Governance of the commons in southern Africa: knowledge, political economy and power

Abstract

Millions of southern African livelihoods continue to depend on the successful management and sustainable use of the commons – land and natural resources that are supposedly or actually managed, with varying degrees of success, as common property. This, above all, is the challenge to governance. The poor must tackle it – and governments and development agencies must support their endeavours – in the triple context of knowledge, political economy and power. This paper highlights the major factors and trends in these three areas that we must understand if we are to optimise support for the governance of the commons in southern Africa. If more commons around the region are studied from the same analytical perspectives, it will be easier to share experience and lessons in ways that can usefully inform development and conservation policy and programmes. This is what the Cross-Sectoral Commons Governance in Southern Africa project, reported in this special issue, has tried to do.

Keywords:

• Southern Africa
• commons
• governance
• knowledge
• political economy
• power

1. INTRODUCTION

Southern Africa is endowed with a rich variety of natural resources spanning most of its societies, landscapes and ecosystems. Its grasslands and forests, its oceans, lakes and rivers, and its floodplains teem with landed and aquatic life. In most cases, these exist as ‘common pool resources’. Although often condemned as environmentally unsustainable, economically unviable or socially anachronistic, this mode of natural resource tenure and governance remains vitally necessary in the livelihoods of the rural poor across much of the region.

Some environment and development policies have recognised this. There have been small islands of focused project attention to community-based management of range, forests, wetlands, fisheries and wildlife. Community-based wildlife management and ecotourism programmes such as Zimbabwe's CAMPFIRE have gained the highest profile. But away from these limited areas of project effort – often focused on specific natural resource sectors – millions of poor rural people continue their own integrated efforts to manage and live off the ecosystems that surround them. This, above all, is the challenge for governance. The poor must tackle it – and governments and development agencies must support their endeavours – in the triple context of knowledge, political economy and power. Taken together, the multiple interactions between these themes shape the governance of the southern African commons. But first, a look at theory, concepts and definitions of common property.

2. COMMON PROPERTY AND THE SOUTHERN AFRICAN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The use of the term ‘common property’ has always been controversial. According to Berkes and Farvar (1989), this stems from philosophical differences between the socio-anthropological and resource management economists. The traditional economists’ view is that property is either private or it belongs to the state. According to this view, resources that cannot be appropriated by private individuals or the state are called ‘common property resources’. In contrast, the socio-anthropological perspective recognises the possibility that a resource can be owned collectively by a defined group. According to this view, the term common property should be restricted to resources for which there exist arrangements for the exclusion of non-owners and for allocation among co-owners. The distinction between the economists’ and the socio-anthropologists’ views is crucially important with regard to Hardin's (1968) ‘tragedy of the commons’ model. This model leads to the conclusion that resources should be either privatised or controlled by government authority to ensure sustainable use. Hardin depicted the solution as ‘mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon’; he made no mention of the possibility of communal management. Thus two solutions have generally been advocated: public (government) control or privatisation of the resource.

Such prescriptions have often failed to consider the experience and capacities of local management systems and have tended to overestimate governments’ ability to manage resources (Kuperan & Abdullah, 1994; Hviding & Jul-Larsen, 1995; Pomeroy, 1995). Hardin's model and Gordon's (1954) economic theory are entrenched in the thinking of managers of common pool resources. This western thinking and the resulting policy prescriptions have been passed on to developing countries.1 The socio-anthropological view has been more widely accepted only in the past two decades, with the increasing embrace of community-based management as a new paradigm in resource management. Hence the proliferation of Community Based Resource Management (CBNRM) or co-management initiatives in southern Africa (Murphree & Hulme, 2001; Hara & Nielsen, 2003; Haller, 2007; Galvin & Haller, 2008).

The definition of ‘common property resources’ generally accepted is the one developed by Feeny et al. (1990; see also Ostrom, 1986; Fortman & Bruce, 1988; Berkes, 1989). They defined ‘common property resources’ as ‘a class of resources for which exclusion is difficult and joint use involves subtractability’ (Feeny et al., 1990:4). Exclusion means that control of access is problematic or costly, while subtractability means that each user's use of the resources results in less being available to other users. This definition implies two major management issues: firstly the need to regulate access to deal with the exclusion problem, and secondly the need to regulate the level of exploitation to deal with the subtractability problem (Feeny, 1994). In this context, property rights are a key element.

Property rights assign benefit streams from the use of a resource (Bromley, 1989). They can be viewed as a bundle of characteristics: exclusivity, transferability, inheritability, alienability and enforceability (Hallowell, 1943; Alchian & Demsetz, 1973; Schlager & Ostrom, 1992). Further still, property rights define resource use and lay down rules and entitlements. Such entitlements entail an organised structure of institutional arrangements, which include mechanisms for defining and enforcing rights, social custom, legitimacy and recognition of the rights (Hallowell, 1943; Taylor, 1987).

The distinction between the resource and the property rights regime under which it is held is important because a resource can be held under more than one regime (Ostrom, 1986; Bromley, 1989).2 Ostrom underscores the importance of the distinction between the resource and the property regime under which it is held by defining this class of resources as ‘common pool resources’. Four ideal analytic types of property rights regimes are distinguished: non-property (open access), common property, private property and state property (Berkes, 1989; Bromley, 1989; Feeny et al., 1990). Under each of these regimes, what is important is that these rights are defined, that they reflect the goals for resource use and that they are enforced. Most management problems stem from incomplete, inconsistent, or unenforced property rights. Property rights regimes thus perform functions of limiting use, coordinating users and responding to changing resource conditions. Furthermore, it is essential to distinguish de jure from de facto property rights. Many common property resources are classified as state property, designated de jure, whereas in practice access is left unregulated and de facto the resource is held in open access (Feeny, 1994). There is a sizeable literature indicating that most common pool resources were originally managed under common property regimes. Often such systems of management were based on membership, boundaries, coordination, rules for harvest techniques, timing of use, knowledge-sharing, and monitoring and sanctioning devices (McCay & Acheson, 1987; Berkes, 1989; Feeney et al., 1990; Ostrom, 1990; McKean, 2000; Ostrom et al., 2002; Haller, 2007).

In southern Africa, colonialism largely led to appropriation of resources from the indigenous populations. In South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia, most of the people were actually evicted from their land under policies such as apartheid, leaving the local population in severely crowded communal reserves. Colonial rule and these policies eroded or discouraged traditional management practices that had been in place before the indigenous people were overrun by white settlers. Most (black majority) independent states adopted similar positivist and centralised management approaches that had been practised under colonialism.

Among the most common state property regimes in southern Africa are protected wildlife areas based on conserving biodiversity and using it for economic gain in the form of tourism. These are usually created from the residential and cultural landscapes of local populations who are evicted and moved elsewhere, with little or no benefits accruing to them.

3. COMMONS GOVERNANCE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

This paper introduces a series of synthetic studies carried out under the Cross-Sectoral Commons Governance in Southern Africa (CROSCOG) project between 2007 and 2009, which aimed to share existing research and experience in the governance of large-scale natural resource commons across various ecosystem types in southern Africa. CROSCOG takes as its starting point Turner's (2002) insight that finding long-term solutions to natural resource degradation in Africa means finding ways to identify, reproduce and encourage existing positive practices of commons management across wide scales in order to meet the two major interrelated challenges for governance of commons: conservation of natural resource biodiversity and poverty alleviation. The project's work spanned floodplains, grasslands and forests, and fisheries. The work had two phases. During the first phase, reported in this special issue, participants summarised the status of commons governance in selected cases around southern Africa, spread across these ecosystem types. The second phase, planned for presentation in a special issue of the International Journal of the Commons, will address the broader and more practical challenge: how to transfer commons governance experience from the usually localised scenarios in which it has been studied, and the generally limited situations in which it currently succeeds, to the communal areas of southern Africa as a whole. This introduction to the outcome of CROSCOG's first phase highlights the major factors and trends in the three areas of knowledge, political economy and power that we must analyse and understand if we are to optimise support for the governance of the commons in southern Africa.

3.1 Knowledge

In the context of the commons, knowledge has political as well as technical meanings. The politics of environmental knowledge in the colonial era have continued through decades of technocracy in independent African governments. Colonial and African administrators have assumed ignorance among rural resource users and failed to see indigenous resource management for what it was and is. Natural resource management (NRM) policy therefore imposed exogenous principles and procedures without consulting the resource users who were meant to apply them, sometimes at major cost to their own livelihoods. Not surprisingly, reactions ranged from bemusement through disdain to hostility. Grounded in western environmental science, the knowledge systems on which most NRM policy has been based typically failed to recognise the tenure regimes under which local resources exist in different ecologies of many African environments – arrangements that local users understood.

Only more recently have researchers, and subsequently some governments and development workers, come to accept the paradigm shift that is necessary in order to optimise the sustainable use of natural resources in southern Africa. They have begun to recognise the value of indigenous environmental and technical knowledge in natural resource use and management. Indeed, it is almost standard practice now to refer to the role of local knowledge in NRM projects and programmes. Often, however, such reference is superficial. In reality, the nature and depth of people's environmental knowledge and resource management skills vary with age, gender, location and livelihood priorities.

Whereas outsiders have often seen the region's commons as zones of open access whose users had no knowledge or system of governance, this was far from the truth. Although there might have been seasonal constellations of open access in floodplain fisheries, for example, most common pool resources in Africa have been managed by local institutions that controlled access through membership and the regulation of timing, technology, opening and closing times, and so on. Colonial and independent regimes have usually undervalued the technical quality of indigenous NRM, even though such indigenous systems are often the most prominent mode of management being practised even after a century or more of external intervention.

Many external interventions in southern African NRM have focused on specific sectors such as range or forest management, and they were therefore unlikely to be technically effective or to match the more holistic knowledge and management systems of the resource users they are meant to benefit. Programmes based on these single-sector approaches rarely prove to be sustainable. While indigenous systems are certainly not perfect, they do coordinate the use of common pool resources under common property regimes. Indigenous local institutions often include different types of resources within one tenure system, as in the Kafue Flats (Haller, 2007) and Chilwa floodplains (Mvula & Haller, this issue).

The concepts of conservation and sustainable use have been another arena of contestation between knowledge systems in the governance of the southern African commons. Colonial and early independent administrations failed to recognise the provisions for sustainable use that were integral to indigenous NRM, often imposing their own regulatory frameworks based on alien legal systems. Partly because of the depredations of colonial hunters, they also found it necessary to excise large areas from existing uses and dedicate them entirely to conservation (Murphree & Hulme, 2001; Haller & Merten, 2006; Galvin & Haller, 2008). This kind of sector-specific approach to NRM often imposed major livelihood costs on local people, whose own management approach – integrated with cultural and religious dimensions of their world view – only needed to preserve specific areas as conservation zones. In this indigenous approach, conservation was an integral part of NRM. In the exogenous knowledge system, conservation and use were disaggregated and spatially segregated – with inevitably disruptive, divisive results.

There is no simple contrast or clash between imported and indigenous knowledge systems in the governance of the southern African commons. Instead, there are uncertain, variable and contested blends of the two, with each society's dispensation reflecting the politics of both kinds of knowledge. As we seek to understand the current condition of the commons in particular parts of the region, we must identify, describe and unravel the webs of knowledge that locals and outsiders are applying in their use and management of natural resources.

3.2 Political economy

Since colonial times, the southern African commons have undergone multiple economic transformations that have affected their governance in many ways – mostly for the worse. Complex shifts, differentials and trends in the valuation of natural resources by local, national and global interest groups have led to conflict over some resources, the neglect of others, the collapse of some resource governance regimes and the intensification of exploitation within a framework of evolving tenure systems. Two key concerns are the struggles that have broken out over some resources, and the ways in which tenure regimes have altered (or collapsed).

Recent studies of struggles over natural resources reveal complex intersecting processes and events that produce specific outcomes on local levels. The New Institutional approach proposes that external factors such as economic changes, changing legal frameworks and environmental, population and technological changes all have a major effect on relative prices for common pool resources (Ensminger, 1992; Haller, 2007). Such changes have also had an impact on the governance of common pool resources by the state. The economic crisis in many African countries since the 1980s has made it hard for governments to meet the management and governance costs arising from their claimed ownership and control of common pool resources. This has often resulted in de facto open access situations for these resources, leading to overuse. In addition, colonial and postcolonial governments have profoundly affected the conditions under which customary and other claims and rights are defined and fought over, and the framing of those claims and rights that shape the costs and benefits of access. Under new conditions of de facto open access, other tenure forms such as common or private property might emerge, based on the bargaining power of the different actors.

While states have sectoral resource laws, pre-colonial management was often based on an inclusive holistic resource system. States’ programmes may be ineffective at times, and may also displace people and undermine the ability of local groups to obtain a livelihood from resources, and they have frequently provided pathways for substantial appropriation of resources by elites. States sometimes award specific powers and rights to individuals such as chiefs, administrators and ministers. The granting of large concessions for agricultural production, hunting reserves, grazing, forestry and mining exemplifies this pattern of appropriation.

Resource conflicts are often triggered by changes in relative prices. The valuation of one resource may have important implications for other resources. For example, in Zambia, although fishing might be profitable, the high demand for hydropower leads state officials to opt for dams that endanger the fisheries. At the same time, the high prices of fish offer more attractive income streams than the salaries of lower level administrators or the earnings of unemployed people working in the informal sector. This constitutes a pull factor for fisheries and for the fish trade (Haller, 2007). Similar processes also occur in other sectors, leading to exclusion of local users and increased competition. For example, access to valuable grazing land in Botswana was increasingly skewed because of the increasing commoditisation of livestock. State-led programmes then privileged better-off and politically well-connected cattle owners to help them obtain boreholes that gave them access to larger areas of dryland grazing (Peters, 1984, 1994).

Thus intense competition has developed over valued resources (dubbed ‘key resources’ by ecologists; Scoones, 1996). Community-based conservation schemes promoting benefits for local people have themselves sometimes become a terrain for conflict. A government plan for an ecotourism project on the Wild Coast of South Africa led to major conflicts centred on resource tenure, the definition of ‘community’ and the legitimacy of claims to ownership of the land identified for the project (Kepe et al., 2001). Game-rich areas of southern Africa are awash with such conflicts; not only do many ecotourism projects fail to devolve income to local communities, they also set local people against one another and against outsiders (Haller & Merten, 2006, 2008). All these cases reveal the intersection between local-level politics and social change, and national and international political and economic processes. They also demonstrate the intimate linkages between economic and political factors in determination of the governance of the southern African commons. The overwhelming impression is not only of deepening social and class differentiation, but also of challenges to authority and intensified contest among users (Peters, 2004; Haller, 2007).

At times, outsiders seek to broaden resource use definitions, claiming to be citizens and therefore entitled to use any national resources. Such discourse can be used by elites to appropriate resources or resist CBNRM. In such contexts, local people do not have the power to adjust the institutional arrangements in their favour, given that the state might not be present to protect local communal property rights. A case in point is Botswana, in particular the Okavango Delta, which elites define as a national resource to which, as citizens, they have strong rights. They deny that local people in the Delta have stronger rights to manage or profit from that ecosystem. Paradoxically, the state is both present by virtue of the land officially belonging to it and in practice not present (i.e. active) to manage the resources. This in turn leads to situations of open access.

Recent decades have seen literature on Africa that celebrates indigenous or customary systems of resource tenure and management as being flexible and adaptive, thus reversing the hegemonic view that they are rigid and outmoded. This is exactly what New Institutionalism proposes to do, by looking not only at changes in institutions but also at how they are brought about by different actors possessing unequal bargaining power and by analysing the distributional effects of these changes (Ensminger, 1992; Haller 2007). Often, such changes put the wealthy in a stronger negotiating position (Amanor, 1999; Odgaard, 2003). These conflicts can increase because of changes in the external political and economic system.

Many have emphasised the tremendous social, economic and political costs of the structural adjustment programmes and market liberalisation imposed through aid conditionalities since the 1980s. This has resulted in a general trend of disengagement by the state, leaving people to cope with their livelihood constraints, often exacerbated by poor terms of trade. These costs have been further exacerbated by increased exposure to unequal international markets (Bryceson & Bank, 2001). Research documenting social competition and conflict over resources should be situated within these debates about the political economy of ‘weak’ states and their use by national elites and international actors (Peters, 2004).

Traditional tenure systems do not preclude systems of private property under conditions of intensification. Longitudinal studies in Africa have shown that agricultural intensification and commercial production are inhibited not by ‘customary tenure’ but rather by the broader social and political−economic conditions at local, regional and international levels (Linares, 1992; Netting, 1993). Problems often arise because rigid privatisation jeopardises multiple uses of resources by multiple users, as conflicts between peasants and pastoralists show (Benjaminsen & Lund, 2003). In another example, privatisation linked with irrigation schemes imposes costs that only richer outsiders are able to meet (Mbeyale, 2005).

While the stated goals and new approaches to environmental governance remain the same (sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction), the failure of earlier approaches in which market models emphasised the conversion of customary tenure to individualised rights has led to a new wave of reforms emphasising the viability of customary systems. These reforms promote policies that are more human-centred, less driven by economic prescriptions and more focused on pro-poor economic growth (Toulmin & Quan, 2000). The new approaches have been embraced by OECD countries and many agencies that promote ‘a livelihoods approach to development, which seeks to build on the strengths and opportunities open to the poor’ (Peters, 2004:275).

In the late 1980s new policy emerged emphasising ‘good governance’ and the market economy. This necessitated a legal culture similar to those operating in western market-oriented economies. Thus there has been a push for the development and adoption of ‘enabling frameworks’ for this new approach, which came as a conditionality for most donor aid. Aid agencies and non-governmental organisations called for more international legislation and effective national measures to protect environmental resources. Such legislation brings about a change in social relations around resources. Alden Wiley (2000) gives an overview of these processes in Anglophone Africa, showing there has been an increase in legislation promoting common property. Nevertheless, these processes are rarely straightforward, as privatisation tendencies often persist (Woodhouse et al., 2000). Which tendencies dominate depends on economic interests and on the strategic options provided by legal as well as informal frameworks. All these processes illustrate the complexity of relationships between value and the governance of natural resources.

To deal with these complexities, some authors recommend intervention by government, while others promote co-management, partnerships or links across institutions in order to avoid the complete replacement of customary systems or their neglect and isolation. These approaches propose supporting the flexibility of tenure while at the same time protecting customary tenure holders from expropriation by elites or powerful interests. In each specific case a historical study of how property rights have been shaped by external constellations and power relations is vital (Peters, 2004). This should lead to analysis of the interplay of bargaining power, organisation, ideology and institutions at the local level. Such analysis enables the assessment of when, why and how tenure systems have been transformed by which actors and how these changes have been legitimised. It also enables analysis of the interplay between state actors, local elites and different classes of local stakeholders (Ensminger, 1992; Haller, 2005).

3.3 Power

Conflicts and cooperation between knowledge systems and between economic interests find multiple expressions in the governance of the southern African commons, as outlined above. But the most direct way to assess the state of commons governance and develop feasible prescriptions for its reinforcement is to analyse the configurations of power among and between rural resource users, other local and national interest groups, states and various global organisations that have interested themselves in the issue for environmental, developmental, financial or less altruistic reasons (Southern African Sustainable Use Specialist Group, 1996). Governance is, after all, the assertion of authority – the wielding of political power. The challenge to our understanding of the governance of the southern African commons arises from the multiple sources and expressions of power that together influence the process.

Historical institutional analysis is crucial to this understanding. It is by learning how so-called common pool resources were managed in the past that we are able to understand the key processes and mechanisms influencing their contemporary governance (Chanock, 1991).

Under indirect rule, customary law and communal tenure were instituted not to support local management but to promote the interests of the colonial state and the European settlers (Mamdani, 1996). Chiefs were given power over resources partly to collect tax for government. At the same time, colonial powers started to fragment originally integrated resource systems into different formal legal settings, which clashed with traditional approaches to overlapping claims and resource use coordination.

However, not all local institutions for governing the southern African commons were changed or dismantled at the same speed. Instead, we face a kind of legal pluralism (Meinzen-Dick & Pradhan, 2002). Sometimes this pluralism has become internally contradictory, creating the opportunity for some actors, depending on their interests and power, to do what has been called ‘forum shopping’ (Benda-Beckmann, 1984, 2002; Meinzen-Dick & Pradhan, 2002). Thus customary law and tenure should not be seen as informal or traditional systems separate from and opposed to formal systems, but as competing forms of institutions – although they do not always function concurrently and with the same intensity. Local leaders and middle-level to lower-level administrators use these contradictions to pursue elite capture under the label of community-driven projects.

There are two processes taking place that paradoxically lead to the same result. On the one hand, the southern African commons are experiencing processes of exclusion, deepening social divisions and class formation over access and use rights for natural resources (Woodhouse et al., 2000; Peters, 2004). On the other, there are cases where open access to common pool resources has developed. While the exclusion of disempowered groups of users is evident in the former case, the latter situation often also leads to reduced access possibilities for these actors, because more mobile and powerful resource users profit from the free access (Haller & Merten, 2008).

A wide range of actors thus contest access rights to natural resources in increasingly intense and complex constellations of claimed private or state property or de facto open access rights. We are far from the ideal of the village, the community or the state granting rights to all its members. Instead, rights are increasingly fluid and contested, creating winners and losers. Thus, despite the paradigm shift of decentralisation that followed structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s, national and local elites often capture the benefits of decentralisation from local and traditional resource users (Ribot, 2000; Woodhouse et al., 2000). More emphasis should therefore be placed on who benefits from instances of ‘negotiability’ in access to natural resources, and who loses (Peters, 2004). This analysis should in turn be placed in the context of broader political, economic and social changes. Peters notes that:

This requires a theoretical shift away from privileging contingency, flexibility and negotiability to one that is able to identify those situations and processes (including commoditisation, structural adjustment, market liberalisation and globalisation) that limit or end negotiation and flexibility for certain social groups or categories. (2004:271)

As Peters points out, the way winners and losers are created, the possibility of their agency in complex settings and the outcomes of these contests have to be analysed historically. The New Institutional approach and approaches based on political economy and ecology all provide the tools to deal with such interactions. They help to identify which specific property rights configurations occur, who dominates them based on what bargaining power, and how institutions are justified. Such an analysis helps to explain why, in specific constellations of property and access rights, elite capture and massive inequalities still exist despite decentralisation, community participation and gender-sensitive programmes resulting in elite capture.

There are certainly differences in the ways in which African governments have dealt with resource governance challenges since structural adjustment and deterioration in the terms of trade. One way has been to promote decentralisation in order to deal with the institutional weakness of most states. However, decentralisation has been shown to be a difficult process since often it merely leads to local elites and administrators profiting from their power to manipulate the local level in their own interests. In rural areas where the state is very weak, virtually absent or failed−as in situations of war−powerful local interest groups (sometimes in collusion with multinationals, e.g. in the mining sector) operate successfully in the absence of the state (Reno, 1995, 2001).

4. COMMUNITY-BASED NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Our discussion has shown the many misunderstandings, disconnects and inequities that have distorted structures of knowledge, economics and power in the governance of the southern African commons from colonial times to the present day. Over recent decades, CBNRM has emerged as a focus of efforts to correct these distortions. CBNRM initiatives aim at a mode of governance for at least some of the region's commons that makes proper use of local environmental knowledge, provides a realistic framework of economic incentives for sustainable resource use that also satisfies conservation criteria, and achieves environmental and social justice from local to global scales through an equitable distribution of power, authority and revenues.

CBNRM is based on the philosophy that if a resource is valuable and holders have effective rights to manage, use and benefit from it, then sustainable use is likely (Murphree, 1993). It is based on two arguments. First, ‘fortress’ approaches to nature conservation are seen to have failed or to be too expensive. Second, it is believed that, if local people perceive direct individual, household or community benefits can accrue from conservation, their commitment to it will increase. The conceptual foundations of CBNRM approaches are thus based on the principles of economic instrumentalism, devolutionism and collective proprietorship (Southern African Sustainable Use Specialist Group, 1996; Cousins, 2000; Murphree & Hulme, 2001).3

CBNRM in southern Africa has succeeded in changing policy and legislation so that communities can gain more rights over and benefits from natural resources. But institutions that were expected to implement new CBNRM approaches have not always succeeded in doing so. Many authorities do not trust local communities to manage resources sustainably, and fear that they will lose their own roles if management authority is devolved (Hara & Nielsen, 2003). Many so-called participatory projects in the region are still dominated by conventional conservation imperatives in which local people do not have much say despite the notion of participation (Blaikie, 2006).

It is often argued that CBNRM is a way of showing the donor community that participation is taking place. But many projects show that the benefits are often too little to compensate for the losses that local people suffer due to wildlife. Instead, it can be argued, CBNRM projects act as a kind of Trojan horse. Conservation areas are enlarged, while local people have to use more time and energy in monitoring wildlife without really being compensated (Blaikie, 2006). This process erodes trust in the state and raises questions of human rights regarding protected areas, because in many instances evictions and dislocations continue. A cost−benefit analysis in many protected areas in Africa and elsewhere shows that, usually, people pay more than they gain. This creates poor incentives for the conservation of biodiversity and reinforces the argument that community conservation cannot work (Gibson, 1999; Emerton, 2001).

5. CHALLENGES OF COMMONS GOVERNANCE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

The above sections outlined the principal analytical thrusts of the CROSCOG project. This section now summarises the papers in the present special issue, produced during the first phase of the work on various cases across three key ecosystems of southern Africa. The challenges to commons governance in southern Africa are analysed with reference to floodplains, to grasslands and forests, and to fisheries.

5.1 Floodplains

The floodplains cases reviewed by the project present important lessons about institutional changes related to knowledge, politics, economics and power. One is that common pool resources are increasingly managed by agencies located far from the floodplains, which leads to a decline in local empowerment and real management options, despite governments’ advocacy of participatory approaches. This again highlights the issue of the power of different actors in this context and links economic problems arising from globalisation and national trends to the local level.

In Mvula and Haller's Chilwa floodplain case, one of the most important features is the fragmentation of resource management across different departments and districts since colonial times. This divided the ecosystem linked to Lake Chilwa into different levels of governance. Knowledge of its management was lost and access to resources was nationalised. Under pressure from a national economic crisis, fishermen from the overused Lake Malombe moved to the Chilwa floodplain, increasing pressure on resources and causing conflicts. There are also considerable problems of legal pluralism and uncertainty about the role of traditional authorities, and confusion about which authorities the resource users are accountable to.

Similarly, the Kafue Flats and their surrounding areas have been broken up into administrative units. Haller and Chabwela describe how common pool resources, previously managed by the interrelated institutions of local groups, were placed under fragmented jurisdictions. Former common property regimes regulating the coordinated use of common pool resources have been dismantled and are now under de jure state control. There have also been controversial incentives regarding control of land for pasture or for irrigation. This is linked to the financial crisis in Zambia since 1975, which increased the value of common pool resources and made the area very attractive. Outside users now have the right, as citizens, to state-regulated access to these resources. While negotiating this access, outsiders’ bargaining power is reinforced ideologically by their claim to citizenship of a state that is legally present but institutionally absent.

DeMotts et al. compare two villages in the Okavango Delta, both now involved in CBNRM and close to Wildlife Management Areas. In Ikoga, CBNRM has been a challenge due to lack of knowledge about how to implement it and difficult relations with a local Trust and a non-governmental organisation – all leading to frustration with the stagnation of the process. Seronga, on the other hand, has two CBNRM programmes operating, from which villagers are generating income. But in both cases all the local people can do is contract out an area to tourist operators. Legislation and restrictions related to tourism prevent direct resource management. Hunting is not allowed, fishing is restricted because of recreational fisheries, and cattle husbandry is limited. The people also face problems with the increase of dangerous wildlife in the area, although this wildlife increases the area's attractiveness for tourists.

5.2 Grasslands and forests

Fragmentation and alienation are also leading issues in the governance of the commons on the southern shores of Lake Kariba. Mhlanga's paper describes how previously integrated indigenous systems for natural resource management and use were disrupted and fragmented by the flooding of the Zambezi valley. The dam created a new kind of national hydropower and fisheries resource, but submerged local economic interests. These trends continued on the Zimbabwean side through processes of land use planning that placed protected conservation and forestry areas under separate jurisdictions, alienating their governance from the local people who depended on them. These people were marginalised by broader economic interests and broader definitions of sound environmental management.

Lefatshe Magole's paper shows how the resource governance experience of the aboriginal San people in the Mababe and Phuduhudu settlements in Ngamiland, to the east of the Okavango Delta, typifies the marginalisation of this group by processes of modernisation and land use planning driven by national authorities. As has so often happened across southern Africa, the San – the least powerful local actors – were largely excluded from new resource governance and use dispensations that were supposedly driven by conservation imperatives. So far, CBNRM has not proved an effective way for these disempowered groups to rebuild sustainable livelihoods. Their natural resource base is still effectively controlled by more powerful external actors – the state and the safari companies.

In the Lake Ngami area of northwestern Botswana, trends in range management are shrinking the commons, as Lapologang Magole's paper explains. Here, the Ovambandero people's flexible and environmentally adaptive resource use systems have been constrained by the award of individual title to extensive areas of grazing land through the national Tribal Grazing Land Policy. With their access to grazing and water resources now restricted, the Ovambandero fear that their herds will no longer be able to withstand the droughts that their indigenous systems had been able to cope with. In Botswana, the challenge to CBNRM is to move beyond nature conservation and ecotourism and offer viable strategies for sustainable use of the grazing commons.

Finally in this section, Matose shows that, in the forest patches of the Dwesa-Cwebe area of the Eastern Cape coast, the theme of conflicting knowledge systems recurs. Indigenous environmental knowledge and value systems were subordinated to state-imposed ones based on western science, and local people were banned from using forest resources for many decades. Linked to the South African ‘betterment’ programmes of land use planning in communal areas, this was the environmental dimension of rural people's subjection to the colonial state – so far only partially relieved by the post-apartheid dispensation, despite a successful community land claim over the forest reserve and the institution of co-management arrangements.

5.3 Fisheries

Fisheries provide two examples of the complexities of resource governance in southern Africa: one with regard to designing and implementing transformation policies in capital intensive natural resource economic sectors where barriers to entry are high for new entrants, and the other with regard to elite capture of co-management arrangements that may disadvantage the very people that devolution of management was supposed to benefit.

The review of the kapenta fishery on Lake Kariba by Nyikahadzoi and Raakjær shows that cooperative management arrangements between the state and resource users are difficult to institute despite the existence of a supporting legal framework. The process of redistributing rights has largely been influenced by external political and macroeconomic factors that have undermined such attempts by the state and eroded its capacity to act as a neutral economic regulator. Global agendas have neutralised the government's efforts to achieve a more equitable access to natural resources in Zimbabwe.

Economics and power plays have been blatantly prominent in the dynamics of policy evolution in the South African fisheries, as Hara and Raakjær's paper shows. The democratic government launched a process of transformation and governance reform intended to open small pelagic fisheries to smaller enterprises owned by previously disadvantaged people. In an intricate series of manoeuvres, stakeholders responded by organising themselves into communities in terms of economic and social interests, political ideologies and strategic options. The result has been less beneficial to the poor and disadvantaged than the reformers had hoped.

Finally, Njaya shows how traditional institutional arrangements for the governance of the fisheries in Lake Chilwa took cognisance of the dynamic ecosystem, but were steadily disrupted by government regulation. Later state co-management initiatives suffered elite capture by traditional leaders and favoured only part of the fishing community. As has so often been the case with the southern African commons, indigenous systems of knowledge and governance have been subjected to new dispensations that have proved less efficient and less equitable.

6. CONCLUSION: SHAPING OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE GOVERNANCE OF THE COMMONS

The southern African commons are suffering a triple fate. In some cases, whether through structured reform, equitable evolution or elite capture, they are becoming the private property of individuals. Elsewhere, their governance is collapsing and common property regimes are being replaced by open access. In a third scenario, their sustainability is being reinforced through new approaches to governance and development that capitalise on the inherent strengths of this mode of tenure and succeed in motivating resource users to participate profitably in production and conservation. Whether our agenda is active intervention or simply accurate analysis, understanding the governance of the southern African commons requires us to consider the triple dimensions of knowledge, economics and power. This paper has elaborated on this framework in order to provide pointers for analysts of specific commons settings in the region, and to introduce the CROSCOG project's efforts to follow this broadly consistent analytical path.

We must keep asking ourselves why it is that southern Africa remains one of the poorest regions on the continent and in the world even though it is arguably the last bastion of natural resource biodiversity. If more commons around southern Africa are studied from the same analytical perspectives, this will make it easier for us to share experience and lessons in ways that can usefully inform development and conservation policy and programmes for the benefit of the majority of the rural poor.

This special issue was produced with the support of the European Union's Sixth Framework programme through the Cross-Sectoral Commons Governance in Southern Africa Project No. 043982. This work does not reflect the Commission's views and in no way anticipates its future policy in this area. The authors would like to thank all the anonymous reviewers, and the Development Southern Africa publications team, who helped to make these papers publishable.

Notes

¹Governments of independent African states inherited these models from colonialists, and because these countries’ resource managers and the western experts that come with development aid are influenced by the western training most of them have had, this thinking has been further entrenched.

²Bromley (1991:2) suggests that the term ‘common property resources’ be abandoned for the more correct ‘common pool resources’. By implication, the term ‘common property’ should be reserved to refer to regimes.

³Economic instrumentalism holds the view that most critical decisions regarding allocation and use of resources are based primarily on economics rather than on conservation considerations. Devolutionism proposes that, in order to create positive conditions for sustainable use, the ability to take crucial management decisions should be devolved to the resource users. Collective proprietorship emphasises that it is important for users to have tenure and property rights if they are to manage resources sustainably.