Wildlife conservation through people-centred approaches to natural resource management programmes and the control of wildlife exploitation

Abstract

While the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992) introduced a new and progressive outlook on conservation, the South African government has failed to produce a comprehensive legal body of legislation to give effect to its varied obligations. Inconsistency and incompleteness of regulations governing wildlife conservation in conjunction with the failure to implement objectives to conserve wildlife through restricted exploitation with the political, social and economic motives of community conservation must be seen as major contributions to failed conservation goals. This paper analyses post-apartheid conservation laws and policies and argues that current plans for people-centred approaches to natural resource management programmes have been unsuccessful in operationalizing policy goals of biodiversity conservation and sustainable development into transparent plans for implementation. In fact, legal instruments and implementation plans seem to focus on the benefit-sharing components of community participation and therefore fail to address important issues of resource exploitation. It is suggested that where communities are expected to take part in the management of wildlife resources, the responsibility for sustainable wildlife management must be linked to the benefit-sharing instruments of the programmes. However, these would not deal with ‘outsiders’ like poachers and poaching driven by commercial interests. The paper proposes a model that allows communities to take control over wildlife resources.

Notes

1. Extract from speech by Nelson Mandela commemorating the centenary of the Kruger National Park, Skukuza, March 1998, cited in SANP (2000).

2. It appears that there is no single universal definition of these concepts: the term ‘people-centred approaches to natural resource management’ will be used as a collective term for Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), Community Wildlife Management (CWM) and Participatory Forest Management (PFM) to describe a situation in which some or all of the relevant stakeholders are involved in a substantial way in the management of natural resources.

3. The most straightforward legal approach to protecting wildlife is to enact laws punishing people who cause harm. Such laws can be relatively simple and can effectively address particular threats to threatened species (see Reid, 2002).

4. The notion of local economic development, the rights of all South African's to benefit from the country's resources and the improvement of the livelihoods of poor and previously disadvantaged groups are made the focus of the PFM strategy while biodiversity conservation merely is a factor to consider in implementing PFM (see Reid, 2002).

5. It has been demonstrated that rural people throughout the world make extensive use of a diversity of natural, biological resources for both home consumption and income generation and that access to these resources contributes significantly to rural livelihoods and to rural poverty reduction (Shackleton & Shackleton, 2004).

6. The term ‘outsiders’ is used here to refer to any person not residing in a community where a people-centred approach to natural resource management programme is operating.