The World Bank/WBI’s CBNRM Initiative
Case Received: January 23, 1998
Author: Patrick Bergin, African Wildlife Foundation
Email: awftz@habari.co.tz
The Community Conservation Service Centre:
An Institutional Innovation in Promoting and Supporting Community based Wildlife
Management in East Africa
Identification of the Case
The Community Conservation Service Centre (CCSC) is a project of the African Wildlife Foundation(AWF) and is based in Arusha, Tanzania, East Africa and is developing linkages with other East African and SADC countries. The Centre promotes natural resource management in an integrated way, but the main focus is on the resources of the African savannah: wildlife and the range resources used by pastoralists.
The CCSC was established in 1996 as an independent service centre' which provides a central clearing house of information, tools and technical services to a whole continuum of stakeholders: community groups, districts, local PVOs, the private sector and government conservation agencies. The author is the executive officer of the CCSC.
The Initial Situation
AWF had worked with Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA) for more than 7 years to establish a "Park Outreach" capacity known as the Community Conservation Service (CCS). The CCS has been successfully institutionalized in the National Parks programs and policy, and is also generally considered successful in having improved the relationships between parks and surrounding communities.
However it was eventually noted that while the relationships between communities and parks had improved, land for grazing and wildlife dispersal outside of and adjacent to national parks was continuing to be alienated for unplanned agricultural expansion and settlement. It was realized that while the CCS continued to play an essential role in implementing the mandate of National Parks, there was also a need for a strategy to work directly with local communities and districts to plan use of land and resources in their areas.
Like other SADC countries, a number of projects' had been initiated in Tanzania to allow local communities to set aside part of their land for wildlife conservation, and to benefit from the revenues and resources coming from these "Wildlife Management Areas" (WMAs). However ten years after such programs were initiated, they were still limited to a few pilot' areas where there was substantial bilateral assistance. The majority of community areas, including the pastoral areas adjacent to Tanzania's northern parks, were not benefitting from such community management.
The problems with this situation are threefold:
The Change Process
After years of working primarily with government agencies, the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) conceived of the idea of the CCSC as a way to promote the participation of the entire community of stakeholders in the essential work of conservation and management of natural resources. With support from Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA) and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, the Centre set out on an initial phase to experiment with models and services that would promote and support more effective and profitable natural resource management regimes, particularly outside of existing protected areas. Work to setup the CCSC began in earnest in July, 1996 and a formal opening was held in November of that year.
The service centre' approach can be thought of as an alternative to the conventional project' intervention in support of CBNRM. "Projects' normally have certain disadvantages including the need to predefine a geographical area, the likelihood that the donor or NGO will be viewed as the real owner of the process, and the fact that such projects are often more costly that the benefits they purport to generate. In the service centre' model, we provide information, services, and support to community groups, but the responsibility remains with them to seek out the assistance and information they need to reach their goals. The Centre does not claim ownership' of any community wildlife management area, but rather works with a range of locally interested parties including districts, private sector companies, researchers and missions to help achieve common objectives. Finally the Centre shares information and models among communities and allows them to learn from each other.
A major output of the first year of the Centre's work with communities has been the formulation of a rather simple, 12-step process framework for catalyzing and supporting Community based Natural Resources Management. It is always stressed that these 12 steps are not like the ten commandments (chiseled in stone) but rather a starting point for initiating and tracking progress. The twelve steps are:
The Centre, in collaboration with other partners, has embarked on these steps with four community areas. It is understood that each community will go at its own pace (if they decide to participate). Of these four areas, the process is most advanced in Enduimet (Longido). In this community area, which lies between Mount Kilimanjaro and Amboseli NP in Kenya, steps one through five have been completed, culminating in the stakeholders workshop (complete report in Annex 2). In addition, steps 6-8 have all been initiated and a training course for community game guards has been successfully completed (Annex 3). Small working groups which include staff from the district, TANAPA, a local Maasai NGO and the Centre are working on participatory methodologies for land use planning, the resource inventory and the business options study.
The Outcome
It is still very earlier to attempt to evaluate the success of the approach of the CCSC. However AWF marked the first anniversary of the CCSC by calling a one day "Annual Stakeholders Consultation". The Consultation brought together almost 50 of the Centre's stakeholders including community representatives (women and men), traditional leaders, NGOs, local government, private sector and government conservation agencies.
The Annual Stakeholders Consultation was an experiment in reporting back to our stakeholders in an open forum and getting feedback. A report of the year's activities was presented (in Swahili, with key points in English on overhead transparencies) and the participants were then given a chance to conduct a "Strengths and Weaknesses Assessment (SWOT) from the perspective of various interest groups.
(Box)
Community Representatives Assessment of CCSC Program
Strengths/Accomplishments of CCSC Program
Weakness/Shortcomings
Although this process if far from complete, we believe that we can already point to some measure of impact. When government game scouts were made redundant around 18 months ago, a vacuum' in wildlife management existed into which elites from local urban areas would come to access free' meat. In the last year of work, nascent natural resource committees and a team of twenty local Maasai warriors have replaced this vacuum with what one of our partners calls "the Presence Principle". The Presence Principle means that once it becomes known that there is someone with an eye open and a viable plan for enforcement, much abuse automatically becomes self-regulating.
Some Lessons Learned
Catalyzing and supporting CBNRM must in itself be affordable. If the goal is empower local management, it is contradictory to try to achieve this with mega projects with many expatriates, computers and other external inputs. We estimate that the first WMA we are helping to set up will be established with around a $200,000 total investment from the different partners. As we are involved in more WMAs, this price will drop. With this sort of economy of support, stepping in to assist communities only where needed, we believe the potential for establishing community management over much larger areas can be realized.
Timing and Process
The contradictions between so-called participatory process and then mechanistic logframe' type projects have been discussed by a number of writers. As the saying goes, the process should be community-based and community-paced, allowing the community to access inputs and take steps based on their time frame and not a predetermined project' time frame. In our experience, it is important to be able to say to a community, if your not ready this year, we can talk again next year.'
Community management should not be ideologically driven
To us, community conservation is about engaging a much larger part of civil society in conservation, not about one particular model of conservation management or one particular definition of community' or participation'. The Service Centre is being successful when more types of people and institutions conserve (manage) more resources. It is better to not be selling' a particular model. It also gives our clients more freedom to really decide what they want.
Linkages between Management Regimes
Community-based management is very important both for empowering communities and for reducing costs and size of government, but it is more and more recognized that it is not a panacea or is not appropriate for all management objectives. The TANAPA CCS and the CCSC working together have a vision that looks not only at national versus local management regimes, but also the linkages between them. National Parks are benefiting where WMAs are set up to provide buffer, corridor and dispersal functions. Likewise communities benefit where their WMAs have more wildlife or more tourist appeal based on easy accessibility to a well-known park.