Let me give one example of how these relationships are played out in an instance from Southern Africa. In a fascinating set of projects, local communities in Mozambique and Zimbabwe are engaged in community management of wildlife resources. These projects involve collaboration with outsider safari companies, in which the communities allow safari hunters to shoot wildlife on their lands, while enforcing quotas, in exchange for a percentage of the fees from each animal that is killed. In Zimbabwe, one striking success story is the village of Masoka, which I had the opportunity to visit several years ago. Nor are two projects in very similar settings ever the same.
Different issues arise.
In Mavita, a village in Mozambique, we met a village chief who explained his problem, involving the ecological and cultural boundaries of his area. Community wildlife management projects were just being launched in Mozambique, and the chief was anxious for Mavita to be included. Technically, on the map, Mavita appeared to be outside the defined area. To complicate this further, it turned out that any resource management project in the mountains would need to take account of a particularly powerful spirit medium, who was said to regulate access to animals and the forest and was also said to be virtually unapproachable. What was striking to me was that this whole conversation was being listened to with care and respect by a team of Mozambican government researchers, who clearly saw themselves as partners and understood that the old man s perspective, while different than their own, needed to be part of any effort to move the work along.