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Environmental
Rights and Natural Resources, Part 2
11 October 2004
Last week we discussed environmental
rights in the management of Swaziland’s resources. We suggested that
rural communities have an environmental right to access, utilise and conserve
the natural resources that they have always used for their livelihoods,
cultural and aesthetic needs.
Empowering local communities:
a powerful and under-exploited potential for conservation
The World Conservation Union
(IUCN) recognise that local communities have knowledge, skills, resources
and institutions which have often been squandered or rendered hostile to
conservation by the lack of understanding and care and/or by the arrogant
imposition of the will of stronger parties. To resolve this there
are two recognised forms of community empowerment in conservation:
-
Community Conserved Areas; territories
and resources directly conserved and managed by indigenous and local communities.
-
Co-Managed Protected Areas; official
state-established protected areas managed with the effective engagement
of other social actors, including indigenous and local communities.
The following are examples of
local people being allowed access to protected areas to satisfy part of
their subsistence requirements. This provides opportunities for increasing
formal roles for local people in the reserve management, and for dialogue
between park managers and communities.
Opening Parks to People
in Central Africa
Examples of community empowerment
in central Africa include:
-
Allowing special community access
to grazing lands and fishing areas (Waza Logone, Cameroon);
-
Providing formalized access to
forest resources within the park to specified user groups and for collection
of agreed products only (e.g., Bwindi, Uganda);
-
Instituting Special Forest Reserves
where local people can hunt or fish (Dzangha-Sangha, CAR);
-
Permitting indigenous people to
remain within the Reserve itself (Mbuti in the Okapi Reserve, DRC).
Balancing the powers in Makuleke
land
In 1969, the Makuleke community
of the Limpopo Province was forcibly removed from land in northeastern
South Africa. Their land was incorporated into the Kruger National
Park and the community relocated some 70km towards the south.
Close to thirty years later,
ownership of the land was returned to them through a co-management agreement
with the South African National Parks (SANP).
This land ownership gave the
Makuleke substantial bargaining power and secured their environmental rights
to their traditional lands. It also created a framework for the longer-term
conservation of the biodiversity of the Makuleke land.
Tayna Gorilla Reserve, Democratic
Republic of Congo
The Tayna Gorilla Reserve
in North Kivu, DRC was created in 1999 through collaboration between conservation
agencies, landholders, government and two groups of indigenous people.
Local people directly participate in the management of the protected area,
whose goals include both the conservation of biodiversity and the promotion
of rural development. The Tayna forest guards are unarmed, and they
do not employ repressive protection measures. Communities have been
directly involved in the development of the Reserve’s management plan,
including in drawing the forest zoning and addressing the long-term vision
of how the park should develop.
Yonge Nawe believes that empowering
local communities to manage natural resources would represent significant
progress towards a more equitable approach to conservation and resource
use in Swaziland.
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