The Contingency of Community Conservation

Abstract

Community-based conservation has been widely viewed in recent years as a desirable strategy to complement and augment the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation in protected areas. Based on a set of incentives to promote mutual interests, especially focusing on increased income flows to surrounding populations, community-based conservation has not been without its detractors, including both biologists who are concerned with its uncertainty and social scientists who point towards the multiplicity and fallacy of the assumptions inherent in the paradigm. These criticisms are taken up and explored through the case of Mkomazi in north-eastern Tanzania, a reserve which was the subject of forced evictions of pastoralists and takeover by a conservation interest group. At the core of reserve policy change was a preoccupation with perceptions of anthropogenic degradation propagated by a contested understanding of rangeland ecology. One paradigm suggests a delicate balance between soil, vegetation and animals while the other claims such environments to be resilient through their nature of shifting chaotically through multiple alternative states depending on the circumstances. While the conservation group maintained the former as their guide to interpreting rangeland dynamics and the documented subsequent rejuvenation of vegetation, the ongoing processes within the reserve are equally, if not better, explained by the latter wisdom. In parallel, the pastoralists who were censured and evicted from the reserve suffered very substantial documented socioeconomic loss which can not be compensated by any community-based conservation programme. Moreover, in the case of Mkomazi, such a programme is likely to be largely irrelevant for the conservation lobby given that they are able to achieve their aims without it and supported by the Tanzanian government that benefits directly from substantial tourism revenues. Thus while the resilience of the rangeland would support multiple use and the inclusion of surrounding populations, an alliance between western conservation and the local state precludes community-based conservation and the flow of real individual benefits to politically-weak constituents.