Impersonal Markets and Personal Communities? Wildlife, Conservation, and Development in Botswana

I MPERSONAL M ARKETS AND P ERSONAL C OMMUNITIES ? W ILDLIFE , C ONSERVATION , AND D EVELOPMENT IN B OTSWANA Parakh N. Hoon 1 1. INTRODUCTION During the 1980s and 1990s conservation policies and agencies in Africa came under severe criticism. In several countries, the evidence of increased poaching in the 1970s and 1980s pointed to the inability of wildlife departments to manage their habitats and wildlife populations. The government departments, critics argued, relied on top-down bureaucratic approaches that excluded local communities. 2 It seemed that a conservation practice based on exclusionary national parks, game reserves, and other sorts of protected areas was not functioning properly. This critique of state managed ‘top-down’ conservation provided an impetus for the emergence of Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) in southern Africa. To its proponents, CBNRM embodied the core sustainable development ethic—balancing material development and environmental conservation, and doing so by taking into consideration the needs of local communities. 3 In Botswana, CBNRM broke new ground in the early 1990s by integrating wildlife management, rural development, and tourism. 4 Often singled out as an African success story because of its stable economy and democratic institutions, Botswana has many of the characteristics that bode well for sustainable development. The dominant aspects of Botswana’s economy are diamond extraction and its livestock industries, but with national parks and game reserves occupying seventeen per cent of its total land area and with a further twenty-two per School of International Service, American University, Washington DC. I am grateful to Goran Hyden, David Leonard, Dennis Galvan, Arielle Levine, and the two reviewers for their comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 Breslauer Symposium on Natural Resource Issues in Africa at the University of California, Berkeley. D AVID H ULME & M ARSHALL M URPHREE , A FRICAN W ILDLIFE & L IVELIHOODS : T HE P ROMISE &P ERFORMANCE O F C OMMUNITY C ONSERVATION , at 1 (2001). The current trend towards CBNRM in southern Africa started in the 1980s with Administrative Management Design for Game Management Areas (ADMADE) and the Luangwa Integrated Resource Development Project (LIRDP) in Zambia, and the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) in Zimbabwe. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, Namibia, South Africa, and Botswana also have implemented CBNRM projects. CBNRM became possible only after a number of policies and ‘guidelines’ were implemented over two decades. The first was the Tribal Grazing Land Policy (TGLP), an attempt at privatizing the grazing commons. For a cogent policy and academic critique of TGLP, see P AULINE P ETERS , D IVIDING T HE C OMMONS : P OLITICS , P OLICY , A ND C ULTURE I N B OTSWANA (1994). The areas not economically viable for cattle ranching were set aside for other uses. One of the unintended consequences of TGLP was to distinguish these areas from the wildlife dominated areas. The Wildlife Conservation Policy of 1986, designed to encourage the economic utilization of wildlife, designated these areas (not useful for cattle) on twenty-two per cent of Botswana’s land, setting them aside exclusively for wildlife utilization or land uses compatible with wildlife. To rationalize the consumptive use of wildlife through devices such as hunting quotas in Controlled Hunting Areas (CHAs), all CHAs were rezoned in 1989. The entire country has been divided into 163 CHAs, of which 43 have been zoned for wildlife uses that include commercial and community managed wildlife use (photographic and hunting safari) areas, livestock areas, and un-designated areas.