Conservation Myths, Political Realities, And The Proliferation Of Protected Areas

African Environments Lecture, African Environments Programme, Oxford University Centre for the Environment (OUCE), University of Oxford, 24 November 2006

Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas Martin Walsh Department of Social Anthropology University of Cambridge

Conservation myths, political realities, & the proliferation of protected areas African Environments Lecture, OUCE, 24 November 2006

Martin Walsh Department of Social Anthropology University of Cambridge

To begin, I’d like to thank Dr. Daley and the Centre for inviting me to give this lecture, and Hassan Sachedina for coordinating the arrangements for my visit.

Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

1998

MBOMIPA = Matumizi Bora ya Malihai Idodi na Pawaga = Sustainable Use of Wildlife Resources in Idodi and Pawaga

2002

MBOMIPA staff, the Iringa District Game Officer, and resident hunters

Between 1997 and 2003 I worked as the Field Manager and Social Development Advisor of MBOMIPA, a community wildlife management project in Tanzania. MBOMIPA was a partnership between Tanzania’s Wildlife Division and TANAPA (Tanzania National Parks), and was supported by DFID (the UK government’s Department for International Development). The basic task of MBOMIPA – inherited from an earlier project (REWMP, the Ruaha Ecosystems Wildlife Management Project, 1992-96) – was to develop community wildlife management in villages bordering Ruaha National Park, contributing to the development of national policy and legislation in the process. One aspect of this was to pilot a new kind of protected area on village lands, a community-run Wildlife Management Area (WMA) that would replace the existing Game Controlled Area (GCA) that was managed directly by the Wildlife Division and Iringa District Council.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNITY WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT IN TANZANIA LESSONS FROM THE RUAHA ECOSYSTEM

Martin T. Walsh MBOMIPA Project, Iringa, Tanzania & Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich, U.K.

disputed Protected area boundary dispute, 2000

Ruaha National Park

r tA

ea

en uth m ea So e ag d Ar antrolle M on

disputed disputed area

e C lif e li dbi Gam W am

Usangu Game Reserve

o pr

gazetted 1998

d kw seda-M o p un L

This work presented us with a number of challenges, not least of which were the consequences of the creation of another protected area to the west. Usangu Game Reserve was gazetted in 1998 and one interpretation of its boundary description suggested that it might swallow a large chunk of our Game Controlled Area and the richest area for wildlife – with negative consequences for village incomes from hunting. The hunting company operating Usangu Game Reserve pressed their claim by bringing clients to Mkupule (the disputed area), ignoring a request from Wildlife Division headquarters to stay out of the area until matters could be settled. I discussed this and other challenges to the project in a presentation to an international gathering (the conference on African Wildlife Management in the New Millennium) at the end of 2000. I talked about the negative consequences of this dispute (especially if it wasn’t settled in our favour), other problems caused by the creation of Usangu Game Reserve (not least the ejection of livestock-keepers and others), and pointed to the precariousness of our position for as long as our work was in a legal limbo and the legal and institutional frameworks for community wildlife management remained undeveloped. The following is a quote from the written version of my presentation: “To donors and other stakeholders in the wildlife sector nationwide, a negative outcome may well be interpreted to indicate lack of real government commitment to developing community wildlife management. If one of the wildlife sector’s most important donor-funded projects can lose a case like this, then what hope is there for other initiatives in the country?” (2000) The assembled grandees of Tanzania’s wildlife bureaucracy were less than pleased by this and responded by arguing that the Usangu Game Reserve represented an opportunity rather than a threat. After the meeting I was taken aside and told off for washing their dirty linen in public. My next performance in a workshop was closely monitored.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

2003

2000

2002

The offending presentation was made in a conference session entitled “Community-based Conservation – the New Myth?” Debate about the pros and cons of community wildlife management and “fortress conservation” is still very much alive in Tanzania, and the process established to create community Wildlife Management Areas is about to be subject to a major review. In my presentation today, though, I want to use the same set of events to point to some of the difficulties associated with “conservation myths” of a different order – the grand narratives that are widely used as explanatory tools in our political ecologies and economies of conservation, in particular the resort to neo-Foucauldian and neo-Marxist understandings of environmentalism and globalisation to describe and explain events such as the ones I experienced in Tanzania.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

2004

2005

I can’t claim any particular credit for this critical tack. Anthropologists (some anthropologists) have long questioned what my Cambridge colleagues Harri Englund and James Leach (2000) refer to as the “meta-narratives of modernity”, explanatory narratives which anthropologists themselves have helped to create. In my own sub-field, the anthropology of development, nearly a decade has passed since Ralph Grillo (1997) attacked the oversimplifying “myth of development” found in the work of Arturo Escobar and others, and called for more ethnographies of development to provide an increasingly multi-sited and multi-vocal alternative to Foucauldian constructions of the “discourses of development”. Grillo’s call has since begun to bear fruit. On the slide I’ve drawn attention to two recently published studies. Christine Walley’s Rough Waters (2004) is a study of the political conflicts surrounding the creation of Tanzania’s Mafia Island Marine Park which questions the adequacy of an explanatory framework focusing on the impacts of global on the local. David Mosse’s Cultivating Development (2005) is an ethnography of aid policy and practice in a DFID-funded agricultural project in western India, a project that Mosse himself worked on. Mosse’s former employers and colleagues were extremely unhappy with his public washing of their own dirty linen, and tried to block publication of this book. An article by Mosse in the current issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (‘Anti-social Anthropology?’, December 2006) provides some interesting reflections on this. The argument of the book itself is that development practice is not driven by policy but shaped by the exigencies of organisations and the need to maintain social relationships. Walley makes similar points when analysing the “social drama” of park development in Mafia.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Tanzania: Protected & Open Areas (Baldus & Cauldwell 2005)

My own argument is illustrated by select moments in the proliferation, expansion and upgrading of “wildlife” (as opposed to forestry) protected areas in south-central Tanzania, around Ruaha National Park. More than a quarter of mainland Tanzania is covered by officially-gazetted protected areas. This map (see slide), poached from a report on hunting, gives some idea of their extent, though it omits some recent additions as well as forest reserves.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Tanzania: Protected & Open Areas (Severre 2000; 2003; Nelson et al. 2006; URT 2006) Category of Protected (or other) Area

Legal mandate / government authority

Villages?

Tourist hunting?

Resident hunting?

Ngorongoro Conservation Area n=1

Ngorongoro Conservation Area Ordinance, 1959 / Ngorongoro Conservation Authority

yes

no

no

National Parks n=14

National Parks Ordinance, 1959 / Tanzania National Parks

no

no

no

Game Reserves n=33

Wildlife Conservation Act, 1974 / Wildlife Division

no

yes

no

Game Controlled Areas n=43

Wildlife Conservation Act, 1974 / Wildlife Division

yes

yes

yes

Open Areas n=?

Wildlife Conservation Act, 1974 / Wildlife Division

yes

yes

yes

Wildlife Management Areas n=4 (of 16 pilot areas)

Wildlife Conservation Act, 1974 & Wildlife Conservation (Wildlife Management Areas) Regulations, 2002 / Wildlife Division

yes

yes

yes

This table (see slide), adapted from another report (Walsh 2006), shows the principal categories of terrestrial “wildlife” protected area and some of their uses: • National Parks – for non-consumptive utilisation of wildlife, mainly tourism and gameviewing; • Game Reserves – especially for profession tourist hunting; • Game Controlled Areas – both tourist and resident hunting; • Open Areas – hunting areas that can be declared without gazettment; • Wildlife Management Areas – the new category of community-managed area, that will in theory replace many Game Controlled Areas (where not created from scratch).

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Protected areas around Ruaha National Park

Muhesi Game Reserve - 1996 Kisigo Game Reserve - 1991

Izazi Open Area

Rungwa Game Reserve - 1946

formerly Rungwa Game Reserve South - 1951

Lunda-Mkwambi Game Controlled Area - 1984 Ruaha National Park - 1964

formerly Iringa Game Controlled Area - 1951

proposed Idodi-Pawaga Wildlife Management Area

Utengule Swamp Open Area

Usangu Game Reserve - 1998

formerly Utengule Swamp Game Controlled Area - 1953

This map (see slide) shows the current cluster of protected areas around Ruaha National Park. As the dates indicate, the development of these has a colonial as well as postcolonial history. I haven’t tried to show all the details of this history. I’ve already introduced Usangu Game Reserve and the Wildlife Management Area that we were planning for Lunda-Mkwambi Game Controlled Area south. Iringa Game Controlled Area was short-lived, and turned into an Open Area for a time. Izazi Open Area is something of an anomaly, apparently declared within Lunda-Mkwambi Game Controlled Area.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

George Rushby

Proposal for Ruaha National Park, 1949

The creation of a National Park was first proposed in 1949 by George Rushby, a Senior Game Ranger (and the subject of a bad docudrama, The Man-eating Lions of Njombe, which first aired on television last year). Rushby made his proposal in response to policy developments in the colony, ultimately stemming from the 1933 Convention for the Protection of African Flora and Fauna and subsequent lobbying by the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire. His main thought seems to have been that a park would primarily help protect people (and economic development) from wildlife rather than the reverse, a view which he shared with many game officers engaged in wildlife control. Following Rushby’s proposal, the existing Game Reserve was extended. The extension (not the whole Game Reserve) wasn’t upgraded to National Park status until 1964, after independence, with the help of grants from the New York Zoological Society and a sister organisation.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Protected areas around Ruaha National Park

Muhesi Game Reserve - 1996 Kisigo Game Reserve - 1991

Izazi Open Area

Rungwa Game Reserve - 1946

formerly Rungwa Game Reserve South - 1951

Lunda-Mkwambi Game Controlled Area - 1984 Ruaha National Park - 1964

formerly Iringa Game Controlled Area - 1951

proposed Idodi-Pawaga Wildlife Management Area

Utengule Swamp Open Area

Usangu Game Reserve - 1998

formerly Utengule Swamp Game Controlled Area - 1953

At a distance the influence of (in this case) colonial policy and environmental discourses is apparent, though the details tell a more complex story. Matters become even more involved when we fast forward to the recent past and cases which are accessible through more than official documentation (and having worked for a number of years in government offices that continue to employ colonial-era filing systems, I’ve seen what gets written and what doesn’t, and what gets lost or thrown away, accidentally or otherwise). Let’s have a look at the new protected area that was causing me problems in 2000 – Usangu Game Reserve (see map).

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Mbeya Regional Game Office, 1995

Ruaha National Park, 1996

Proposals for Usangu Game Reserve, 1995-96

The case for the creation of a new Game Reserve in Usangu was first detailed in writing by the Regional Game Officer in Mbeya. That was in 1995. The following year his proposal was seconded by the Chief Park Warden of Ruaha National Park. Their principal justification for the gazettment of a new Game Reserve was to protect the wetlands of Usangu from environmental degradation by immigrant livestock keepers and their herds of cattle. This degradation was in turn thought to be the main cause of the drying-up of the Great Ruaha River downstream of Usangu.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

The Rufiji Basin

Great Ruaha River Rufiji River

Usangu catchment

The Great Ruaha flows out of the permanent swamp in the north-east of Usangu, along the south-eastern side of Ruaha National Park, and on to the Mtera and Kidatu Reservoirs. In December 1993 the river dried up for the first time in living memory, and since then has become a seasonal river, much to the consternation of the park authorities and other downstream users. This became a cause for national concern in 1995 when power rationing in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar was blamed by TANESCO (the Tanzania Electricity Supply Company) on the low level of the reservoir at Mtera, which was blamed in turn on reduced flows in the Great Ruaha, and ultimately on environmental degradation in its catchment, including the wetlands of Usangu. As subsequent research has shown, however, dry season changes in the Great Ruaha had had little impact on reservoir levels, which were poorly managed by TANESCO using outdated operating procedures. And livestock keepers were being unfairly scapegoated for the drying of the river, which has largely been caused by the expansion of rice cultivation and dry season irrigation in the south of Usangu.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

But the anti-livestock narrative was good enough to justify the creation of the Game Reserve and repeated efforts to evict the livestock-keepers and other residents of the wetland. Although I knew that this narrative chain was flawed, I also acquiesced in the use of part of it – the alleged impact of resource use in the catchment on hydroelectric power in the country – to justify DFID investment in a project designed to tackle resource use conflicts in Usangu. This was SMUWC – the Sustainable Management of the Usangu Wetland and its Catchment – a project I helped to develop in 1997.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Usangu Safaris Limited

I also expressed my disagreement with the plans for a new Game Reserve. By this time it had become clear that there was another set of interests pressing for it – a tourist hunting company founded in 1989 by a member of Usangu’s long-standing Baluchi community. This company was engaged in a bitter struggle with resident hunters over access to game quotas in Usangu. The creation of a Game Reserve would give the company exclusive access to hunting rights, excluding other hunters as well as livestock-keepers and others.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Usangu Safaris Ltd. – hunting blocks

The author of the Usangu proposal was widely supposed to be acting on behalf of the Baluchi hunting company, and his behaviour throughout this affair was cited as evidence for this. The company also had a fair amount of political clout at higher levels, and in 1998 it purchased the privatised parastatal TAWICO, the Tanzania Wildlife Company, acquiring many of its assets, hunting block included, in the process. In supporting the Game Reserve proposal, the Ruaha National Park warden was motivated by the desire for a more effective buffer zone along the southern boundary of the park. Ironically the hunting company and its clients were said to be responsible for many of the incidents of bad practice (like hunting animals close to the park boundary) that the park authorities wanted to guard against.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Usangu Safaris Limited

The Game Reserve was gazetted in 1998 and the Baluchi company began to encroach on the hunting block managed by MBOMIPA Project villages. The legal description of the new reserve’s boundaries suggested that this was their due, although this description had been developed without consulting villagers and ate into the Game Controlled Area that was being developed on their behalf. As it happens the Wildlife Division had made funds available in 1996 for resolving this boundary dispute. But these were not taken up by the District Natural Resources Officer responsible, allegedly because he had a personal stake in unauthorised logging in the disputed area.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Protected area boundary dispute, 2000

ea Ar t en uth m ea So e ag d Ar antrolle M on

Ruaha National Park disputed area

Usangu Game Reserve gazetted 1998

e C lif me ildbi Ga W am

pr

o

d kw seda-M o p un L

My verbal intervention in December 2000 hastened the release of funds by the Wildlife Division for the work of a specially-convened committee to investigate and recommend a solution to the dispute. Although this committee came under a number of pressures, we lost our case on a technicality. Lunda-Mkwambi Game Controlled Area had first been proposed in the 1970s. Boundary descriptions were bounced back and forth until 1980 when the final verbal description landed on the desk of an officer at Wildlife Division headquarters.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Lunda-Mkwambi boundary description, 1980

Although this wasn’t a legal requirement (as he later admitted), he decided to add map coordinates to the description, and went to the Mapping Division in Dar es Salaam to do this. Unfortunately he didn’t know the area and placed the co-ordinates far to the east of the verbally-defined boundary. When the gazettment went through in 1985 everyone simply followed the verbal description with its named points of reference. When the gazettment was scrutinised in 2001 the map co-ordinates took legal precedence over the verbal description. We were left with no grounds on which to challenge the Usangu Game Reserve boundary, short of asking for both gazettments to be revised. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was no political will to support such a move. MBOMIPA’s Game Controlled Area and protoWildlife Management Area shrank overnight.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Ruaha National Park

Lunda-Mkwambi Game Controlled Area

Usangu Game Reserve

Protected area proliferation

Kitulo National Park Mpanga / Kipengere Game Reserve

Before I hasten to a close, let me add a little on subsequent developments. Many years after his mapping mistake, the man in question came to work in Iringa as our Regional Game Officer. In part to keep himself busy at a time when he had relatively little else to do (as a consequence of local government decentralisation), he set about proposing a new Game Reserve in the upper catchment of Usangu. The creation of this reserve, Mpanga/Kipengere, was justified in part by an environmental degradation narrative linked to that deployed in Usangu itself.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Cattle in Usangu

The original narrative has changed in the hands of different actors, but continues to be used in various ways. At the Rio+10 Preparatory Meeting in London in March 2001, influenced by the work of the SMUWC Project, the Prime Minister of Tanzania committed his government to restoring year-round flows in the Great Ruaha River by 2010. In 2001 the WWF started a Ruaha Water Programme with the same objective, and subsequently began to support the development of Mpanga/Kipengere and Usangu Game Reserves.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Ruaha National Park

Usangu Game Reserve

Protected area upgrading

Mpanga / Kipengere Game Reserve

More recently, Mpanga/Kipengere has been annexed to Usangu Game Reserve. Following the election of Tanzania’s new President (Jakaya Kikwete) late last year, efforts to eject livestock-keepers from Usangu were redoubled. And in July the Game Reserve Manager announced plans to upgrade the enlarged Usangu and incorporate it within Ruaha National Park. It remains to be seen how and when (and if) this will happen, and what the response of the Baluchi-owned hunting company will be. I’m sure that there will be a lot more to come.

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

Fishing in the Usangu Game Reserve (before eviction)

I’ve got relatively little information on these recent developments and can’t provide the kind of detail that I can for earlier events. I’ve only sketched the outline of these and what I understand of them. I would argue that when personal observation, ethnography or the historical record allow us to pick apart events and describe the intentions and/or actions of individual and collective actors, and the unintended consequences of these actions, then it becomes increasingly difficult to interpret these events as effects of a conspiratorial modernity. I fail to find what my good friend Dan Brockington has called Tanzania’s “environmental-conservation complex”. This may be because I was (and am) a part of it, but I prefer to think that the political realities that I’ve experienced are more complex than that. The simplifying meta-narratives of environmentalism and globalisation are all to readily used as substitutes for careful ethnographic and historical description and the analysis of local causes and effects. Recent writing on the global proliferation of protected areas – and I’m thinking here in particular of papers published by Dan Brockington, Jim Igoe and Paige West (not necessarily in that order) in Current Anthropology and the Annual Review of Anthropology – has been weak on the causes of this phenomenon but perhaps stronger on some of its effects, although they also recognise the general lack of detailed information on social impacts. But they are happy to explain the proliferation of protected areas as an effect of neoliberality and the topdown imposition of a series of global “-isms” – environmentalism, virtualism, and the demands of late capitalism. But I think that this is a simplification too far. Of particular significance is the way in which these discourses are appropriated and reinterpreted and conjoined with other, sometimes local discourses by different social actors and groups. (And Dan Brockington has himself written interestingly on this subject in his paper on ‘The Politics and Ethnography of Environmentalisms in Tanzania’ (2005).)

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Martin Walsh (2006) Conservation Myths, Political Realities, and the Proliferation of Protected Areas ___________________________________________________________________________________

This is exactly what has happened to the narratives produced to explain the drying-up of the Great Ruaha and its supposed impacts on hydropower generation. Far from functioning as an “anti-politics machine” (Ferguson 1980), these discourses of development and underdevelopment are the very stuff of political contestation. But you won’t see this without dwelling in at least some of the details that close-up research supplies. This includes (or should include) ethnographic research in the sites of policy and decision-making at higher levels than those that I’ve described today. The appeal to global ”-isms” and the metanarratives of modernity to explain everything is a symptom of ignorance of the details, and one which can foster further ignorance by discouraging the kinds of research that can free us from intellectual laziness.

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