Rough Waters: nature and development in an East African marine park (review)

Christine Walley describes the development of a marine park off the coast of Tanzania, close to Zanzibar. The presentation of the park fits with a globalized discourse, promulgated by international development and environmental organizations, on how – especially in developing countries – nature conservation can contribute to the socio-economic development of local communities. Walley’s aim is to analyse how this discourse relates to the actual practices of implementing the Mafia marine park. The book is especially interesting because ‘People and Parks’ issues have not often been analysed in the context of marine parks. Fishing grounds are perhaps even more complicated ‘commons’ to manage than land-based ones. Furthermore, many studies on the relations between protected areas and local communities take place in a context where these relations are antagonistic from the start, often because the areas have been established by evicting/excluding local populations. In the case analysed by Walley, the majority of residents on Chole Island initially supported the park, providing park management with a much more advantageous starting point.

The main reason for this support was the hope that park authorities would be able to stop dynamite fishing by ‘outsiders’. Residents felt entitled to participation in the park’s management on the basis of their belief that they owned the fishing grounds and coastal zones, and the participation and community development ideologies propagated by the main supporters and donors of the park, IUCN and WWF. Alas, an all too familiar story follows about deceptions and struggles. Donors, the government appointed Park Warden, and residents all disagreed about the definitions and degree of community participation. Walley, however, warns against viewing international organizations as homogeneous entities, illustrating this point with interesting details about the struggle the local WWF technical adviser fought with headquarters.

Chole residents are not well-represented in the marine park’s institutions – which Walley partly attributes to the legacy of colonialism: a centralized and highly bureaucratic state. By withholding information and using opaque language, government officials have tried to retain control over these institutions at the expense of residents. Residents often did not dare to confront park bureaucrats openly, yet they were not completely powerless – resorting to mechanisms like gossip and forging patron–client relationships. Nevertheless, as many others studying community–park relations also point out, residents were given the ‘right to offer opinions’, not the right to influence decision making. The fact that communities are ‘local’ is used to exclude them from certain structures that are involved in policy making at a more general level, while other actors (from the private sector, for example) are included despite the fact that they also have very local interests.

Walley also compares the views of the different ‘stakeholders’ on the history of the islands and on development. The park offers tourists an escape from development, while promising local residents exactly the opposite. The problem, Walley argues, is that tourism developers are not only attracted to Mafia because of its ‘pristine’ environment, but also because labour is cheap. Wages in the tourism sector in developing countries can hardly ever replace income from other livelihood strategies.

Interesting though this book is, a few critical remarks can be made. Each chapter starts with a theoretical introduction, and these sections disrupt the flow of the book somewhat; nor are they all up to date. Walley has a slight tendency to caricature her opponents in the debates she engages in. For instance, her rendition of globalization theories ignores the fact that many scholars before her have concluded that globalization is not new. The same applies to the presentation of the different views on the islands’ history and the concept of development. All earlier cautions about the need to acknowledge the heterogeneous character of ‘the state’ and international environmental/development organizations seem forgotten, and a coherent, simplistic view of development is ascribed to them. While the views of residents about tourism and the...