Protecting the environment across borders in southern Africa

Transfrontier conservation initiatives refer to environmental and wildlife management programmes that cross political boundaries and national borders. These occur in 117 areas of the world. The hope is that a combined approach to ecosystem management will produce positive environmental outcomes, increased revenue from ecotourism, and benefits for local communities. However, the benefits to communities living in or alongside conservation areas are variable, and often they are not treated as equal stakeholders.

Research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, looks at how approaches to transfrontier conservation vary across Southern Africa. The research compares a community-based approach to transfrontier conservation in Namibia with a park-based approach used in neighbouring South Africa.

South African transnational policy reflects a long history of controlling perspectives on conservation. Here, community involvement in conservation is added into transfrontier initiatives, rather than forming the basis for them. Namibia, by contrast, has a long history of community-based conservation projects, strengthened in recent years by the emergence of strong national policy commitments and legal frameworks.  This has resulted in a transfrontier conservation initiative which is based on existing community-based initiatives.

The research shows:

• An influential Namibian project during the 1980s worked to distribute tourist revenues to communities, support markets for people to sell their products to tourists, and create a labour pool of local people for conservation work. The guiding principles of this project – returning the control of local wildlife to communities - came to determine national policy. 
• A successful early project was the creation of conservancies, which are groups of commercial farms which neighbouring land owners have pooled resources to conserve and use wildlife sustainably. After independence, this was extended to communal areas. Legislation was later passed to support group-owned businesses based on wildlife.
• Transfrontier conservation initiatives with Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe aim to build on the success of conservancies at the local level in border areas.  Communities share common cultural and historical ties even if they are separated by national borders. Strengthening these ties may lead to greater co-operation, and the re-establishment of wildlife migration patterns.

Transfrontier initiatives that enable the participation of local communities reflect a desire to manage resources across borders, rather than a desire to create large international protected areas. While these initiatives are complex and challenging, they also make it clear that local people and wildlife should both benefit from conservation. 

South Africa’s transfrontier initiatives, meanwhile, give economic considerations equal importance to conservation. They are also far less clear about specifying who will benefit. Particular challenges to participation are raised in the case of the proposed Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, straddling the borders of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Given the history of war in these border areas, as well as current tensions about land tenure and distribution in Zimbabwe, the prospects for community participation in the Park are not strong. In any case, plans to ‘remove all human barriers’ within the proposed park hardly suggest a community friendly approach.

The research warns that:

• the lack of consultation in South Africa may make donors and NGOs unwilling to support transfrontier park initiatives
• this may have negative consequences for the communities which live within the boundaries of such initiatives.

Explicit commitments continue to be made to include local communities in transfrontier conservation initiatives. Even so, the underlying principles of some models seem far more concerned with expanding national parks without having to make investments in land purchase. As long as this situation prevails, there is a strong chance that transfrontier conservation initiatives will not benefit the livelihoods of local people.

Source(s):
‘Placing the Local in the Transnational: Communities and Conservation Across Borders in Southern Africa’ by Rachel DeMotts in 'African Environment and Development: Rhetoric, Programs and Realities' Kings SOAS Studies in Development Geography, edited by W. Moseley and B. Ikubolajeh Logan, Ashgate Publishing, 2004

Funded by: University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA and Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Grant

id21 Research Highlight: 24 February 2005

Further Information:
Refugee Research Programme
The Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences
University of the Witwatersrand
Private Bag X3, Wits 2050
Johannesburg
South Africa

Tel: +27 (0) 13795 5441
Fax: +27 (0) 13795 5024
Contact the contributor: witsrrp@mweb.co.za

University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation
IRDNC Windhoek
2nd Floor
Kenya House
Robert Mugabe Avenue
Windhoek
PO Box 24050
Namibia

Tel: +264 (0) 61 228506 or 228509
Fax: +264 (0) 61 228530
Contact the contributor: irdnc@iafrica.com.na

Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation, Namibia

Other related links:
'Land reform or wildlife? Balancing the interests of conservation and people'

'Linking conservation and sustainable livelihoods'

'Buying and selling wildlife conservation in Kenya'

'The challenges facing landlocked developing countries'

Transfrontier conservation areas

Conservation at the South African National Parks