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Revisiting the Question of Local Communities in Transboundary Natural Resource Management (TBNRM): The Case of Peace Parks in Southern Africa
- Africa Institute of South Africa
- Chapter
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97 Revisiting the Question of Local Communities in Transboundary Natural Resource Management (TBNRM) The Case of Peace Parks in southern Africa Emmanuel Kisiangani Introduction The concept of Transboundary Natural Resource Management (TBNRM) has, increasingly, been promoted as an integral part of the southern African region’s vision to promote co-operation and improve the conservation of biodiversity and endangered ecosystems. Central to TBNRM is the idea of local community participation , which is seen to represent a paradigm shift away from the conventional government and international agencies dominated top-down model (Siddhartha, Gehendra and Khadga, 2007). With poverty being one of the major threats to the conservation of the environment and natural resources, the potential of TBNRM is seen in terms of utilisation of natural resources by local communities to promote their welfare and improve their living standards without damaging biodiversity. TBNRM takes various forms, ranging from transfrontier/transboundary conservation areas1 , to spatial development initiatives such as those involving private companies and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). This article focuses on the Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) or ‘Peace Parks’2 in southern Africa. Mooted as the answer to the challenge of arresting the poverty and the environment cycle through sustainable development, Peace Parks have grown tremendously and have been replicated across the southern Africa region. In practice, however, their creation has not necessarily stimulated the intended benefits to local communities. In some cases, Peace Parks have undermined the very objectives they seek to realise. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the place of local communities in Peace Parks in southern Africa and highlight some of the tensions that exist between principle and practice in TBNRM initiatives . The main argument of the chapter is that while the idea of Peace Parks is good in theory, in practice, it can face a set of challenges involving governance and institutional arrangements that undermine the buy-in at community level. The discussion concentrates on southern Africa in general, but draws most of 98 Revisiting the Question of Local Communities in Transboundary Natural Resource Managementa its illustrations from the Great Limpopo Peace Park, which is considered as the flagship TFCA in Africa (Büscher, 2005). Since there is little primary data that benchmarks the actual community benefits realised from Peace Parks, the study proceeds by integrating conceptual analyses and analytical reflections based on the potential benefits gleaned from literature. The Development of TBNRM The distribution of natural resources and biodiversity in Africa and the rest of the world do not necessarily follow international boundaries. In other words, international boundaries are political rather than ecological in nature. As such, key ecological systems and components often occur in two or more countries, and are subject to a range of different, sometimes opposing management and land-use systems. This situation has been more prominent in Africa, where international boundaries were drawn up arbitrarily, with little or no consideration whatsoever , of the socio-cultural, political and ecological conditions of the region. The emergence and growth of TBNRM initiatives is largely underlined by the need to promote collaborative natural resource management with the aim of enhancing or maintaining ecosystem functions and biodiversity objectives in transfrontier conservation areas (Van der Linde et al. 2001). In Africa the first TBNRM initiative is said to be the Virunga National Park (formerly Albert National Park), which was created by the German colonial administration in 1925 (Info Resources News: 2004). The Park straddles the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The specific TBNRM concept of Peace Parks,3 however, only gained momentum in Africa (and in southern Africa in particular) in the mid 1990s, following the end of apartheid and subsequent improvement in state relations in the region. The intervening years have witnessed the concept of Peace Parks attracting a lot of attention because of the expectations associated with it. A number of countries, motivated by the need to open up borders that were arbitrarily drawn up during colonisation, embarked on a process of creating Peace Parks with the aim of re-establishing wildlife migration routes, promoting economic development and goodwill between states. The regional body, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) sees Peace Parks as complimenting the SADC principles related to alleviation of poverty and regional economic integration.4 While there is no comprehensive list of all transfrontier conservation areas in Africa, in southern Africa, SADC has identified about 20 existing and potential Peace Parks within the region that are at different levels of implementation...