![]()
Chapter 1
Introduction
Brian Child
In 1903, the president of the US, Theodore Roosevelt, dedicated a monument on which is written: ‘For the benefit and enjoyment of the people – Yellowstone National Park, created by an Act of Congress, March 1, 1872’. Thus was born the modern concept of a national park. Managed by national agencies, national parks are set aside for the benefit of people, and their importance has been repeatedly emphasized by such landmark events as the London Convention of 1933, which also defined the purpose of national parks,1 and more recently by criteria established through the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). National parks are seen as the cornerstone of the world's conservation efforts, with a target that each nation sets aside 10 per cent of its land in this manner.
However, national parks are latecomers to the protected-area movement. For thousands of years people have been setting aside and protecting areas of natural value. Some Arabian hemas are more than 1000 years old, as are sacred groves and the temples of Asia. These protected areas are not usually managed by national agencies, nor is use prohibited in them. Indeed, they are usually set aside by local communities to conserve environments of value to them – fodder for droughts, animals for hunting, habitats for bees – or are sanctified for their beauty or calm.
With the colonization of southern Africa, a model of conservation based on strictly preserved national parks and the prohibition of commercial use of wildlife outside them was imposed, not only on traditional communities but also on a more pragmatic conservation ethos based on the wise use of the soil, forest and their products (see Chapter 4). This may have been a reasonable short-term response to the excess of the frontier period, characterized as it was by unfettered open-access predation of natural resources, leading to the slaughter of millions of head of game, often to subsidize the building of nations or farms. However, this response misaligned and undervalued incentives in the less dramatic, but even more damaging, period of settlement that followed exploration: the land was cut up into farms, and wildlife, which damaged crops and threatened or competed with livestock, was insidiously but effectively annihilated by land-use practices that did not value wildlife legislation that prevented all commercial use and controlled hunting. This legislation no longer addressed the central problem. It is highly appropriate to quote the Southern Africa Sustainable Use Specialist Group (SASUSG; ‘sausage’ as it is called) (1996) conclusions: ‘A common perception is that unsustainable exploitation (overuse) is the greatest threat [to wildlife]. We argue that, in terrestrial situations, the greater threat lies in natural systems being replaced with other land uses.’
Forty years ago, the realization dawned that the real threat to wildlife was not illegal or commercial hunting, sensationalist as this is, but wildlife's inability to compete economically with alternative uses of the land. It was being replaced by the plough and the cow, even in areas where one would expect a diverse and robust spectrum of indigenous animals to have a comparative advantage. Thus began a search for solutions that in many ways brought us back to the concepts underlying ancient protected areas – that wildlife and natural resources must usually be locally managed and be of local benefit to survive.
Often originating in national park agencies, but sometimes from persons interested in the health of the soil or agricultural diversification, experimentation began when private landholders were given the rights to manage and benefit from their wildlife in the early 1960s. This effectively denationalized wildlife, and this transformation from a national to a private resource breathed new life into wildlife conservation. Thus was born the ‘new’ paradigm of incentive-led, inclusive conservation, and the numerous innovations that it spawned. Tens, and then hundreds and now thousands of landholders have replaced normal agricultural activities in whole or in part with natural systems and wildlife, sometimes merely for the pleasure and because they are proprietors, and sometimes for profit. When economists and ecologists demonstrated that this was better for the land, better for the wildlife and provided more jobs and more profit, a movement was born that attempted to transfer this success to communal lands. With the economic advantages of wildlife developed and demonstrated on private land, the commercial model was easily transferable. The next challenge was the complexity of organizing remote rural communities into common-property management units, giving rise to fascinating experimentation and literature on governance, organizational and political theory within the community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) movement. While the World Bank's cutting-edge literature (World Bank, 2002) advocates the theory that the best way to encourage development is to provide poor people with truly discretionary financing, the CBNRM movement has already experimented with cash distribution and wildlife dividends and shown just how powerful fiscal devolution and discretionary financing can be. Governance and democracy are critical issues to the CBNRM movement which also faces the reactionary forces of ‘aborted devolution’ as those in authority recognize the grass-roots power that these experiments can release.
With this reinvention of ancient wisdom have come great strides in conservation, wildlife, land and economic development, albeit sometimes with strident opposition to the commercialization and use of wildlife and to inclusive, devolutionary processes (in other words the democratization of control). This movement has now come full circle. The performance of private, and in some cases community, conservation are showing up national parks. They are creating more benefits, and usually foster as much and often more conservation than national parks, yet are costing the national treasury nothing. Many national parks are also losing favour with national constituencies, and their funding and superstructures are crumbling from neglect. The paradox is that many national parks are doing particularly badly at just the time that it has been demonstrated that conservation, at least of Africa's spectacular megafauna, has within itself the economic seeds of its own perpetuity. This poses several critical questions for national parks, which this book sets out to identify and begin to answer or at least to draw out.
The first of these is the central political economic question of power and accountability: who are these parks to serve? The national park movement has been highly centralized, even hegemonic, and has so prevented experimentation and evolution that our answers can only be tentative. There are not enough national parks managed privately, by communities or deliberately to encourage economic benefit or local control. Nevertheless, the few indications that we have point to the advantages of a return to the ancient wisdom where protected areas primarily benefit and are integrated with the locality and local people, and where they are deliberately managed to provide benefits with the condition that no irreversible ecological damage is caused. In the context of transitional socio-economies, and recognizing the importance of aligning protected-area goals with the needs of their legitimate constituencies, we investigate this shift of primacy from biodiversity conservation to economic benefit. This suggests that maximizing economic value also maximizes conservation benefits, a conclusion that is counter-intuitive only when conservation is viewed as a narrow biological problem, but not when sustainability is seen as having social, political and economic, as well as biological, roots.
By changing the question of ‘who’ park conservation is for from global to local, we also radically alter the question of ‘what’ national parks are for. In this, perhaps, was the biggest surprise to us all. While we did not expect to find that the goals for national parks that adequately took into account the social, economic and political realities of societies in developing countries, what began to emerge was of integrity and commitment derailed and ineffective park management for lack of clearly defined objectives. National park agencies had so many demands they did not know what to focus on and, as Drucker (1973, p144) says, nothing is ever accomplished unless scarce resources are concentrated on a few priorities. Because we cannot manage for something we cannot describe, we therefore need to discuss what exactly conservation should be, so that we can outline the performance accountability of public park conservation agencies.
In southern Africa, we are just touching the beginnings of a new paradigm that aligns protected-area management more closely with the needs of non-affluent societies. Some new ideas are emerging. First, is the starting point that national parks are a common pool resource set aside on behalf of society. Our societies, like many in the world, are in transition from poverty and central planning to, hopefully, sustainable livelihoods and democratic governance. To bring alignment with their constituencies, parks must provide what societies need, which in this context are usually values more tangible than normally associated with parks – namely jobs and economic growth. As we shall continually emphasize, this does not mean, and should not mean, a sacrificing of ecological productivity or diversity. Second, we need to make national parks accountable for their performance. On a political level, we need to learn how to make parks answerable to society while avoiding the problems of elite predation. Managerially, accountability requires that we set and quantify goals far more precisely than in the past. Third, park agency structures are inefficient managerially. They also represent mechanisms that are structured to parks rather than ordinary people. This presents opportunities to develop management systems that are significantly more effective with issues such as the localization of parks, decentralization and performance management emerging as important.
In writing this book we draw on the collective experience of some 100 southern African conservationists, and a great deal of experimentation across the region, some led by remarkable people and others that are a force of circumstances – hungry people sometimes have to find solutions. SASUSG, a regional network of people working in government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), communities and the private sector, has been privileged to be a part of this learning process. In the past, SASUSG has largely been an advocate of the rights of people to benefit from their resources, in the belief that conservation is best served by internalizing as many of the benefits of wildlife as possible. SASUSG and its members have collectively developed, and are still developing, a variety of conceptual tools to guide and improve resource use: the economics of wildlife, and particularly the impacts of proprietorship (especially the lack of it), taxation and perverse incentives; governance, democracy and equity as it relates to the socio-economic uplift of rural communities; the political economics of shifting power and benefit from the central techno-bureaucratic authorities to thousands of rural people, and the like. Indeed, SASUSG's core belief and experience is that conservation will be most effective when placed in the hands of landholders made responsible by sensible institutions that empower landholders and align and internalize costs and benefits at the level of land units.
In the past two decades, much of the focus has been on private conservation and, particularly, on CBNRM. The management of national parks has been woefully neglected. This book is the first step in redressing this imbalance. It began as a collective effort to bring together many of the experiences from across this diverse region, most of which remain undocumented and unanalysed. We are concerned that this oral knowledge is entering the formal literature largely through secondary or tertiary papers prepared by outsiders, not by the people who initiated and managed these innovations. Therefore members from across the region were tasked with bringing together their experiences in a series of case studies, some 50 of which will comprise volume 2 of this initiative. Using these experiences, individuals volunteered or were persuaded to synthesize these experiences into what has now become Volume 1, this book. Many of these issues were discussed at a workshop in Skukuza, South Africa, in April 2003. At this workshop, it was also decided that SASUSG should progress from advocating sustainable use towards improving the mechanisms that make use sustainable. SASUSG's contribution to the evolution and conceptualization of the paradigm of landholder responsibility and sustainable use would be best served by working with landholders, and especially national agencies, to develop mechanisms for the self-assessment of conservation performance that also provide performance measures to support a process of peer review and learning. But this is for the future.
As the Skukuza workshop demonstrated to us, we are at the beginning of a learning experience where new ideas are rapidly formed, some to be rejected. This book is written to learn from the experiences of southern Africa, and to share lessons with many conservationists around the world who are also dealing with the unprecedented speed of change. What we offer is a compilation of a huge variety of experiences from almost First World South Africa to war-recovering Mozambique, from dry or empty countries like Namibia and Botswana to crowded Malawi, and to a wide range of governance experiences. What makes this region special is its experimentation, born of both desperation and inspiration, and fuelled by the growing value of wildlife and the determination to harvest this value for conservation. With landholders and communities now managing conservation as a business, there is far more experimentation and innovation than when responsibility was monopolized centrally. The learning experience is further improved by the diversity of disciplines that SASUSG and others represent: conservation biologists, wildlife economists, social and political scientists, trying to understand power and property rights and, more recently, emerging experiences with political intuitions and organizational and management theory. Although truly a hotchpotch, in this complexity lies conservation progress.
In Chapter 2, Graham Child, who represents the generation that built parks and laid the first seeds of private and community conservation, presents a historical perspective of the changes and driving forces behind conservation in southern Africa. This, like all the other chapters, draws on inputs and case studies from many other members of SASUSG. The first major innovation was private sector conservation, the theory and results of which are described by Ivan Bond (Chapter 3). Brian Jones and Marshall Murphree (Chapter 4) summarize the performance and principles of the CBNRM experimentation across the region. We have intentionally included both community- and privately conserved areas in a book about protected areas. Not only do they represent a return to ancient concepts, but in many ways their dynamism and experimentation is both an inspiration and a challenge to more conventional protected-area conservation. Moreover, most of the growth in protected-area coverage lauded at the World Parks Congress is in these categories of protected areas.
In Chapter 5, David Cumming assesses the performance of parks in the region against ecological and socio-economic goals. Assessing performance proves remarkably difficult, partly for lack of data and also partly because there is not yet available to us a clearly articulated conceptual foundation against which to measure park performance. In ecological terms we have not defined whether we are conserving ecological process and health or ecological diversity; nor have we clarified the relationship between ecological and economic objectives. Thus we tend to conform to western anthropocentric norms such as not killing animals, so privileging subjective value-sets and recreational interests over ecological and economic imperatives. We subsidize recreational activities. We spend little money monitoring true common value in the form of biodiversity. And we consequently allow the charismatic megafauna, to which we so closely relate, to damage long-term ecological processes that are of ultimate importance to our parks and planet.
Leading on from this Brian Child (Chapter 6) provides some conceptual background as to why centralized park agencies are prone to burgeoning mandates and, consequently, to underperforming. Using case studies, he describes the trends of distancing park agencies from central government towards commercial management systems, and draws out some of the managerial lessons from these emerging parastatals. This is complemented by Chapter 7, which assesses the budding partnerships between state conservation agencies, communities and the private sector, and Chapter 8, where Derek de la Harpe discusses the commercialization of park agencies.
In Chapter 9, Marshall Murphree describes the great changes that are occurring across the region and, in returning to the ‘who’ question, emphasizes how much more robust is conservation that is centred on local management and benefit. However, having so long centralized conservation, we need to challenge the mindsets that are threatened by local control, as well as the mechanisms of getting local control to work properly.
As before, the ‘who’ leads to the ‘what’, and Chapter 10 discusses what values parks should provide if they are to serve their constituency (that is, society in emerging or transitional economies), and also makes a preliminary attempt to define conservation goals within a framework that is amenable to performance management.
The conclusion also emphasizes why experimentation is so important to the evolution of conservation, as well as re-emphasizing the concerns that parks must serve their societies, and must be accountable to them. It suggests that there is a strong case for managing parks deliberately to create more value, and suggests possible control mechanisms. Building on the evidence of earlier chapters, it challenges the concept that parks should be economic black holes fenced off from their neighbours, returning wealth to the capital city and responding to instructions from the centre. There is indeed a strong case that parks can play an important role as bridgeheads for promoting economic development and landscape integration, and even for acting as rural development agencies, provided their mandate is clearly defined. As with community and private conservation, there is a strong case for devolved management even within conventional protected-area agencies. In advocating that southern Africa should extend these lessons, we end by emphasizing the importance of further, bold experimentation. This needs to be deliberately structured as a learning process, whereby progress is monitored against clearly defined indicators, and innovation and learning occurs through positive competition and peer review.
We hope that the ideas and experiences in this book will help to take forward and widen the debate on why we conserve protected areas, and how we can do it better.
NOTES
1 The ‘Convention Relative to the Preservation of Fauna and Flora in their N...
