Rights Resources and Rural Development
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Rights Resources and Rural Development

Community-based Natural Resource Management in Southern Africa

Christo Fabricius, Eddie Koch, Stephen Turner, Hector Magome, Christo Fabricius, Eddie Koch, Stephen Turner, Hector Magome

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eBook - ePub

Rights Resources and Rural Development

Community-based Natural Resource Management in Southern Africa

Christo Fabricius, Eddie Koch, Stephen Turner, Hector Magome, Christo Fabricius, Eddie Koch, Stephen Turner, Hector Magome

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About This Book

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is an approach that offers multiple related benefits: securing rural livelihoods; ensuring careful conservation and management of biodiversity and other resources; and empowering communities to manage these resources sustainably. Recently, however, the CBNRM concept has attracted criticism for failing in its promise of delivering significant local improvements and conserving biodiversity in some contexts. This book identifies the flaws in its application, which often have been swept under the carpet by those involved in the initiatives. The authors analyse them, and propose remedies for specific circumstances based on the lessons learned from CBNRM experience in southern Africa over more than a decade. The result is essential reading for all researchers, observers and practitioners who have focused on CBNRM in sustainable development programmes as a means to overcome poverty and conserve ecosystems in various parts of the globe. It is a vital tool in improving their methods and performance. In addition, academics, students and policy-makers in natural resource management, resource economics, resource governance and rural development will find it a very valuable and instructive resource.

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Yes, you can access Rights Resources and Rural Development by Christo Fabricius, Eddie Koch, Stephen Turner, Hector Magome, Christo Fabricius, Eddie Koch, Stephen Turner, Hector Magome in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Ecology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781136558047
Subtopic
Ecology
Edition
1

Part 1

Synthesis

Chapter 1

The fundamentals of community-
based natural resource management

CHRISTO FABRICIUS

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO COMMUNITY-BASED
NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Although not well documented, there is some evidence that elaborate resource management systems prevailed among indigenous African people before the arrival of European colonists. Traditional institutions such as kings, chiefs, headmen and healers played an important role in regulating and monitoring resource use. Examples include the royal hunting preserves of the amaZulu and amaSwati people, and the kgotla system of land management practised by the Batswana people.
It is too often assumed that the traditional systems were characterized by a free-for-all anarchic exploitation of resources. While it is possible that in some exceptionally richly endowed regions with very sparse populations the regulatory may have been minimal or even non-existent, most communities had evolved systems which in varying degrees conserved resources and ensured their equitable distribution among households (Ghai, 1992).
Traditionally, people relied heavily on the abundant wild natural resources that surrounded them. As a result, people in Africa generally appreciated the value of nature, and incorporated nature into their worldviews, metaphors, folklore and belief systems (see Chapter 6). Many of their systems of governance included rules and procedures designed to regulate the use and management of natural resources. Practices that were geared towards enhancing ecosystem services and maintaining their resilience were developed through adaptive management or ‘trial and error’. These practices have been carried over from generation to generation through oral testimony and are now recognized as customary (Folke et al, 1998).
The range of people’s resilience-enhancing practices included customs that created small-scale disturbances – for example, ‘pulse’ hunting, where animals were heavily hunted during certain months and then left alone for the rest of the year (see Chapter 18) and patch burning to enrich grazing for wildlife (Feely, 1986; Kepe and Scoones, 1999) – and customs to nurture biodiversity stocks to assist renewal after resource depletion – for example, taboos where certain resources were prohibited from being used at certain times of the month or year, or where certain plants and animals are out of bounds for certain families or clans. Food taboos were broken in times of extreme scarcity, suggesting that their function was partly to nurture resources upon which to fall back during crises (see Chapter 10). Animals such as the python and lion were believed to be the custodians of important landscapes and resources, often through human spirit mediums that represented these animals. Sacred forests are scattered all over the southern African landscape (Barrow, 1996); these forests, together with abandoned fields and settlements, result in a rich mosaic of habitat patches that are strongly influenced by human impacts. In Botswana, hunter-gatherer Basarwa were able to move around in response to ecosystem change and wildlife dynamics, burn vegetation selectively, and choose a livelihood strategy from a range of possibilities that would best suit their particular circumstances. Although many of these practices still exist, they were much more prevalent and effective in the past than now because of low human population densities, people’s minimal impact on the land and their lifestyles, which were often nomadic.
Local institutions such as chiefs and headmen also played an important ecological role, setting boundaries that restricted natural resource use and enforcing them. In the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa, research conducted among local communities showed a clear decline in the condition of indigenous forests after the headman (Ibhodi) system collapsed (primarily due to the corrupting influences of apartheid-era social engineering) (Rhodes University et al, 2001). In Lesotho’s communal rangelands, chiefs and headmen controlled the use of grazing and managed a system of controlled grazing areas (maboella), often with the assistance of the people themselves. These comprised grazing land set aside to recover; scarce resource areas; fields that were periodically opened to everyone – for example, for the grazing of crop residues; and special grazing reserves in the lowlands (see Chapter 11). These traditional leaders often got their legitimacy from the spirit mediums mentioned above. The link between leadership, land and life was undisputed, implicit and strong.

The arrival of colonial powers in southern Africa

The colonists arrived in the Cape during the mid 17th century and steadily worked their way northwards. Soon after their arrival, the Portuguese, British and particularly the Dutch colonists started hunting large quantities of game, especially elephant. They would disappear into the interior for months and return with wagonloads of ivory (Mostert, 1992). Products of the hunt, especially ivory, were also traded throughout the subcontinent, and local chiefs and their followers in some regions began to intensify their hunting efforts in order to be part of the growing trade in ivory and other animal products during this period. British administrators and the wealthier settler farmers engaged in hunting for recreation and sport. The combined impact of these intensified hunting activities caused a severe drop in animal numbers throughout southern Africa. Some writers speak of a ‘killing spree’ by African and settler hunting parties (Carruthers, 1989). Constant hunting resulted in piles of skulls of plains animals such as black wildebeest and springbok being visible across the veld, in what Mostert (1992) describes as scenes of ‘perpetual havoc’.
In 1775, a Swedish botanist at the Cape named A Sparmann pointed out that the Dutch farmers, who were producing meat and milk for the market, could have damaged the land much more than the nomadic Khoikhoi, who constantly moved their livestock before grazing could have a lasting impact on the land (Wilson, 1970). Economic pressure on the land during the late 18th and early 19th centuries induced a change in traditional practices. While the Africans used hoes to till the soil, the Europeans brought ploughs that were unsuitable to the African climate (Maquet, 1972), accelerating soil erosion and disturbing natural soil profiles and processes. This played an important role in the development of the environmental degradation experienced today. Many invasive alien plant species and animals were brought by the colonial military. Invasive alien species such as Opuntia monacantha, deliberately introduced by the French to southern Africa, caused tremendous damage as these plants were able to outcompete indigenous vegetation (McNeely, 2002).
The tribal population increased rapidly as a result of the cattle revolution; however, simultaneously, the land to the south was gradually taken over by Europeans (Kuper, 1963; Yudelman, 1964). Conflicts over land and resources escalated. The Kruger National Park, for example, has been characterized by conflicts of interest since its inception:
White farmers wanted game reserves to be opened for grazing, the Department of Mines raised the question of valuable minerals in the reserves, land owners wanted to control hunting in their private farms, the Department of Lands wanted the reserve for white settlement, while the Department of Native Affairs wanted land for the relocation of Africans (Carruthers, 1993).

Perceptions of scarcity: The emergence of top-down preservation

By the early 1920s, law-makers started realizing that natural resources would not last for ever, and that something needed to be done to conserve the dwindling wildlife and forests, and to combat land degradation (Schroeder, 1999). The first signs of preservationist sentiment emerged from the ranks of colonial administrators on the Indian Ocean islands off the east coast of the subcontinent. Because these islands, which were used by ships plying the Cape trading route from Europe to the Middle East, were small, it was possible to detect land degradation and deforestation much earlier than on mainland Africa. The proportional impact was also much higher. Because of this, early conservation legislation was developed on these islands and then exported to the Cape Colony (Beinart, 1990; Carruthers, 1989).
Conservation ideologies in southern Africa were heavily influenced by political and economic events on other continents. Impressionist paintings of Edenic landscapes, devoid of labour and portraying peace and tranquility, reflected a popular consciousness that underlay the British colonial drive for ‘wild’ protected areas, without people, where animals could be observed in ‘pristine’ environments (Neuman, 1998). Colonial administrators, alarmed by the American dust bowl of the depression during the 1930s, made soil conservation compulsory for peasant farmers (Schroeder, 1999). Management ideologies such as the concept of ‘climax’ vegetation – that is, pristine vegetation at the pinnacle of its development, with no or minimal disturbance (Schroeder, 1999) – Hardin’s (1968) ‘Tragedy of the commons’ essay and beliefs in Malthusian economics, which postulated that resources eventually have to run out if human populations keep growing, further fuelled the move towards conserving landscapes devoid of people and towards returning disturbed landscapes to their ‘original’ undisturbed form.
In 1900, foreign ministers representing the African colonial powers – Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Spain – gathered in London to sign the world’s first international conservation treaty: the Convention for the Preservation of Animals. In its report on the conference, the Times of London described the situation in southern Africa:
It is necessary to go far into the interior to find the nobler forms of antelope, and still further if the hunter wants to pursue the elephant, the rhinoceros or the giraffe. It is perfectly clear that very soon those animals, unless something is done to prevent their extermination, will be stamped out as completely as the dodo. To some extent this process is inevitable. The advance of civilization, with its noise and agitation, is fatally disturbing the primitive forms of animal life. Commerce, moreover, discovers continually some new demand for trophies of the chase. The horns, the skins and the plumage of beasts and birds have an increasing market value. It is not surprising, therefore, that men of science have become alarmed at the prospect of the extinction of many of the most interesting and characteristic types of zoological development (Bonner, 1993).
In the early part of the century, an influential lobby of landowners, mining magnates and colonial administrators in the colonies secured tighter legislation for the preservation of game reserves, largely to protect wildlife (Beinart, 1990). But many people were excluded in the process:
Africans and poorer whites – those for whom hunting was still of some importance in subsistence and survival – were finally to be excluded from hunting on private lands and in the new game reserves. Hunting for subsistence or trade goods – ‘biltong hunting’ – was conceived as laziness, a term increasingly identified with the capacity to avoid wage labour. Trespass onto private land to hunt animals, which still in law belonged to no one, became poaching (Beinart, 1990).
Beinart argues that because whites had disproportionate political power in South Africa, game reserves were usually located in the segregated ethnic ‘homelands’ or on lands made marginal by low rainfall, poor soils, malaria and tsetse fly. People in these areas were poor and lacked political representation, and were less able to resist land alienation than people in the commercial agricultural regions. Conservation thus became highly politicized and was intricately bound up with the political imperatives of segregation, (Koch et al, 1990).
The colony of Rhodesia, later to become the independent states of Zimbabwe and Zambia, was colonized during the late 19th century by British settlers. The preservationist laws that had been developed in the Cape Colony were thus extended north into the British colonies across the Limpopo River. In Rhodesia, tribal areas became buffer zones where subsistence and commercial hunting was allowed around most protected areas.
In the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique (Portuguese East Africa) and Angola, legislation to create formally protected wildlife areas was only passed during the 1960s and 1970s. In Mozambique, the Banine, Zinave and Maputa elephant reserves were promulgated as late as 1969 (Meneses, 1994). In Angola, proposals were made during the same period to create a network of new protected areas that would set aside 6 per cent of the land and protect up to 90 per cent of the country’s biological richness. War in the post-colonial period ensured that these plans were stillborn (Huntley and Matos, 1992).
In the then Basutoland, the colonial administration became very concerned about land and soil degradation during the 1930s. During the 1970s, a number of donor-funded land reclamation initiatives were launched in independent Lesotho. Researchers made wild claims that the rangeland ...

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