Todays post is by David Adam, a good friend of mine who for the past five years has worked with Maasai communities in Tanzania in development of basic education, healthcare and water provision, in addition to helping to coordinate research on mammal and bird populations. This article is a digestion of a years research on the issue of land rights and problems of aquired knowledge by international conservation organisations.
Life is all about context. Perceptions and narratives create and define paradigms that come to be replicated at all levels of society. In some cases these start with large international organisations, such as the World Bank, building a hegemonic control of knowledge. Others operate at local and regional levels, manifesting themselves as inter and intra community politics. These serve to define and represent power relations and control that can be imposed not only over natural resource use but also through the management of other actors’ ability to access resources. International Development efforts are increasingly recognizing the important interactions between the environment and issues of poverty and vulnerability while at the same time seeking to create solutions that acknowledge the complexity of local situations. Land and property rights are at the centre of these debates.
Maasai Rangelands
In the Maasai Rangelands of Northern Tanzania and Kenya the interactions between pastoral communities and ecological systems are subject to a variety of factors such as climatic variability and social and political pressures. This takes place within an historical background of oppression and western interference that has left an indelible legacy on many African societies. Conservation areas and protected resources that have in many cases been created at the expense of local communities are often built on western ideals of a ‘wilderness’. In reality the broad savannahs and wonderfully diverse ecosystems glorified by writers such as Hemmingway are as in large part a product of centuries of processes and interactions in which humans and pastoral land use have played an integral part.
In the 1960’s Hardin outlined a ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ scenario where common pool resources are routinely abused, arguing that only private property rights endow a level of corporate responsibility. He proposed a focus on individual landowners who would understand and act on the need to protect their own property, protecting the environment as a whole. A simplistic and poorly informed idea, this model has been repeatedly invoked over decades in relation to African conservation areas, with pastoralist practices often the target of criticism. This received wisdom suggests that not only is there little productivity for the wider community but that growing populations and herd sizes irredeemably degrade soil that is otherwise conducive to agriculture, while decimating local biodiversity.
The creation of National Parks such as Amboseli in Kenya and Manyara in Tanzania resulted in local pastoral communities being forcibly evicted from lands in order to create what western environmentalists saw as natural environments. The impact of such measures on the rural poor can be devastating as the coping strategies used by the most vulnerable are removed. Those reliant on newly alienated resources are often treated indiscriminately, categorized with poachers as criminals while they seek to maintain access to previously held resources, or removed from discussion of how best to conserve local ecosystems. The Tanzanian Government’s Land Policy actively advocates a need to educate pastoralists on land use yet actively ignores the political economy of land degradation and the social process that underlie resource use, many of which spring from state laws.
A Question of Identity
These issues raise the question of who are we conserving the environment and its resources for- the locals who directly rely upon them, maybe a nation and its population, or the wider international community? Countries harbour differing ideals of what constitutes a natural landscape or what should be conserved and this reflects not on a natural history but a cultural or spiritual one. For instance, in Latvia the national idea of a conservation area is that of an ethnoscape that represents both an ecological and social history. The creation of national parks during Soviet era occupation created a focal point for Latvians to maintain a sense of identity. Attempts by the E.U. to reclassify Guaja national park as a U.S. style zone with no inhabitants were firmly and successfully rejected by local Latvians, for whom the very notion made little sense.
In the same way there is little understanding among Maasai communities as to why they should not be considered suitable stewards of an environment they have maintained so well in the past. Crucially the difference in outcomes between the two cases lies in the external interests involved. Conservation is an industry and in most cases a reflection of private and state interests. The revenues brought in by tourism outstrip many other sectors and it is fair to say that were these removed then pillars central to the economies of both Tanzania and Kenya would be removed. At the heart of these are the conservation areas located in the Maasai steppe such as Amboseli and the Maasai Mara in Kenya, and Ngorongoro or the Serengetti in Tanzania.
While internationally propagated narratives of the way in which nature should be managed affect attitudes to pastoralism, it should also be recognized that communities themselves are not homogenous entities; conflicts and power relations work at an intra-community level. The response to exclusionary conservation has often been to build an idealised picture of harmonious interactions between traditional (non-western) communities and ecological systems but of course this is not the case. As a counter-narrative to the discourse of pastoral degradation there is some value to this, yet it remains a misrepresentation that obscures local politics and power struggles over resources that should not be ignored when seeking to create viable conservation and development solutions.
Participatory Conservation
If it is accepted that the tourism generated by conservation areas plays a vital role in supporting these countries, could it not be argued that the exclusion of these communities should be taken in the wider context of conserving the environment for a far wider group of citizens? In my opinion, no. Morally and ethically there can be no support for ignoring the rights of locals and putting livelihoods at risk. The ability of large conservation organizations and state bodies to ride roughshod over local rights represents an abuse of power and there are many examples where the creation of national parks also reflects governmental desire for increased control over natural resources. In one example, Nancy Lee Peluso outlines the role of the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) on providing money for weapons and even helicopter gun-ships to the Kenyan anti-poaching units and parks authorities in the 1980’s.
Much has been made of the calls for participatory involvement by local communities through the creation of buffer zones, or community areas, around national parks that contrast with the ‘fortress conservation’ approach taken in the past. Yet in many cases these have served only to increase governmental control over wider areas of land outside. Neumann (1997) cites the buffer zones created in Tanzania around the Selous National Park, Manyara National Park and the Serengetti Regional Conservation Strategy as examples of areas designed to involve communities that in reality put greater swathes of community land under game reserve and parks authorities control. In the case of the Serengetti the mandate was to remove land use types that were ‘incompatible’ with conservation aims. Igoe (2009) looks at the more recent creation of ‘wildlife corridors’ such as that between Manyara and Tarangire national parks and finds a great deal of evidence of coercion and violence used to actively remove whole villages from AWF bought land. Following its eventual creation, the wildlife corridor is now used as exclusive luxury safari land and billed as a ‘sustainable model’. Not so sustainable for the families who lost their livelihoods and remain uncompensated.
Aside from the moral objections to the exclusion of local communities, the evidence shows clearly that these methods do not work. Despite having long standing national parks with well funded anti poaching units, Kenya’s wildlife numbers have consistently declined over recent decades. Market led arguments proposed that the resulting revenue from tourism around parks should offset the loss of resources traditionally used but again the research shows otherwise. Maasai villagers around Amboseli National Park believe they are worse off finically and in terms of resources from their proximity to the conservation area. They receive little or no income from tourism or benefits, while conservation organizations have promised a variety of incentives to maintain the Park including schools and water holes but these have been either poorly targeted and benefited only a few, or have simply not been built. On top of this they bear the costs of conservation such as increased competition with wildlife for fewer resources, risks to personal safety, damage to crops and livelihoods and the management costs required to maintain fencing.
Communities are often used as pawns in political power relations, while development efforts often fail in the process of scaling up. During the recent drive to develop a road through the Serengetti both the Government of Tanzania and conservation organistions argued respectively that the project would benefit and destroy local villages. Much development work remains clouded by woolly terms that lose all relevance when appropriated by various actors for various purposes. Terms such as participation, sustainability or governance cease to have currency at a local level when applied indiscriminately. The challenge is to create bespoke solutions that can work both locally and regionally.
PES, Partnerships and Property Rights
So how can conservation and development work in tandem? One of the ideas currently in vogue centres on the concept of paying local communities to maintain certain ecosystems services (such as timber and forests, biodiversity and agricultural areas) while compensating them for the loss of others. As with all market driven solutions there are serious questions over how this works in practise. The size and relative value of ecosystems services are subject to variations in time and scale. Thus the value of bee pollination services to coffee growers in India changes when production switches to crops that do not require bee pollination. Communities around gorilla and chimpanzee reserves in Rwanda are compensated for looking after forest resources, but this is dependant on tourism continuing in the area. In Tanzania and Kenya there are programmes to assist the Maasai in maintaining conservation areas such as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the growth of game controlled areas across the region. For these to work however greater attention needs to be paid to what is meant by participation and a focus on the ability to the Maasai to not only assist in the conservation of resources to in deciding what is valued and how this is achieved.
Tourism and private partnerships offer another area that can benefit communities. If markets are to be followed then allowing greater security to communities over land ownership means they are able to negotiate partnerships from a position of grater strength. This should be coupled with a drive to increase the awareness of legal rights to counteract the resources and positions of power controlled by external parties with vested interests. Shared land and rangeland management changes in conjunction with climatic variations and it is instead the restrictions placed on herd movements and access to resources that leads to diversification and land degradation. Similarly more sophisticated models are needed that accurately reflect how the land is managed in differing circumstances. The very concept of land degradation is a contentious issue, and accurate measurements of soil and biodiversity changes are not readily available or indeed accurate. Calls to incorporate local perceptions of land and soil types should be heeded as these can help provide a better range of data.
Land rights and property ownership become central to these issues. Both the Tanzanian and Kenyan Governments are seeking to develop an economic market for land that is not in sync with traditional beliefs of what gives a land value. Around conservation areas this leads to conflict over resources and land grabs from private organizations to the detriment of those unable to take advantage of this market. It is lazy to invoke Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ concept and assume that pastoral practices rely solely on communal land. Over centuries the Maasai have developed sharing practices that incorporate both communal and private ownership. Private grazing areas are maintained by families while villages simultaneously develop shared land for larger herd movements; studies have shown that in these areas biodiversity is often richer and more abundant. If the state were to adopt a role as a mediator between these communities rather than creating conflict by imposing artificial boundaries then the coping mechanisms available to the vulnerable could also increase.
It is always easy to demand a holistic approach that embraces local knowledge but practical examples are available that demonstrate how strengthening traditional land claims and introducing PES, such as in Kimana Group Ranch near Amboseli NP in Kenya, can be successful. If funding is to be used to support conservation then in the first instance it should be used to develop local land rights, both communal and individual, by supporting the necessary state and community systems (in many cases decimated by structural adjustments and decentralization policies forced on them by the World Bank and IMF). This way local communities who are distrustful of conservation areas and state politics after years of being exploited and coerced may begin to see some of the considerable benefits being generated, while providing protection for those most at risk.
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