Progress or regression? Institutional evolutions of community‐based conservation in eastern and southern Africa

Abstract

Eastern and southern Africa has been a key laboratory for community‐based approaches to conservation for over three decades. During the 1990s, field‐level initiatives and national policy reforms across the region put it at the forefront of global experiments with community‐based conservation. Community‐based conservation, in theory and practice, is closely tied to institutional reforms that devolve rights over wildlife and natural resources to local communities. As such, these efforts have frequently encountered political‐economic and institutional barriers that limited their impact. This contributed to a rising sense of rollback and recentralization of community conservation approaches during the 2000s. Since then, community‐based conservation has expanded its scope considerably in some countries, notably Kenya and Namibia, primarily as a result of relatively supportive legal and policy provisions coupled with sustained government, civil society, and private sector support. At a wider scale, sufficient devolution of rights over wildlife and natural resources has been a chronic constraint, but community‐based initiatives have still managed to persist, adapt, and deliver some evidence of positive ecological and social impacts in Zambia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Three key overarching trends across the region are (a) the significant growth and expansion of community‐based conservation where key institutional enabling conditions exist; (b) pervasive institutional limitations on community rights over wildlife and other valuable natural resources, which continue to constrain and undermine community‐based approaches; and (c) local entrepreneurship and resilience that continues to create new opportunities for community‐based approaches, even under adverse conditions.

Adaptation and evolution of institutions and governance in community‐based conservation

“…And yet, local governance institutions in Botswana hold potential to contribute to conservation goals while provisioning local benefit from lands and resources, if communities were to be meaningfully integrated into policy and management. Nelson et al (2021) paint a similar picture for CBC governance across Africa, where central governments may be continuing to extract rents and limit self‐governance, but a new form of CBC governance supported by local civil society, entrepreneurship, and innovation may suggest more positive paths forward.…”

“…Drake et al (2021), Kicheleri, Mangewa, Nielsen, Kajembe, and Treue (2021), and Salerno et al (2021) each report dynamics from long‐running wildlife‐based CBC interventions in Africa, representative of the early CBC model from the 1990s, and show varied outcomes on community governance and institutions, with a lack of community agency being a common thread among interventions. Cassidy (2021) and Nelson, Mupeta‐Muyamwa, Muyengwa, Sulle, and Kaelo (2021) go further to argue that there has been a trend toward governments recentralizing control over wildlife in Africa, against the core tenet of CBC, although there may still be examples of strong community institutions enduring under the right conditions. Strong state policy yielding varied outcomes is also illustrated through a rapid move to decentralized forest management in Indonesia (Meijaard et al, 2021), where some communities could secure forest and livelihood gains, but many could not.…”

“…Contributions also describe adaptation by local institutions to opportunities and constraints presented by external CBC interventions and associated top‐down policy environments. Despite reform and recentralization of state control in the wildlife sector of East and southern Africa, Nelson et al (2021) describe local entrepreneurial organizations (e.g., carbon credit schemes, game ranching) and public–private–civil society collaborations that have worked under the top‐down CBC policy framework to secure land rights, generate revenue, and manage resources. Similarly, Salerno et al (2021) show evidence of strengthened community governance associated with a long‐term multi‐community CBC intervention.…”

“…While the majority of contributions do not implement counterfactual approaches, nearly all conducted forms of in‐depth institutional analyses of CBC. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches uncovered enabling conditions for better community outcomes and CBC governance in specific contexts, such as the presence of a local conservation champion or civil society organizations (e.g., Quintana & Basurto, 2021; Romulo et al, 2021), a facilitative higher‐level policy environment (e.g., Borgerhoff Mulder et al, 2021; Gonzales Tovar et al, 2021), and agency and innovation within communities (e.g., Bennett et al, 2021; Nelson et al, 2021).…”

“…In part, motivation for this issue was to highlight people and communities as adaptive agents rather than passive recipients or targets of intervention efforts. Indeed, the importance of agency in the form of local entrepreneurship and policy innovation emerged as a key message for future CBC efforts (e.g., Cassidy, 2021; Nelson et al, 2021).…”