The involvement of local communities in the management of protected areas has been a recurrent theme over the past ten days at the World Parks Congress (WPC) in Durban.
It found expression on Wednesday in the ratification of the Durban Accord, a document the World Conservation Union says represents ”the cumulative wisdom and sentiment” of the WPC’s more than 2 500 participants.
Among its calls for action, the accord urges ”commitment to involve local communities, indigenous and mobile peoples in the creation, proclamation and management of protected areas”.
But according to John McKinnon, director of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Centre for Biodiversity Conservation, this is just so much conventional wisdom, and one of several examples of ”false beliefs and common mistakes rife in conservation”.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is a seven-member economic block.
Writing in The Game Ranger, a publication of the Game Rangers Association of Africa, he says involving local communities as participatory stakeholders in planning protected area management ”may be sometimes a necessity to reach some compromise deal, but it is certainly not the best way to achieve conservation”.
”The local community will always have a more economical way of using the area than protecting it for biodiversity. Incorporating their wishes into management will definitely dilute the options available for conservation.
”Why not invite the urban poor to help run the national airport instead?” he asks.
McKinnon also pours cold water on the notion that raising the standard of living of local people means they will no longer need to exploit the natural resources in neighbouring protected areas.
He says every step they take up the development ladder is accompanied by an overall increase in resource-use levels.
”People never have enough. When a man graduates from a bicycle to a motorbike, he suddenly also needs money to pay for the fuel. This need forces him to cut even more forest or sell more wildlife than when he was a subsistence farmer. If he can afford a gun and a chainsaw, he becomes an even greater threat.”
However, he says a common mistake of park managers is failing to incorporate indigenous knowledge and interest in biodiversity into conservation programmes.
”Ethnic minorities and other long-term rural inhabitants lack high-school certificates, but they are great field workers and make excellent forest guards, research assistants etc.
”Departments should be more open to recruiting their knowledge and skills, and less snobbish about race and education standard.”
McKinnon also calls for a stop to ”diluting conservation objectives with secondary agenda of poverty and gender”, saying there are already enough people fighting these wars. — Sapa