Transboundary natural resource management (TBNRM) is gaining currency as environmentalists and policymakers recognize the limitations of existing national natural resource management programs, policies, and laws. There is a growing recognition that current policy and legal regimes are founded on narrow nationalistic sentiments that eschew the fact that many threatened ecosystems are shared by different communities within a country, or between two or more countries. Policy makers and environmentalists require programmatic and policy approaches to ensure sustainable management of such ecosystems. TBNRM has the potential to provide this kind of approach.
TBNRM has received impetus as a result of global environmentalism and the integration of natural resource management considerations into the agenda of regional political and economic treaties and associated development programs. TBNRM is now of concern to African regional bodies such as the East African Community (EAC) and the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD). This is demonstrated by the growing articulation of TBNRM-related issues in their discussions and programs. However, there is still limited analysis of the nature and implications of policies, programs, laws, and institutions for TBNRM. There are few lessons from past and current efforts to implement TBNRM.
TBNRM is not the preoccupation of conservationists alone. It is attracting the attention of the private sector, particularly in terms of industry’s interest in the natural resources of fisheries, wildlife, and forests. Investment from the private sector in TBNRM should create a source of new jobs and growth of incomes for communities. Globalization and associated liberalization of economic markets could increase opportunities for TBNRM. These phenomena—globalization and liberalization—will increase flexibility and may even open political boundaries that have confined natural resource management in the past. Enlarged economic markets now increase national and regional trade competitiveness. The mere ownership of natural resources does not give a country any economic privileges these days. It is how such resources are accessed and used that matters. Kenya and Zimbabwe, despite their considerable wildlife base, are not attracting tourists as they did five years ago because they lack or are losing the necessary conditions for sustained tourism. South Africa is gaining while Zambia hopes to gain from Kenya and Zimbabwe’s loses. The decline of tourism in Kenya and Zimbabwe could well undermine the process of TBNRM in those countries.
This study provides an overview of policies, laws, and programs for TBNRM in the Eastern Africa Region.1 It provides a conceptual foundation for assessing where, when, why, and how TBNRM works. Following this introduction, the second chapter defines the concepts of TBNRM, and discusses what constitutes TBNRM at local, national and regional levels of sociopolitical governance. A distinction is made between TBNRM as processes and TBNRM areas. The conceptual framework builds on that discussed in an early volume by Griffin et al. (1999), which focused on TBNRM in Southern Africa. We add a typology of TBNRM.
The third chapter introduces Eastern Africa’s political context. It gives a history of the political and administrative boundaries of the region’s nation states. An important point to note from this chapter is that the national boundaries are not sensitive to ecological issues; they do not take ecosystems into account.
The fourth chapter describes some of the transboundary ecosystems of the region, and also identifies some of the land-use systems of each of the ecosystems.
The fifth chapter is about TBNRM programs and projects, with emphasis on their process aspects. The sixth discusses the TBNRM content of national policies and laws as well as regional and international conventions to which Eastern African countries are parties.
The last two chapters draw together lessons from current TBNRM efforts in the region, and make recommendations on the strengthening of TBNRM in the region.
This overview is followed by two very different case studies, and draws on their detail and lessons learned in setting out conclusions. The studies are from two distinct practitioners:
Eastern Africa is changing in response to global forces, and regional alliances are becoming strong again (e.g., the East African Community). But some issues continue to have negative impact; Eastern Africa is:
The authors are conscious that this regional overview concentrates on traditional East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda) and has less detail on the other countries of the region. To some extent this mirrors the authors’ own experience, but there have been fewer conservation projects and especially TBNRM processes within the other countries—many of which have a long history of territorial conflict. We do, however, include a limited number of Horn experiences in the text.
We treat the label “transboundary” broadly, including issues that cross national borders as well as across internal institutional boundaries inside a country. We are aware that BSP’s priorities are across national borders. We have endeavored to find case studies from the region that describe resources other than wildlife-focused protected areas, which have typified many past reviews of transboundary processes. The significance of other natural resources in arid Eastern Africa (emphasizing scarce forests, water, grazing lands), and the internal institutional boundaries that occur in such resource management practice, encouraged us to include these issues.
1. This region is mapped in Map 1, and comprises nine countries—Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Tanzania, and Uganda—plus eastern Sudan, where it borders the other nations. A subset of Eastern Africa—Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—has been traditionally referred to as East Africa.
2. GEF is the Global Environment Facility and UNDP the United Nations Development Programme; the project, “Reducing Biodiversity Loss in Selected Cross-Border Sites in East Africa,” started preparation in 1997.