Patronage or Participation? Understanding the Failure and Success of Community-Based Natural Resource Reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Abstract Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is a widespread approach to improving the conservation and use of wildlife in sub-Saharan Africa. CBNRM promotes the devolution of rights to use wildlife to local community landholders as a way of increasing access to economic benefits from the resource and thereby create incentives for conservation. Despite over twenty years of development in east and southern Africa, there are few instances where such devolutionary reforms have occurred and this poses fundamental constraints to CBNRM, leading to increasing contemporary doubts regarding the efficacy of these strategies. Tanzania has undergone a process of wildlife sector reform since the early 1990’s aiming to decentralize management to the local level. Foreign donors and conservation groups have provided substantial support to these reforms, but they have not resulted in substantive changes to wildlife management in terms of local rights and benefits. Plausible reasons for the failure to devolve rights over wildlife to local communities over this period of time are the incentives of central wildlife authorities for maintaining control and its attendant opportunities for utilizing wildlife as a patronage resource, and the lack of local participation in policy reform developments. The experiences of five other wildlife-rich countries in east and southern Africa with respect to developing and implementing similar wildlife policy reforms are reviewed and reveal both parallel and contrasting outcomes. These case studies suggest that relatively successful devolution occurs as a result of central leadership, with local demands for increased rights through participation in policy reform processes not a significant factor in reform outcomes in any instances. The incentives of central actors, in turn, are critically influenced by the values accessible to them through commercial utilization of wildlife on community lands, principally through centrally controlled tourist hunting concessions, and the levels of institutional transparency and accountability in a given country. This suggests an important linkage between poor quality governance and wildlife conservation outcomes outside protected areas on community lands in the region. More effective strategies for CBNRM reforms will need to take greater account of these political economic factors and the incentives they create among key actors.