central administration live off
corruption’.
3 By ‘participation in the market-place’ I simply mean the right and ability to sell a given
good or service, such as those related to the use of lands or natural resources. The
rights governing resource use, access and tenure, are fundamental determinants of this
participation.
4 South Asia, which includes, among other countries, Pakistan, Afghanistan and
Bangladesh, is the only region which scores lower than sub-Saharan Africa for this
governance indicator; although India, the largest country in South Asia, scores above
the global median value and well above sub-Saharan Africa.
5 It should be noted that these two issues are not necessarily unrelated, with an increasing
number of scholars and activists arguing that the high proportion of government
 Democratizing Natural Resource Governance 331

budgets comprising of foreign aid is an important limitation of greater citizen account-

ability in Africa. See Mwenda, 2006 for a particularly lucid presentation of this argu-
ment, and Bräutigam and Knack (2004) for a more analytical treatment.
6 This simplified model effectively adapts the operational reality of most decentraliza-
tion reform initiatives, which route resources through state bureaucracies, to Chhatre’s
(2008, p12) critical observation that ‘decentralisation is about community agency’.
7 Donor agencies differ and, while nearly all recognize the importance of building the
capacity of non-state actors to demand accountable forms of governance, the effective-
ness of pursuing such aims varies. The World Bank, which directly supports only client
governments, has few means at its disposal for supporting demand-driven reforms.
Britain’s Department for International Development, by contrast, is among the bilateral
European donors that have developed a range of mechanisms for supporting civil society
and for investing in both learning and action in the realm of governance reform.
8 This suggests that broader democratic processes are advancing in Senegal, and that
the forestry sector is an institutional outlier. In Tanzania, by contrast, it is unclear if
expanding central control of wildlife is an anachronistic outlier or rather embodies the
broader erosion of the limited democratic reforms enacted during the 1990s, which
may well be the case. See for example Mmuya, 1998; Lissu, 2000; Cooksey, 2003.

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 Index
Administrative Management for Game G/wi 245, 247
Management Areas (ADMADE), indigenous knowledge systems of 244–248
Zambia 109, 205–206, 218 !Kung 245
African Wildlife Foundation 17, 19, 165, 277 Naro 245
Agency for Cooperation and Research in territorial systems of 245–247
Development (ACORD) 60, 68 !Xo 245–246
agriculture 6, 48, 57, 92, 125, 160, 165, 215, Bechuanaland Protectorate 243–244
230, 242, 272, 284, 301, 321 Bell, Richard 208, 210
and colonialism 35–36, 38–40, 269 Bennde Mutale community, South Africa 147,
arable land in Africa 6 154, 163–164, 169
impacts of climate change on 296 Bessinger, Niko 110–111, 113
investment patterns 20 Bio-fuels 20, 33, 46, 294, 307, 317, 321, 329
policy in Africa 13–14 Botswana
policy in Tanzania 81, 94, 273 Basarwa, ethnic group 241–263
aid Bechuanaland Protectorate 243–244
agencies 16, 34, 45, 323, 326, 330–331 Botswana Alliance Movement 71
and development narratives 16 Botswana Community-based Organizations
and natural resource reforms 34, 42, 85–86, Network (BOCOBONET) 60–61
98, 330–331 Botswana Democratic Party 63–65, 71
and NGOs 16–17, 19, 21 Central Kalahari Game Reserve 256,
Department for International Development 258–259, 262
(DfID), UK 16, 96, 331 Cgaecgae Tlhabololo Trust 67, 71–72
German Development Agency (GTZ) 16, civil society in 59–60, 62, 73
91, 96 community-based natural resource man-
Netherlands Development Organization agement (CBNRM) in 55–74, 242–244,
(SNV) 58–60 248–262, 314
Overseas Development Aid (ODA) 297, 306 community-based organizations (CBOs) 58,
political economy of 17–19, 21 60–61, 66–74, 249, 255, 261
Structural Adjustment Programmes 4, 16, Department of Wildlife and National
33, 38, 40–41, 81, 95, 211, 273 Parks 57–59, 65, 68, 71–72, 242, 256
Swedish International Development diamonds in 56, 63–64, 73–74, 259,
Cooperation Agency (SIDA) 86–87, 97, 101 313–314
United States Agency for International District Councils 66, 74
Development (USAID) 16–17 D’Kar settlement 258
LIFE Programme, Namibia 111, 115–116 economy 55, 63
in Kenya 132 Fauna Conservation Act of 1977 244
in Tanzania 96 First People of the Kalahari 258
NRMP, Botswana 57–58, 60, 66, 68, Forestry Association of Botswana 60
109–110, 115 Gantsi District 243, 258
World Bank 6, 16–18, 75, 224, 273, 304, 331 governance in 55–57, 61–64
Amazon 294 Kalahari Conservation Society 242
Amboseli National Park 11, 126, 133, 139 Kalahari Desert 242, 245
Angola 36, 48, 263 Kgalagadi District 243
apartheid kgotla 61, 249, 254
in Namibia 107, 109, 112 Khama, Ian 56, 59, 62–64, 73
in South Africa 10, 36, 142, 147–149, 151, Khwai 242, 249–251, 253, 256, 259
153–158, 168–169, 313, 324 Khwai Development Trust 70–71, 74
Arash village, Tanzania 278 Kuru Development Trust 258
Kuru Family of Organisations 258–259
Banhine National Park, Mozambique 157 land policy 40, 56, 64–65, 243, 248
Basarwa, ethnic group 241–263 livestock policy 56, 64–65, 243, 248
BaBugakhwe 242, 246, 249, 253 Moremi Game Reserve 70, 249, 256
Bagumaii 242 National CBNRM Forum 60–62, 251, 259
Bateti 242 Natural Resource Management Programme
BaXhanikwe 242, 246–247, 252 (NRMP) 57–58, 60, 66, 68, 109–110, 115
 Index 335

Ngamiland 58, 67–68, 251–252, 258 European Union Emission Trading

Okavango Community Trust 67–70, 74 Scheme 302
Okavango Delta 55, 58, 68, 70, 241–242, Forest Carbon Partnership Facility 304
246, 252, 254, 257, 263 impacts in Africa 295–296
Okavango Kopano Mokoro Trust 252, 256 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Remote Area Dwellers Programme 260 (IPCC) 295
Survival International 259, 262 Kyoto Protocol 297, 302
thatch grass harvesting 250–251, 253 United Nations Framework Convention on
tourism in 55–56, 58, 62–63, 65–72, 249, Climate Change (UNFCCC) 294, 302
252, 256–258, 314 colonialism
Tribal Grazing Land Policy 243, 249, 254 and construction of communal land tenure
Tribal Land Act of 1968 243, 253 regimes 33, 35–40, 45
Trust for Okavango Cultural and natural resource governance 3, 9, 12, 21,
and Development Initiatives 79, 243
(TOCADI) 258–259 and wildlife management 91, 124–127, 139,
Tsobaoro 252 256, 272
University of Botswana 258 British ‘indirect rule’ 12, 36–39
Village Trust Committees (VTCs) 75, 249, ‘Fabian colonialism’ 38
254 common property resource regimes 8–9, 21, 65,
Wildlife Conservation and National Parks Act 82, 106–107, 109–110, 191, 263, 314
of 1992 244 communal conservancies, Namibia 4, 10,
Working Group for Indigenous Peoples of 106–109, 111–119, 312, 315–316, 319–320
Southern Africa (WIMSA) 258 Communal Areas Management Programme
Xaxaba 242, 246–247, 252–253, 256, 257, for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE),
259 Zimbabwe 4, 9–10, 42–43, 47, 66, 74,
Botswana Alliance Movement 71 109–110, 116, 119, 174–199, 212, 214, 227,
Botswana Community-based Organizations 313, 320, 325
Network (BOCOBONET) 60–61 and Rural District Councils (RDCs) 10,
Botswana Democratic Party 63–65, 71 176, 180–182, 185–192, 194–195, 197–198
CAMPFIRE Association 190, 197–198
Cameroon 6, 14, 86, 330 CAMPFIRE Collaborative Group 176,
Caprivi, Namibia 110, 114, 118 178–179, 189
carbon market 33, 297, 303–304, 317, 320, 329 in Mahenye Ward 174–175, 179–198
Clean Development Mechanism in Masoka 195
(CDM) 297, 302 community-based conservation 7, 11, 19, 45,
Forest Carbon Partnership Facility 304 223, 227, 275, 284–285, 315
Carr, Norman 210 community-based natural resource management
Central African Republic 86 (CBNRM) 4, 11, 17–18, 25, 32–35, 39,
Central Kalahari Game Reserve 256, 258–259, 41–48, 151, 155, 174–176, 202, 295, 300–302,
262 304–305, 307, 311, 316, 320, 323–325
Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), Tanzania 80, in Botswana 55–74, 242–244, 248–262, 314
279, 281 in Mozambique 227–238
charcoal 14, 329 in Namibia 106, 111–119
Chiluba, Frederick 211 in Zambia 203–223
China 89, 298, 317 in Zimbabwe 179–198
Chipanje Chetu project, Mozambique 45, 228 Community Resource Boards (CRBs),
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) 297, Zambia 208–210, 217–221, 223
302 Malama Community Resource Board 220
climate change Congo Basin 36, 329
African Development Bank 304 Congo Basin Forest Fund 304
and CBNRM 300–302, 304–305 Conservation Corporation Africa 274
and land/resource rights 299–307, 330 Conservation International 17, 62, 242
as market failure 296–297 Contractual National Parks 150, 158–161, 163,
carbon market 33, 297, 303–304, 317, 320, 167–169
329 Convention on International Trade in
Clean Development Mechanism Endangered Species (CITES) 301
(CDM) 297, 302
Congo Basin Forest Fund 304 David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust 132, 138
336 Index

decentralization 57, 107, 151, 153, 312, 331 236–237, 312, 315–316, 320
of natural resources 5, 11, 15–16, 21–24, 64, miombo woodlands 82, 84, 86–89, 97
74, 94, 139, 176, 217, 233, 300, 306, 310–313, Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and
318, 324–326, 329 Forest Degradation (REDD) 294–295, 297,
in Tanzania 90, 94–96, 283 301–307, 329
deforestation 24, 293, 300–301 Forestry and Beekeeping Division, Tanzania 83,
Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and 86–88, 97–98, 101
Forest Degradation (REDD) 294–295, 297, Forestry Association of Botswana 60
301–307, 329 Forest Carbon Partnership Facility 304
democratization 22, 195 Frankfurt Zoological Society 17, 272, 275, 284
and natural resources 15, 22–23, 26, 56–57,
66, 99–101, 140, 174–176, 195, 202, 223, 227, Gabon 86
310–312, 324–325 Game Management Areas (GMAs),
patterns in Africa 4, 12, 14–15, 121–123, Zambia 204–206, 216, 219, 223
317, 324, 331 Lupande Game Management Area 203–205,
trends in Zimbabwe 177–178 207, 215, 218–223
Department of Wildlife and National Parks, Gantsi District, Botswana 243, 258
Botswana 57–59, 65, 68, 71–72, 242, 256 German Development Agency (GTZ) 16, 91, 96
Department for International Development Ghana 36
(DfID), UK 16, 96, 331 Gonarezhou National Park 157, 179
diamonds 56, 63–64, 73–74, 160, 196, 259, Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation
313–314 Area 46, 144–151, 152, 157, 161, 164–167
D’Kar settlement, Botswana 258 Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park 150,
Douglass, Frederick 3, 22 157–159, 164–165
Kruger National Park 46, 153–154,
Eastern Arc Mountains, Tanzania 82, 85 157–161, 163, 165–168
economics Grzimek, Bernhard 272
African economies 4–7, 12–14, 16, 55, 81,
100, 122–123 hunting 163, 168–169, 232
and colonial history 35–41 by Basarwa 242–247, 256, 258, 263
crisis of 2008 298 BaXhanikhwe traditions 246–247
of market failure 296–297 tourist hunting 42, 48, 301, 329
of natural resource management 5–7, 9, and CBNRM 42, 48, 58, 63, 249–250,
14–15, 20, 24, 56–58, 64–65, 79–80, 85–88, 257, 264, 301
300–301, in Botswana 58, 63, 68–72, 249–250, 252
of wildlife use 9, 91–96, 106, 128, 132, in Kenya 124–125, 127–128, 131–137,
181–185, 193, 206, 215–216, 219, 269–272, 139, 141–142
274–275 in Namibia 10, 106, 108, 114, 117
of Zimbabwe 177 in South Africa 163
elephants 55, 62, 91, 111, 124, 130, 167, 181, in Tanzania 91–100, 273–278, 283–284,
205–207, 223, 230 286, 312, 315
ivory 91, 124, 317 in Zambia 204, 206–208, 211–212,
Engusero Sambu village, Tanzania 280 215–216, 219, 222
Ethiopia 14 in Zimbabwe 38, 41, 43, 181–189, 193,
European Union Emission Trading Scheme 302 196–197

First People of the Kalahari 258 Iddi, Said 87, 97

fisheries 4, 6–8, Imperial British East African Company 124
Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the International Fund for Animal Welfare 138, 141
United Nations 230–231, 235 India 22, 262, 298, 322, 330
foreign direct investment (FDI) 19 Forest Rights Act of 2006 322
forests 4, 6–9, 14, 32–34, 36, 40–41, 122, 283, Rajaji National Park 262
299–301, 317, 321–323 indunas, Zambia 207, 210, 215, 223
Congo Basin Forest Fund 304 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 16, 75,
Forest Carbon Partnership Facility 304 273
Forestry and Beekeeping Division, Structural Adjustment Programmes 4, 16,
Tanzania 83, 86–88, 97–98, 101 33, 38, 40–41, 81, 95, 211, 273
participatory forest management 11, 16, International Union for Conservation of Nature
79–80, 82–91, 96–99, 101, 227–228, 231–233, (IUCN) 58–60, 231, 235
 Index 337

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Khwai, Botswana 242, 249–251, 253, 256, 259
(IPCC) 295 Khwai Development Trust 70–71, 74
Kilimanjaro, Mt 269, 283
Kafue National Park 217, 219, 223 Klein’s Camp, Tanzania 274
Kalahari Conservation Society, Botswana 242 Klein’s Gate, Tanzania 273, 282
Kalahari Desert 242, 245 Koronkoro Indigenous Peoples Oriented to
Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, South Conservation (KIPOC) 274
Africa 159 Kruger National Park, South Africa 46,
Kaunda, Kenneth 203–205, 207–208, 210 153–154, 157–161, 163, 165–168
Kaweche, Gilson 210 Kunda chiefdoms, Zambia 206, 215
Kenya Kunene Region, Namibia 114, 118
Amboseli National Park 11, 126, 133, 139 Kuru Development Trust, Botswana 258
colonial settlers in 125, 127, 139 Kuru Family of Organisations,
compensation for wildlife damage in 125, Botswana 258–259
128–130, 133, 139 Kyoto Protocol 297, 302
David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust 132, 138
election (2002) 23, 130, 132, 140, 313, 328 land
election (2007) 12, 15 and colonialism 3, 9, 12, 21, 33, 35–40, 45,
forest management in 122 107, 122, 148, 157, 177–178, 244, 269, 299
‘GG Bill’, 2004 133–136, 139 and investment 20–21, 44, 271, 294, 318
hunting in 124–125, 127–128, 131–137, 139, and pastoralists in Tanzania 272–287
141–142 arable area in Africa 6
Imperial British East African Company 124 communal tenure of 7, 34–35, 37–42, 82,
International Fund for Animal Welfare 138, 204, 228–229, 232–233, 273, 299–300, 322
141 in India 322
ivory trade in 124 indigenous management systems 244–247,
Kenya African National Union (KANU) 23, 272
130, 328 policy in Botswana 40, 56, 64–65, 243,
Kenya Association of Tour Operators 132 248–249, 254
Kenya Coalition for Wildlife Conservation and political economy of 14–15, 21, 140,
Management 135 317–319, 324, 329
Kenya Wildlife Coalition 135 reform 5, 23, 40, 44–47, 112, 148–151, 155,
Kenya Wildlife Service 130–134, 136–140 157–164, 167–168, 178, 196, 230, 313, 319, 328
Kenya Wildlife Working Group 133–135, Laikipia District, Kenya 134, 141
137, 141 Larsen, Thor 210
Laikipia District 134, 141 Latin America 5, 300, 311, 321–323
Leakey, Richard 137 Leakey, Richard 137
Maasai Mara National Reserve 126, 133, Lesotho 40
139, 270–272 Lewis, Dale 210
Ole Kaparo, Francis 134 Limpopo National Park, Mozambique 157,
parliamentary debates on wildlife 129–130, 165–167
133–136, 139 lion 230, 247, 272
political economy of 122–124 Loliondo, Tanzania 93, 270–286
tourism in 128, 131–132, 136, 140, 313–314 Luangwa Valley 202–208, 212–214, 217–223
Western, David 131 Luangwa Integrated Rural Development
wildlife trends in 130, 139–140 Authority 214–215
Kenya African National Union (KANU) 23, Luangwa Integrated Resources and
130, 328 Development Project (LIRDP) 205–208,
Kenya Association of Tour Operators 132 210–220, 222–223
Kenya Coalition for Wildlife Conservation and South Luangwa National Park 203–208,
Management 135 210, 217, 222–223
Kenya Wildlife Coalition 135 Lungu, Fedelius 208, 210
Kenya Wildlife Service 130–134, 136–140 Lupande Game Management Area 203–205,
Kenya Wildlife Working Group 133–135, 137, 207, 215, 218–223
141 Lupande Development Project 205–206
Kgalagadi District, Botswana 243
Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park 159 Maasai ethnic group 272–287
kgotla 61, 249, 254 Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya 126,
Khama, Ian 56, 59, 62–64, 73 133, 139, 270–272
338 Index

Madimbo corridor, South Africa 147–151, Mudumu North Complex 118

153–155, 158, 160–164, 166–168, 313 Namibia Association of CBNRM Support
Mahel locale, Mozambique 227, 229–238 Organisations (NACSO) 116
Mahenye Ward, Zimbabwe 174–175, 179–198 Namibia Nature Foundation 116
Makuleke community, South Africa 46, Nature Conservation Amendment Act
154–155, 157–161, 163, 166, 168–169 107–108, 112
Malama, Chief 213 Nyae Nyae conservancy 115–116
Malipati Safari Area, Zimbabwe 157 political history 106–107
Mambwe District, Zambia 206–207, 210 Rumpf, Hanno 110–111, 113
Manjinji Pan Sanctuary, Zimbabwe 157 South West Africa People’s Organisation
Maori 262 (SWAPO) 107, 112, 118
Matshakatini Nature Reserve, South Africa 155, tourism in 4, 106–108, 110, 112–113, 118
161–162, 168 Ulenga, Ben 114
Mexico 303, 322 USAID in 111, 115–116
Millennium Development Goals 112, 295 wildlife trends in 4, 9
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 296 WWF in 111, 115–116
mining 36, 38, 55, 100, 160–161, 321 Namibia Association of CBNRM Support
Mnkhanya, Chief 213 Organisations (NACSO) 116
Moremi Game Reserve, Botswana 70, 249, 256 Namibia Nature Foundation 116
Motlanthe, Kgalema 159 narratives, policy 23–24, 56–57, 109, 175, 199
Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), national parks 95, 109, 126, 130–131, 243–244,
Zimbabwe 187, 192, 196–197 262
Movement for Multiparty Democracy, Amboseli National Park 11, 126, 133, 139
Zambia 211 Banhine National Park 157
Mozambique 20, 21, 35, 36, 39, 48, 86, 152, Contractual National Parks 150, 158–161,
154, 324 163, 167–169
Banhine National Park 157 Department of National Parks and Wildlife
Community-based natural resource manage- Management, Zimbabwe 42–43, 175–176,
ment (CBNRM) in 227–238 180
Chipanje Chetu project 45, 228 Department of Wildlife and National Parks,
FAO in 230–231, 235 Botswana 57–59, 65, 68, 71–72, 242, 256
IUCN Livelihoods and Landscape Gonarezhou National Park 157, 179
Programme 231, 235 Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park 150,
land reform in 45, 228 157–159, 164–165
Limpopo National Park 157, 165–167 Kafue National Park 217, 219, 223
Mahel locale 227, 229–238 Kalahari Gemsbok National Park 159
Tchuma Tchato project 45, 228 Kenya Wildlife Service 130–134, 136–140
traditional leaders in 234–236 Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park 159
União Nacionale de Camponese 45 Kruger National Park 46, 153–154,
Zinave National Park 157 157–161, 163, 165–168
Msoro, Chief 213, 223 Limpopo National Park 157, 165–167
Mudumu North Complex, Namibia 118 National Parks and Wildlife Service,
Murphree, Marshall 110 Zambia 205–208, 210–212, 216–217, 222
Mutele, Chief 154, 161, 163 Pondoland National Park 159
Serengeti National Park 93, 269, 270–275,
Namibia 282–283
Bessinger, Niko 110–111, 113 South Africa National Parks (SANParks)
Caprivi 110, 114, 118 158–159
commercial game ranching in 4, 9, 108–109, South Luangwa National Park 203–208,
111, 113 210, 217, 222–223
communal conservancies in 4, 10, 106–109, Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA) 3, 86,
111–119, 312, 315–316, 319–320 91, 101, 275
hunting in 10, 106, 108, 114, 117 Zinave National Park 157
Integrated Rural Development and Nature Natural Resource Management Programme
Conservation (IRDNC) 110 (NRMP), Botswana 57–58, 60, 66, 68,
Kunene Region 114, 118 109–110, 115
Living in a Finite Environment pro- Nature Conservation Amendment Act,
gramme 111, 115–116 Namibia 107–108, 112
 Index 339

Nepal 303 Rural District Councils, Zimbabwe 10, 176,

Netherlands Development Organization (SNV) 180–182, 185–192, 194–195, 197–198
58–60 Rural Litigation and Entitlements Kendra 262
New Zealand 262
Ngamiland, Botswana 58, 67–68, 251–252, 258 safari hunting, see hunting, tourist
Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania 95, Salisbury, Lord 124
270–272, 283, 287 San ethnic group, see Basarwa
Niger 329 Senegal 14, 329, 331
Nkuzi Development Association 149 Serengeti National Park, Tanzania 93, 269,
Norway, Government of 96, 304 270–275, 282–283
support to CBNRM in Zambia 203, 205, Serengeti Regional Conservation Strategy 283
207–208, 210–212, 217–218, 222–223 Shinyanga Region, Tanzania 88
Nsefu, Chief 207 Soit Sambu village, Tanzania 279–281, 285
Nyae Nyae conservancy, Namibia 115–116 South Africa
Nyamaluma Training Institute, Zambia 205–206 apartheid 10, 36, 107, 109, 112, 142,
Nyerere, Julius 35, 141 147–149, 151, 153–158, 168–169, 313, 324
Bennde Mutale 147, 154, 163–164, 169
Okavango Delta 55, 58, 68, 70, 241–242, 246, Communal Property Associations 158
252, 254, 257, 263 Contractual National Parks 150, 158–161,
Okavango Community Trust 67–70, 74 163, 167–169
Okavango Kopano Mokoro Trust 252, 256 Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation
Ole Kaparo, Francis 134 Area 46, 144–151, 152, 157, 161, 164–167
Ololosokwan village, Tanzania 273–274, Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park 150,
282–283, 285 157–159, 164–165
Ortello Business Corporation 278, 284 Kalahari Gemsbok National Park 159
Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park 159
Parkipuny, Lazarus 274 Kruger National Park 46, 153–154,
pastoralism 157–161, 163, 165–168
changing livelihoods in East Africa 272 land reform in 23, 46, 148–151, 157–164,
co-existence with wildlife 134, 272 167, 319
economic value in Kenya 6 Madimbo corridor 147–150, 153–155,
in Tanzania 269–286, 317 160–164, 166–168
Pastoralist Indigenous NGOs Forum Makuleke community 46, 154–155,
278–279 157–161, 163, 166, 168–169
transhumance 272 Matshakatini Nature Reserve 155, 161–162,
Pastoralist Indigenous NGOs Forum, 168
Tanzania 278–279 Motlanthe, Kgalema 159
payments for ecosystem services (PES) 297, Mutele, Chief 154, 161, 163
305, 320 Nkuzi Development Association 149
Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Peace Parks Foundation 62–63, 149, 157,
Forest Degradation (REDD) 294–295, 297, 161, 164–166
301–307, 329 Pondoland National Park 159
Peace Parks Foundation 62–63, 149, 157, 161, Resource Africa 149
164–166 South African Defence Force 110, 154–155
Pondoland National Park, South Africa 159 South African National Defence Force 155,
160–164, 168
Rajaji National Park 262 South Africa National Parks
recreational hunting, see hunting, tourist (SANParks) 158–159
Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and tourism in 46, 149, 152–153, 156–157, 159,
Forest Degradation (REDD) 294–295, 297, 161, 164–168, 313
301–307, 329 Venda 154, 169
Resource Africa 149 Vhembe Communal Property
rhino 10, 91, 118, 205 Association 149, 160–164
Rhodes, Cecil John 149, 243 Zuma, Jacob 159
Rhodesia, Southern 36, 38, 154, 301 South African Breweries 279
rule of law 177–178, 192, 221, 299, 318, 320, South African Defence Force 110, 154–155
324 South African National Defence Force 155,
Rumpf, Hanno 110–111, 113 160–164, 168
340 Index

South Africa National Parks (SANParks) Serengeti National Park 93, 269, 270–275,
158–159 282–283
South West Africa People’s Organisation Serengeti Regional Conservation
(SWAPO) 107, 112, 118 Strategy 283
Southern Africa Sustainable Use Specialist Shinyanga Region 88
Group 111 SIDA in 86–87, 97, 101
Southern African Development Community Soit Sambu village 279–281, 285
149, 156 Structural Adjustment in 81, 95, 273
Structural Adjustment Programmes, see Sukenya Farm 279–281, 283–284, 286
International Monetary Fund Tanzania Breweries Ltd 279, 283
Sukenya Farm, Tanzania 279–281, 283–284, Tanzania Forest Conservation Group 85–86
286 Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA) 3, 86,
Survival International 259, 262 91, 101, 275
Swedish International Development Cooperation Tanzania Natural Resource Forum 101, 277
Agency (SIDA) 86–87, 97, 101 Thomson Safaris 279–282, 284
timber trade in 80, 86, 88–90, 97–98, 100
Tanzania tourism in 91, 93–94, 98, 101, 269–272,
agricultural policy 81, 94, 273 274–285, 315
Arash village 278 ujamaa 82, 141
Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) 80, 279, 281 Ujamaa Community Resource Trust 271
decentralization in 90, 94–96, 283 Village Councils 82–84, 93, 95, 97, 273
district councils 82, 90 wildebeest migration 270–271
Eastern Arc Mountains 82, 85 Wildlife Conservation Act of 2009 278
Engusero Sambu village 280 Wildlife Division 92–99, 276–277
Forestry and Beekeeping Division 83, 86–88, Wildlife Management Areas
97–98, 101 (WMAs) 91–94, 96–99, 275, 284–285
Frankfurt Zoological Society 17, 272, 275, wildlife management in 79–80, 91–99,
284 272–275, 284–285, 310, 313, 315, 320, 323,
Game Controlled Areas 278–279 331
GTZ in 91, 96 Tanzania Forest Conservation Group 85–86
Grzimek, Bernhard 272 Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA) 3, 86, 91,
hunting in 91–96, 98, 100 101, 275
Iddi, Said 87, 97 Tchuma Tchato project, Mozambique 45, 228
Iringa Region 88 Thomson Safaris 279–282, 284
Kilimanjaro, Mt 269, 283 timber 6, 14, 20, 33, 36, 80, 86, 88–90, 317
Koronkoro Indigenous Peoples Oriented to tourism
Conservation (KIPOC) 274 and land rights 45, 48, 279–284, 317, 321
land tenure policy 82, 273 and wildlife 7, 20 42–44, 46, 48, 55, 66–72,
Laitayok 280–281 94, 101, 106, 108, 112, 128, 136–137, 140,
Lindi Region 89 168, 177, 251, 257, 269, 271–272, 274–276,
Loliondo 93, 270–286 283–287, 301, 310, 312–313, 329
Maasai 272–287 in Botswana 55–56, 58, 62–63, 65– 72, 249,
miombo woodlands 82, 84, 86–89, 97 252, 256–258, 314
Ngorongoro Conservation Area 95, in Kenya 128, 131–132, 136, 140, 313–314
270–272, 283, 287 in Mozambique 230
Non-consumptive Tourism Regulations 277 in Namibia 4, 106–108, 110, 112–113, 118
Ololosokwan village 273–274, 282–283, 285 in South Africa 46, 149, 152–153, 156–157,
Ortello Business Corporation 278, 284 159, 161, 164–168, 313
Parkipuny, Lazarus 274 in Tanzania 91, 93–94, 98, 101, 269–272,
participatory forest management in 11, 274–285, 312, 315
79–80, 82–91, 96–99, 101, 312, 315–316, 320 in the Okavango Delta 66–72, 249, 252,
pastoralism in 269–273, 275–276 256–258
Pastoralist Indigenous NGOs in Zambia 204, 207, 211, 217, 219
Forum 278–279 in Zimbabwe 41–43, 177, 179, 181, 186
political changes in 99–101 joint venture partnerships 10, 20, 44, 58,
political economy of 80–82, 99 66–72, 93, 98, 270, 274–275, 277–278, 284,
Purko 280–281 287
Rufiji River 89 political economy of 7, 45–46, 56, 285–286,
Selous Conservation Programme 91 310, 312–313, 317, 321, 329
 Index 341

revenues from 6–7, 20, 55–56, 58, 91, 93, 168, 177, 251, 257, 269, 271–272, 274–276,
137, 152–153, 156, 257, 271, 274–275, 285, 283–287, 301, 310, 312–313, 329
287 compensation for damage by 125, 128–130,
Toyota Land Cruiser 207 133, 139
tragedy of the commons 8, 24, 65 economic returns from 9, 91–96, 106,
transfrontier conservation areas 147–153, 128, 132, 181–185, 193, 206, 215–216, 219,
156–160, 167, 313 269–272, 274–275
Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation hunting of, see hunting
Area 46, 144–151, 152, 157, 161, 164–167 in Botswana 55–74, 243–244, 249, 252, 254,
Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park 150, 312–314
157–159, 164–165 Department of Wildlife and National
Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park 159 Parks 57–59, 65, 68, 71–72, 242, 256
Transparency International Corruption indigenous management systems
Perceptions Index 55, 205, 318–319 for 246–247
Tribal Grazing Land Policy, Botswana 243, Wildlife Conservation and National Parks
249, 254 Act of 1992 244
Tribal Land Act of 1968, Botswana 243, 253 in Kenya 11, 14, 20, 121–122, 124–141,
trophy hunting, see hunting, tourist 313–314, 323, 328
Trust for Okavango Cultural and Development Kenya Wildlife Coalition 135
Initiatives (TOCADI), Botswana 258–259 Kenya Wildlife Service 130–134, 136–140
tsetse fly 41, 246 Kenya Wildlife Working Group 133–135,
137, 141
Uganda 6, 11, 81 in Mozambique 227–230, 232–233, 237,
ujamaa, Tanzania 82, 141 328
Ujamaa Community Resource Trust, in Namibia 4, 9–10, 20, 23, 106–119, 312,
Tanzania 271 315–316, 319–320, 325, 328
Ulenga, Ben 114 in South Africa 158, 163, 168, 313
União Nacionale de Camponese, Mozambique in Tanzania 79–80, 91–100, 269–286, 310,
45 313, 315, 320, 323, 331
United Arab Emirates 274 Wildlife Conservation Act of 2009 278
United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs)
Racial Discrimination 286 91–94, 96–99, 275, 284–285
United Nations Framework Convention on in Zambia 14, 203–223, 310, 320
Climate Change (UNFCCC) 294, 302 Zambia Wildlife Act of 1998 220
United States Agency for International Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) 206,
Development (USAID) 16–17 208, 216–223
in Kenya 132 in Zimbabwe 9–10, 14, 41–44, 174, 176–
in Tanzania 96 177, 179–180, 183, 186–188, 193, 196–197,
LIFE Programme, Namibia 111, 115–116 313, 320, 328
NRMP, Botswana 57–58, 60, 66, 68, Wildlife Industries New Development for
109–110, 115 All (WINDFALL) 43
University of Botswana 258 on private lands 9, 46, 108–109, 316
political economy of 3, 7, 14–15, 24–25, 39,
Venda ethnic group 154, 169 44–48, 55–74, 79–80, 91–100, 112–119,
Vhembe Communal Property Association, South 121–122, 124–141, 178, 192, 196–197,
Africa 149, 160–164 222–223, 255, 283–284, 305, 310–317,
Village Action Groups (VAGs), Zambia 208– 319–321, 325
210, 212–216, 218–219, 221, 223 population trends of 9–10, 55, 122, 130,
139–140
water lily 253 property rights in 8–9, 46, 55, 61, 106–113,
West Africa 36, 329 117, 124–127, 180, 254, 314–316
Western, David 131 Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs),
wildebeest 270–271 Tanzania 91–94, 96–99, 275, 284–285
wildlife Wily, Liz Alden 97, 101
and colonialism 39, 91, 124–127, 139, 179, Working Group for Indigenous Peoples of
256, 272 Southern Africa (WIMSA) 258
and pastoralism 234, 272 World Bank 6, 16–18, 75, 224, 273, 304, 331
and tourism 7, 20 42–44, 46, 48, 55, 66–72, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) 17, 86, 189, 210
94, 101, 106, 108, 112, 128, 136–137, 140, in Namibia 111, 115–116
342 Index

Xaxaba, Botswana 242, 246–247, 252–253, South Luangwa National Park 203–208,
256, 257, 259 210, 217, 222–223
Xhanikhwe, see Basarwa, BaXhanikwe tourism in 204, 207, 211, 217, 219
traditional leaders in 204, 207–208, 210–213,
Yellowstone National Park 272 215
Village Action Groups (VAGs) 208–210,
Zambia 212–216, 218–219, 221, 223
Administrative Management for Game Zambia Revenue Authority 219
Management Areas (ADMADE) 109, Zambia Wildlife Act of 1998 220
205–206, 218 Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) 206,
Area Development Committees 208, 216–223
(ADCs) 209–210, 212, 214–215 Zambia Revenue Authority 219
Bell, Richard 208, 210 Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) 206, 208,
Carr, Norman 210 216–223
Chiluba, Frederick 211 Zimbabawe
Commission for Economic Planning and civil society in 178–179, 189–190,
Development 205 CAMPFIRE Association 190, 197–198
Community-based natural resource manage- CAMPFIRE Collaborative Group 176,
ment in 202–223 178–179, 189
Community Resource Boards (CRBs) Centre for Applied Social Sciences, University
208–210, 217–221, 223 of Zimbabwe 110
elephants in 205–207, 223 Communal Areas Management Programme
Game Management Areas (GMAs) for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE),
204–206, 216, 219, 223 Zimbabwe 4, 9–10, 42–43, 47, 66, 74,
hunting in 204, 206–208, 211–212, 215–216, 109–110, 116, 119, 174–199, 212, 214, 227,
219, 222 313, 320, 325
indunas 207, 210, 215, 223 democratic governance in 177–178
Kafue National Park 217, 219, 223 Department of National Parks and Wildlife
Kaunda, Kenneth 203–205, 207–208, 210 Management (DNPWM) 42–43, 175–176,
Kaweche, Gilson 210 180
Kunda chiefdoms 206, 215 economy of 177
Larsen, Thor 210 elections, 2008 15, 196
Lewis, Dale 210 Gonarezhou National Park 157, 179
Luangwa Integrated Rural Development hunting in 38, 41, 43, 181–189, 193,
Authority 214–215 196–197
Luangwa Integrated Resources and land reform 39, 178
Development Project (LIRDP) 205–208, Mahenye Ward 174–175, 179–198
210–220, 222–223 Malipati Safari Area 157
Luangwa Valley 202–208, 212–214, 217–223 Manjinji Pan Sanctuary 157
Lungu, Fedelius 208, 210 Masoka 195
Lupande Development Project 205–206 Movement for Democratic Change
Lupande Game Management Area 203–205, (MDC) 187, 192, 196–197
207, 215, 218–223 Rural District Councils 10, 176, 180–182,
Malama, Chief 213 185–192, 194–195, 197–198
Malama Community Resource Board 220 traditional leaders in 178, 185–187, 191–193
Mambwe District 206–207, 210 wildlife on commercial farmland 9, 43, 46
Mnkhanya, Chief 213 Wildlife Industries New Development for All
Movement for Multiparty Democracy 211 (WINDFALL) 43
Msoro, Chief 213, 223 Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic
National Parks and Wildlife Service Front (ZANU-PF) 3, 178, 187, 189–192,
(NPWS) 205–208, 210–212, 216–217, 222 196–197, 199
Norwegian government support in 203, 205, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic
207–208, 210–212, 217–218, 222–223 Front (ZANU-PF) 3, 178, 187, 189–192,
Nsefu, Chief 207 196–197, 199
Nyamaluma Training Institute 205–206 Zinave National Park, Mozambique 157
poaching in 205, 214 Zuma, Jacob 159