Community Management of Natural Resources in Africa: Impacts, Experiences and Future Directions

More than twenty years have passed since community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) rose to prominence in different parts of Africa as a strategy for rural development, local empowerment, and conservation. Led by new ideas about the merits of decentralized, collective resource governance regimes, and creative field experiments such as Zimbabwe's CAMPFIRE, these community-based approaches evolved in a wide range of ecological, political, and social contexts across Africa. This review provides an unprecedented pan-African synthesis of CBNRM, drawing on multiple authors and a wide range of documented experiences from Southern, Eastern, Western and Central Africa. The review discusses the degree to which CBNRM has met poverty alleviation, economic development and nature conservation objectives. In its concluding chapter, the report suggests a way forward for strengthening CBNRM and addressing key challenges in the years ahead

REDD at the crossroads? The opportunities and challenges of REDD for conservation and human welfare in South West Uganda

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) in the tropics could slow climate change while contributing to biodiversity conservation and to improvement of people’s livelihoods. In this study we assessed the opportunities and challenges of implementing REDD in South West (SW) Uganda. We consulted key stakeholders and reviewed regional literature particularly focusing on the opportunities for conservation and human welfare benefits. We structured our study using the Simpson and Vira (2010) framework for assessing policy interventions. The leading drivers of forest loss and degradation include escalating timber trade, fuel-wood extraction and agricultural expansion. Generally, local stakeholders had limited awareness of REDD, and local expectations appeared un-realistically high. Mechanisms for allocating and administering REDD payments remained unknown. However, Civil Society Organisations appeared the most popular option to manage REDD funding as government agencies had limited credibility. For REDD to succeed, the challenges we have highlighted will need to be addressed: key to success will be improvements in foundational knowledge, enabling institutions and social conditions. Our results have implications for potential REDD activities around the world which face similar challenges.This work was supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to Mbarara University of Science and Technology.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Inderscience via http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/IJESD.2015.07013

Digital Games and Biodiversity Conservation

Digital games play an important role in the lives of millions of people worldwide. The games industry is expanding rapidly, and games are developing in sophistication and complexity. Games (and gaming approaches to other activities) are increasingly being used for serious or social purposes in a wide range of fields, including biodiversity conservation. This paper evaluates the potential of “conservation games” (digital games that promote conservation). It explores ways in which conservation might make use of digital games in the areas of (1) education and behavior change, (2) fundraising, and (3) research, monitoring, and planning. It discusses the risk that games may distract gamers from the real world and its problems or provide misleadingly simple narratives about conservation issues. We conclude that there is great potential for conservation to take more advantage of digital games, provided that conservation games are developed in collaboration with game design specialists, have specific rather than general aims, target a specific and conservation-relevant audience, and (above all) are fun to play.This project was funded by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative Strategic Initiative Workshop Fund.This is the final published version. It first appeared at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12113/abstract

New spaces for nature: The re-territorialisation of biodiversity conservation under neoliberalism in the UK

Biodiversity conservation is a fundamentally spatial practice. For more than a century, conservation's leading strategy has been the establishment of protected areas. Governance by the state has been central to conservation's claim to territory. In the UK, the established approach to biodiversity conservation concentrated on spatial strategies of territorialisation to secure particular outcomes in relatively small pieces of land, set aside as protected areas. However, this strategy has begun to change, and conservation's expanding territorial claims have been expressed through new models of large-scale conservation. A series of projects developed by non-governmental conservation organisations seek to extend conservation management over larger areas of land. In this paper we consider these developments as a form of re-territorialisation, a reframing and extension of conservation's spatial claims. We describe how conservation's ambitions have been reformed and extended and discuss evidence on the growth of large-scale biodiversity conservation projects in the UK. We then consider the implications of these changes in the light of the neoliberalisation of conservation.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.12050/abstract

Provinciality and the Art World: The Midland Group 1961- 1977

This paper takes as its focus the Midland Group Gallery in order to first, make a case for the consideration of the geographies of art galleries. Second, highlight the importance of galleries in the context of cultural geographies of the sixties. Third, discuss the role of provinciality in the operation of art worlds. In so doing it explicates one set of geographies surrounding the gallery – those of the local, regional and international networks that connected to produce art works and art space. It reveals how the interactions between places and practices outside of metropolitan and regional hierarchies provides a more nuanced insight into how art worlds operated during the sixties, a period of growing internationalism of art, and how contested definitions of the provincial played an integral role in this. The paper charts the operations of the Midland Group Gallery and the spaces that it occupied to demonstrate how it was representative of a post-war discourse of provincialism and a corresponding re-evaluation of regional cultural activity

The antecedents of direct management communication to employees in Mauritius

We measure whether, in a developing country, existence of a ‘hard’ strategic human resource management (SHRM) strategy developed at high organizational levels or one designed to enhance employee knowledge inputs and thereby promote employer–employee interdependence (EEIN) is a stronger antecedent of direct communication to employees. We use data from a comprehensive survey of HR practices in Mauritius, one of Africa’s most open and successful economies. We find that both SHRM and EEIN are antecedents, but that the latter is stronger in public organizations and in smaller and older companies. We conclude that EEIN is a significant analytic category for explaining management practices especially in a historic sense in this and possibly other developing country contexts

Technology, inclusivity and the rogue: bats and the war against the ‘invisible enemy’

Although tempting to envisage the emerging violence in conservation as either against nature or in defence of it, this paper argues that such violence is increasingly between ‘the included’ and ‘rogues’ in ways that transcend the nature : society binary. The paper traces how the emergence of these battle lines is associated with the digital information revolution that is producing discourses and practices of ‘inclusion’ that embrace social and natural worlds, whilst recasting a hitherto knowable and governable ‘excluded’ as more unknowable and threatening ‘rogues’. Accordingly, the paper then illustrates how the battle against the ‘invisible enemy’ of Ebola was fought not just against rogue viruses but against rogue bats, rogue deforesters and rogue patients, transcending the nature : human binary, and similarly that sustainable solutions are being sought in rearranging landscapes within an inclusive ‘One Health’ approach

The Politics of Service Delivery Reform

This article identifies the leaders, the supporters and the resisters of public service reform. It adopts a principal–agent framework, comparing reality with an ‘ideal’ situation in which citizens are the principals over political policy-makers as their agents, and policy-makers are the principals over public service officials as their agents. Reform in most developing countries is complicated by an additional set of external actors — international financial institutions and donors. In practice, international agencies and core government officials usually act as the ‘principals’ in the determination of reforms. The analysis identifies the interests involved in reform, indicating how the balance between them is affected by institutional and sectoral factors. Organizational reforms, particularly in the social sectors, present greater difficulties than first generation economic policy reforms

Tourism, conservation and livelihoods: the impacts of gorilla tracking at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda.

Integrated Conservation and Development (ICD) initiatives that seek to incorporate human needs into protected area management have become common conservation practice. A popular ICD tool is nature-based tourism, which should deliver funding for conservation and benefits to local people, thereby encouraging them to support sustainable resource management. This "ecotourism" is attractive in theory, but its performance has been understudied in practice. In particular, little is known about how benefits and costs of tourism are distributed within host communities, how tourism influences attitudes to natural resources, the environmental impacts of tourism, and how tourists differ in their impacts. This thesis investigates all of these issues, using gorilla-tracking at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (BINP) in Uganda as a case study. The results show that whilst tourism at BINP resulted in measurable improvements in community development indicators, there were severe inequalities in the distribution of benefits between individuals according to age, gender, education, wealth, location and social networks. Tourism benefits generally outweighed tourism costs, encouraging positive attitudes to the industry. However, many people did not feel compensated for costs of conservation, because benefits were inappropriate or because they were not seen as linked to conservation. Tourism paid for park management, but tourists were found to represent a greater disease threat to gorillas than previously realised because encounters were illegally close and some tourists were unwell. Comparing the performance of tourists, older women were found to leave the most money in the local economy, whereas younger tourists posed the greatest disease threat to gorillas. Overall, tourism at BINP delivered surprisingly well on some of the promises of ecotourism. Nonetheless, considerable conflicts, risks and inequalities were identified. The thesis concludes by presenting a series of recommendations designed to improve the performance of tourism at BINP, and by discussing wider theoretical implications of the study

Introduction : screen Londons

Our aim, in editing the ‘London Issue’ of this journal, is to contribute to a conversation between scholars of British cinema and television, London historians and scholars of the cinematic city. In 2007, introducing the themed issue on ‘Space and Place in British Cinema and Television’, Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley observed that it would have been possible to fill the whole journal with essays about the representation of London. This issue does just that, responding to the increased interest in cinematic and, to a lesser extent, televisual, Londons, while also demonstrating the continuing fertility of the paradigms of ‘space and place’ for scholars of the moving image1. It includes a wide range of approaches to the topic of London on screen, with varying attention to British institutions of the moving image – such as Channel Four or the British Board of Film Classification – as well as to concepts such as genre, narration and memory. As a whole, the issue, through its juxtapositions of method and approach, shows something of the complexity of encounters between the terms ‘London’, ‘cinema’ and ‘television’ within British film and television studies