The village conserves its sacred grove, national conservation
authorities plan within their own state boundaries, while international bodies
concern themselves with world heritage sites
Kingdon 1989
The vocabulary, perceptions and
interest of the three have very little overlap even if they share a common
interest in conserving wildlife. Much of conventional conservation, although it
may seek to involve local interests, is centralized and imposed and conservation, like tourism, can only be
successful in settings where the affected local communities obtain tangible
economic returns and cultural incentives for its implementation.
During the colonial era in the
first half of the twentieth century, management of protected areas in West
Africa shifted from traditional to state-run systems. This followed an
internationally established system of national parks and reserves sanctioned by
international conventions such as the Society for the Protection of Fauna of
the Empire which emphasised the need for national parks and drew heavily on a
scientific approach to the environment and its management. This is a trend
which has continued into the post-colonial period, with large areas gazetted as
national parks and other such protected areas.
This model was heavily influenced
by western science and conservation organisations, and often local communities find
themselves marginalised, facing restrictions from an outside authority that
denies them the right to use the resources they have depended upon, in a
coercive form of protectionism that ignores the needs of the people and often
excluded them from protected areas. This is a symptom of programmes not only in
West Africa, but across the continent.
Community-based conservation
(CBC) came as a response to both alienating protectionist policies of the past
and to the economic concerns that many rural people face. Advocates of CBC
argue that the approach can be effective because it relates back to
pre-colonial African conservation practices that used community-based
constraints to regulate resource use, and it is a means by which rural Africans
can benefit materially from protecting wildlife. CBC programmes follow a
‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top-down’ approach, and have three major aims: (1)
allowing people living near protected lands to participate in land-use policy
and management decisions; (2) giving people proprietorship or ownership over
wildlife resources; and (3) giving local people economic benefit from wildlife
conservation.
A common problem in
community-based conservation programmes is that often the needs of local people
are considered primarily as a strategy to gain their acceptance of the
conservation aspect. This kind of situation can create difficulties in
long-term sustainability as enough money must be generated for local people to
receive significant financial gain indefinitely. It is questionable whether
sufficient employment and revenue can be generated to prevent exploitation of
natural resources. There is also often doubt as to whether the economic return
to rural people from CBC programmes can be high enough that people will not
eventually look for economic alternatives. Simultaneous achievement of social,
economic and conservation goals is a challenge.
By their nature, protected areas are
attractive to tourists, through whom significant contributions to conservation
costs can be obtained. However, if communities are excluded, they see no
benefit from conservation or tourism, and are often even be forced off their
farming land by the expanding boundaries of ‘successful’ conservation
initiatives, forcing many into poverty or to turn to other less sustainable
livelihood options such as poaching.
For CBC and tourism to succeed they
must be flexible enough to cope with a growing number of extremely poor people
who depend on a subsistence existence and whose greatest goal is to gain
economic security. Policies that restrict responses to changing circumstances,
“forced primitivism” and can lead to poverty traps, may be a problem when the
needs of wildlife and wildlife watchers are emphasized over the needs of
people.
