Peanut butter salvation: the replayed assumptions of ‘community’ – conservation in Zambia

Abstract

In contemporary conservation discourse, an uncomfortable distinction exists between the foreign organisations invested in protected areas and the surrounding ‘local communities’. Specifically, this dichotomy seems to reinforce a stereotypical set of imagined stakeholders, ultimately promoting Euro-American conservation experts as the instructors of uninformed residents in wild areas. This paper presents publications on two community-based conservation efforts in South Luangwa, Zambia that emphasise this division: Administrate Management Design (ADMADE) and Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO). Through community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) literature from Zambia, additional CBNRM narratives from elsewhere in Southern Africa, and limited supporting ethnographic evidence from South Luangwa, this paper demonstrates the continued Euro-American environmental hegemony of ‘community-focused’ conservationism. In particular, the perspectives publicised by both ADMADE and COMACO suggest that without influence from international conservation institutions, ‘communities’ that live amongst wildlife in Zambia will deplete their natural resources and in the process alter the African savannah as imagined and revered by the global North. This paper introduces a preliminary analysis of both ADMADE and COMACO in attempt to unveil their inherent imperial associations and highlight the local challenges to their protocols. In so doing, this critique serves as a point of departure for future comparative research on the repeat assumptions and rejections of CBNRM programmes in Southern Africa.

Keywords:

• conservation
• community
• representation
• Zambia
• conservation programme
• ethnographic
• community conservation
• conservationism
• environmentalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my research informants in South Luangwa, especially Dennis, for their thoughtful, patient reflections. I would also like to extend a special thank you to the organisers of the Old Land New Practices conference for their support of this paper and for challenging me to develop its argument and analysis.

Notes

1. http://www.itswild.org/peanut-butter.

2. National Geographic Video about COMACO, www.itswild.org.

3. http://www.itswild.org/maps-cant-talk-and-are-we-listening-anyway.

4. Agrawal (1995, 2002) and Scott (1998) confront representations of the ‘community’ as an abstracted, yielding unit of people, with specific reference to the inadequacies of development philosophies and agendas.

5. See Twyman (2000) and Mbaiwa and Stronza 2011 for studies on CBNRM in Botswana and Long (2004) and Jones and Weaver (2009) for perspectives from Namibia.

6. Science-based management, with commitment to stand-alone facts is the governing voice behind implementing many conservation policies, see Berkes (2004) and Gunderson and Holling (2002).

7. Interview with Dennis Phiri, Assistant Ecologist for ZAWA in South Luangwa, at the Chinzombo Research Station, July 2012.

8. See Lyons (2000) for thorough review of ADMADE and the lessons learned from its published successes and failures.

9. Similar research was done on CAMPFIRE, specifically the programme's exclusive focus on ‘producer communities’ at the expense of other communities and individuals that were equally affected by wildlife, see Dzingirai (2003a).

10. Zambia Wildlife Authority, The Zambia Wildlife Act: 1998.

11. The World Bank hosts the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), which contributed US$4.5 million to CAMPFIRE. See Young, Makoni, and Boehmer-Christiansen 2001 for discussion on how such ‘global’ and powerful funding bodies work to claim a ‘monopoly on the wisdom to manage nature in the South’ (302).

12. Figures courtesy of the Zambia Wildlife Authority, Chinzombo Research Station.

13. South Luangwa Area Management Unit Reports, 2007 and 2008.

14. Figures courtesy of the Central Statistics Office, Zambia.

15. Figures courtesy of the Luangwa Safari Association.

16. Jachmann and Billiouw 1997.

17. http://www.wcs.org/conservation-challenges/local-livelihoods/farming-communities/wcs-and-comaco.aspx.

18. Mackenzie (1988) and Steinhart (2006) discuss the hunter and the poacher as figures in colonial and post-colonial Africa, specifically the forced adjustment of Africans from the former to the latter.

19. Interview with Zambia Wildlife Authority officials, Chinzombo Research Station.

20. Gibson and Marks 1995 also discuss similar ‘free rider’ manipulations in the context of ADMADE.

21. Becker et al. (2013) discuss the increased level of poaching in the Luangwa Valley, specifically the rampant use of snare wire.

22. Wildlife Conservation Society ‘Saving Wildlife’ mission statement: http://www.wcs.org/saving-wildlife.aspx.

23. See Scott (1998) for a persuasive attack on development theory and the violating assumptions of similitude.

24. Euro-American conservation interventions often arrive with particular neo-liberal agendas and paternalistic instructions on how ‘the locals’ can become globally-informed citizens, see Ferguson (2006) and Aronowitz (1988).

25. And, moreover, to further align these activities with the colonial rhetoric from which they claim practical distance. Stafford (1989), Irwin (1995), and Bajaj (1988) explore these contradictions in the context of foreign scientific paternalism – a useful perspective as most (if not all) foreign conservation efforts arrive with scientific warrants.

26. Wildlife Conservation Society ‘Saving Wildlife’ mission statement: http://www.wcs.org/saving-wildlife.aspx.