WILDLIFE, MARKETS, STATES, AND COMMUNITIES IN AFRICA: LOOKING BEYOND THE INVISIBLE HAND

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Notes

1 African Wildlife & Livelihoods: The Promise & Performance of Community Conservation (David Hulme & Marshall W. Murphree eds., 2001). It is important to add, however, that the history of communal approaches to natural resource management in Africa, particularly the commodification of wildlife, has much deeper roots than this. Beinart traces what may have been the first proposal for game farming in South Africa to observations made by Anders Sparrman in the late eighteenth century. William Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, & the Environment 1770–1950 68 (2003). Adams observes, “It was axiomatic to the first 20th century conservationists that a properly managed wildlife resource could yield a steady flow of income or other benefits such as meat,” and his book offers an account of the ways in which, at various times in African history, different ideas, including safari hunting and safari tourism, have surfaced about who should enjoy and capture these benefits, and how. William M. Adams, Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation 117–124, 217 (2004).

2 The notoriety of fortress conservation stems from the adverse impacts the creation of protected areas had on local people, often involving large scale resettlements, and the racially discriminatory ways in which “fences and fines” conservation was enforced. See Dan Brockington, Fortress Conservation: The Preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania (2002) and Clark C. Gibson, Politicians & Poachers: The Political Economy of Wildlife in Africa (1999).

3 For an argument that the incentives are real and have been successfully captured in a number of CBNRM projects, see Brian T.B. Jones & Marshall W. Murphree, Community-Based Natural Resource Management as a Conservation Mechanism: Lessons and Directions, in Parks in Transition: Biodiversity, Rural Development and the Bottom Line ch. 4 (Brian Child ed. 2004).

4 Adams, supra note 1, chs. 2, 3, 4, 5, and 8.

5 This is an important consideration underlying the vigorous and extensive contemporary debate over bushmeat. For contrasting perspectives, see the materials assembled at http://www.odi-bushmeat.org/index.html and at http://www.bushmeat.org/

6 Steps towards creating an environmental movement in Africa, and a movement which would have access to and the skills to use the sorts of political, litigation, and interventionist strategies needed to secure some of the same success enjoyed by environmental movements elsewhere, are explored, for example, in Environmental Law Institute, A Toolkit for Environmental Advocacy in Africa (2004); Linda A. Malone & Scott Pasternack, Defending the Environment: Civil Society Strategies to Enforce International Law (2004); and Carl Bruch, African Environmental Governance: Opportunities at the Regional, Subregional and National Levels, in International Environmental Law & Policy in Africa 217–249 (Beatrice Chaytor & Kevin R. Gray eds. 2003).

7 “Agriculture,” Adams writes, “was the most favored means of organizing the proper government of nature, whether in Tudor England, Irish or American plantations, or (by the mid-20th century) in the intricately jumbled fields of African peasant farmers. The idea of agricultural improvement emerged in medieval England (as an argument for the enclosure of common land), and it came to underpin the economics of Empire in India, Australia, and Africa. Agriculture could reclaim wastelands, and make barbarous peoples civilized(emphasis added). In its 20th century guise this same impulse towards order and improvement was re-expressed as ‘development,’ an all-conquering ideology of modernization and change.” Adams, supra note 1 at 159–160. It is also important to note, however, that after the Second World War the presumed correlation between agriculture and development in Africa weakened appreciably. Henry Bernstein & Philip Woodhouse, Telling Environmental Change Like It Is? Reflections on a Study in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1 J. Agrarian Change 283–324 (2001). As conservation came to be seen in the late 1960s and early 1970s as an “indispensable ingredient in development planning” the international environmental community, as Oates puts it, fell in love with economic development and has remained enamored with it ever since. John F. Oates, Myth & Reality in the Rain Forest: How Conservation Strategies Are Failing in West Africa 43–58 (1999). There is a history of the visions of development for Africa that have been favored by external actors in James Midgley, Community Participation, Social Development and the State (1986).

8 There are some cases, most notably in the Zimbabwe's CAMPFIRE program, where economic incentives have worked well to generate greater community support for conservation and an increase in wildlife numbers. Jones & Murphree, supra note 3. Unfortunately, these policies were not successful in a number of villages in the same program. For a political history and a generally critical overall assessment of CAMPFIRE, see Rosaleen Duffy, Killing for Conservation: Wildlife Policy in Zimbabwe (2000).