Evolution and Innovation in Wildlife Conservation

Parks and Game Ranches to Transfrontier Conservation Areas

Brian Child, Helen Suich, Spenceley Anna, Helen Suich, Brian Child

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844076345
• eBook ISBN: 9781136566097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

The crucible of innovation in wildlife and habitat conservation is in southern Africa where it has co-evolved with decolonization, political transformation and the rise of development, ownership, management and livelihood debates. Charting this innovation, early chapters deal with the traditional 'fines and fences' conservation that occurred in the colonial and early post-independence period, with subsequent sections focussing on the experimentation and innovation that occurred on private and communal land as a result of the break from these traditional methods. The final section deals with more recent innovations in the sector, focussing on building and strengthening the relationships between parks and society. Importantly, the book provides a data-rich summary of experimentation with more inclusive models of conservation in terms of ecological, social, political and economic indicators.

Published with the Southern African Sustainable Use Specialist Group (SASUSG) of IUCN

Part I

Overview

1

Conservation in Transition

Brian Child

This book is a sister volume to Parks in Transition: Biodiversity, Rural Development and the Bottom Line (Child, 2004). It chronicles southern Africa’s search for a new conservation paradigm that is more politically resilient and relevant to society. The book includes four sections providing case studies that reflect the temporal evolution of these new ideas. Part II describes the evolution of state protected areas using case studies from four countries. The period 1930 to 1970 was one of energetic park building, resulting in globally important parks like Kruger, Hwange, Chobe, South Luangwa, Etosha, Serengeti and Tsavo. Towards the end of this period, conservation was strengthened by recruiting professional conservation managers and researchers. These professionals realized that parks alone could not conserve the region’s spectacular wildlife and ecosystems, and off-reserve conservation had to be a part of the conservation matrix. This led to policy experimentation with conservation on privately held land, which is described in Part III. The third phase of experimentation, described in Part IV, was the transfer of the economic model for wildlife utilization developed on private (and, in some cases, state) land to the more complex socio-economic conditions of southern Africa’s communal lands. Coming full circle, many of the ideas developed to encourage communities and farmers to manage wildlife sustainably are now being applied back to the management of protected areas, and this is described in Part V, as are other, more recent, innovations in conservations.

These changes have taken the conceptual development of conservation through several phases related to 1) biological conservation, biogeography and the ecosystem approach; 2) economic instrumentalism based on property rights and neo-liberal concepts of resource allocation and market economies; 3) political ecology and political organization related to environmental justice and the challenge of how communities and landholders should be organized to control and manage conservation; and 4) institutional ecology that tries to understand how the way conservation is organized and governed affects power and incentives, and therefore conservation outcomes.

Scholar–practitioners and inductive learning

The purpose of this book is to provide an opportunity for many of the scholar-practitioners who have spent years (or more often decades) developing innovative conservation models to share their experiences. Common conceptual threads weave their way through these case studies, illustrating an hypothesis about the relationship between humans and nature conservation that is still evolving. Put briefly, these are encapsulated by the ‘price, proprietorship, subsidiarity hypothesis’: in other words, if wildlife is valuable, if this value is captured by the landholder, and if rights are devolved to the lowest level, the probability of successful wildlife and natural resource conservation is greatly increased (Child, 2002). As illustrated throughout this book, this simple statement includes the principles of property rights and liberal economics, the principles of individual discretion and democratization, and concepts relating to the way institutions and organizations are designed.

Rihoy et al (2007) and Hutton et al (2006) comment that the scholarly literature has recently been critical of community conservation, taking the line that simplistic approaches have been applied to complex and multidimensional problems and that, for example, internal differentiation within ‘communities’ has been glossed over. In responding to these, and earlier, critiques, Barrow and Murphree (2001) agree that donor projects may be inexcusably simplistic, but make the point that this criticism is unfair if it is aimed at practitioners of sustainable use, who are extremely familiar with the complexities of concepts such as community, political economy and the like because they deal with them every day. Indeed they suggest a different problem: that scholars are ignorant of the knowledge being accumulated by practitioners because it resides in oral learning networks and the grey literature of reports and analyses. This knowledge is greatly under-represented in the peer-reviewed literature; indeed, with a few notable exceptions such as Marshall Murphree, universities have played a surprisingly minor role in this learning process. One aim of this book is to begin to close the gap between practice and scholarship.

In 2003, busy practitioners who are members of the Southern African Sustainable Use Specialist Group (SASUSG) and intimately involved with key park, private and community conservation programmes in southern Africa, agreed to write up their experiences. The value of this compilation is that the authors have all been directly involved with the programmes they describe, so their ideas are honed and ‘peer-reviewed’ in the furnace of making things work. Some of the conceptual thinking related to this compilation was published in Parks in Transition: Biodiversity, Rural Development and the Bottom Line (Child, 2004). This volume provides the conservation stories behind these ideas, to illustrate a new way of thinking about conservation that is emerging in the southern African region.

Although there is synchronicity between key international events and the manifestation of community conservation and sustainable use in southern Africa, this book will show that these ideas emerged locally over many years with deep roots in local experiences. They were driven by field scientists working from first principles, with limited exposure to the plethora of international meetings and pronouncements that are such a feature of contemporary conservation. For example, the idea of conserving wildlife through sustainable use emerged in the 1960s, almost two decades before the World Conservation Strategy (IUCN, 1980). Indeed, southern Africa’s practical experience influenced, as much as was influenced by, important narrative-setting forums such as the 1982 World Parks Congress held in Bali, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN’s) shift towards people and sustainable use.

Three phases in the political economy of wildlife

This book is about changes in the way wildlife is used and controlled by people; it is about the changing political economy of wildlife, and the policy and management responses to this. It describes devolved, incentive-led conservation and the importance of matching the rising value of wildlife with mechanisms to ensure that these incentives reach and are controlled by land-holders. The ideology governing park and wildlife management is not nearly as set in stone as we might imagine. Rather, it is a reflection of the societal priorities of the time that is surprisingly flexible.

Frontier economy

The tone for wildlife conservation in the 20th century was set by the white man’s abuse of wildlife in the 1800s. On the frontier of European settlement in southern Africa (with its many parallels to North America) some 20 million wild animals were eliminated between 1780 and 1880, including local and complete extinctions (i.e. bloubok and quagga) (www.kruger2canyons.com). The introduction of technology such as firearms, medicine, fences, railways and markets increased the profitability of hunting in an economy lacking the institutions to control the use of increasingly scarce resources, so that they were seriously over-utilized.¹ Perhaps more importantly, much of the land was converted to agriculture.

Conservation legislation evolved out of the Cape Colony, and entrenched the Roman Dutch system of law (Anderson and Grove, 1988). Fuelled by fears of soil erosion and deforestation, the earliest conservation legislation was promulgated for flora in the Cape Colony in the 1820s (Anderson and Grove, 1988). Following the massive killing of wildlife for food, profit and to make way for agriculture, the Cape Colony protected elephant and buffalo (1858), and the 1886 Cape Act for the Preservation of Game was the first systematic conservation legislation in Africa.

Protected areas, centralized control and banning of commercial use

Concern about the elimination of millions of wild animals on the African frontier led the African colonial powers to draft the 1900 London Convention Concerning the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa. Although never ratified, this sought to standardize game laws across colonial Africa, regulate hunting and establish game reserves (IUCN, 2004). These sentiments were echoed in the more forceful 1933 Convention Relative to the Preservation of Fauna and Flora in their Natural State (the ‘London Convention’). This set the legislative tone for African conservation and radically altered the political economy of wildlife into a configuration that reverberates through the conservation community to this day. The London Convention greatly encouraged the setting aside of large areas for game preservation and set in motion a wave of national park establishment. Commercial utilization of wildlife was roundly rejected, presumably because it was associated with pictures of greed and slaughter, but hunting by sportsmen for non-commercial reasons remained acceptable. New laws disenfranchised land-holders, both white and black, from using wildlife sensibly.² Another recommendation with long-lasting consequences was that the control of wildlife be centralized (Heijnsbergen, 1997).

Consequently, colonial officials became responsible for managing wildlife not only in parks, but also on farmlands and in traditional African areas. Initially, many of these officials were problem-animal control officers, with many game departments growing out of this function. National parks, and wildlife outside of parks, became the responsibility of a single state agency (except in South Africa where wildlife was controlled by the provinces). Well-intended, and appropriate to the frontier economy during and immediately after colonialization, the London Convention implanted governing frame-works that greatly undervalued wildlife: killing animals for sport and (sometimes) for low-value uses like food was acceptable, but using it for financial gain was not.

Across southern and East Africa a world class system of national parks evolved – with Kruger, Hwange, Luangwa, Serengti, Tsavo and Queen Elizabeth national parks, for example, becoming household names associated with Africa’s spectacular wildlife. Parks were a very successful innovation. Areas were set aside to protect wildlife (initially from white adventurers), and these areas soon became famous for ‘big game’ tourism. They also began to attract dedicated and professional managers. Prompted by the emerging science of ecology and the theory of island biogeography (MacArthur and Wilson, 1967), and noticing the importance of off-reserve dispersal areas for migrating herbivores in East African wildlife, and elephants and other large mammals in southern Africa, wildlife authorities concluded that parks were not big enough to conserve nature. Subsequent research into species–area curves suggest that conserving 10 per cent of the Earth’s surface falls short of what is necessary to conserve most biodiversity (Hutton and Leader-Williams, 2003). Moreover, from the 1950s onwards a rapid demographic and agricultural transition began placing considerable pressure on land, including land outside national parks. A landscape approach was needed to protect wildlife and wild lands. The problem was that the wildlife outside parks was being rapidly replaced by the cow and the plough; wildlife could neither be owned nor utilized for profit, and could therefore not compete commercially against crops and livestock, and the state could not regulate nor police this problem away. The structure of the rural economy had changed and the ideas in the London Convention were undermining their own goals. It was time for a new political economic model for wildlife conservation. This volume shows how this new approach led, over several decades, to the emergence of the principles of sustainable use (see SASUSG, 1996).

Devolved, incentive-led conservation

Wise use, the soil and accountability of policymakers

Southern Africa has always had a different socio-cultural vision for conservation than Europe or America (Anderson and Grove, 1988). This has been driven by a rural, rather than an urban, economy and political constituency, and has been associated with an obsession with soil erosion and environmental health (Beinart, 1984). It is not surprising, therefore, that the home-grown conservation narrative came to be framed in terms of the wise use of land rather than single species or wilderness conservation. We also observe that this narrative was developed at the nexus between scientists, policymakers and extension agents on the one hand, and land users on the other, in a process of iteratively solving real-life problems that came to be known as adaptive management.

Early experiments in sustainable use and the FAO Special Project

As early as the 1960s, the term ‘use it or lose it’ gained currency. A series of experiments with game cropping were undertaken in Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, Kenya and Uganda (see Parker, 2004 for descriptions of East Africa), spawning a considerable literature about the potential ecological, production and behavioural advantages of wildlife (reviewed in Child, 1988). In Kenya, the participation of local people (the Walanguli elephants hunters) was proposed (Parker, 2004), while in Northern Rhodesia, the return of benefits to the Nsefu chieftainship was championed (Norman Carr, pers. comm.). Under a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) project, the role of wildlife in the future economy of rural people was promoted scientifically, and Riney and others (for example Talbot et al. 1965; Riney and Hill, 1967; Parker, 2004) developed a philosophy of sustainable use that began to be reflected in the global discourse (for example IUCN, 1980; Brundtland, 1987).

As always, personalities play a significant role in innovation. The renowned mammalogist and Director of Museums in Zimbabwe, Reay Smithers, recognized that wildlife would not survive outside protected areas unless landholders derived economic value from it. Much impetus for a changing conservation philosophy was provided when he invited three Fulbright Scholars (Ray Dasmann, Archie Mossman and Thane Riney, who studied under Starker Leopold at the University of Berkeley) to Zimbabwe (and South Africa) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The hegemony of the London Convention was first broken by Zimbabwe’s Wild Life Conservation Act of 1960, which allowed farmers some freedom to experiment with game cropping and profit-oriented trophy hunting (Child, 1995). This allowed the Fulbright Scholars to experiment with wildlife utilization on ranches in Zimbabwe, where they also introduced new ideas about ecosystem and park management. Dasmann then joined the IUCN and influenced policy through his extensive environmental writing. Riney, who was more field-oriented, undertook a major study of wildlife’s potential in Africa through FAO’s Africa Special Project (Riney and Hill, 1967), before heading ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Boxes, Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• PART I. Overview
• PART II. History of State-Led Conservation
• PART III. Conservation on Private Land
• PART IV. Community-Based Natural Resource Management
• PART V. Integrating Wildlife and Parks into the Social Landscape
• PART VI. Conclusion
• Author Biographies
• Index