| A. What is TBNRM? | |
| B. What this report is and what it is not | |
| C. TBNRM: A component of landscape, watershed, and ecosystem management | |
| D. Why is TBNRM important? | |
| E. For whom is TBNRM important? | |
Transboundary Natural Resource Management is a process for reducing or minimizing conflicting resource-use policies and practices within ecosystems that are divided by international frontiers or by national property or land-use zoning boundaries. It can be both an international and a national process. TBNRM is advocated within the conservation and development community as a way to promote land-use policies and practices within a shared ecosystem that, at minimum, do not adversely impact management objectives elsewhere within the ecosystem. Under the best conditions, TBNRM should promote cross-border resource management policies and practices that maintain ecosystem productivity and resilience, species composition and persistence, and economic revenues and human welfare. It should generate positive ecological, economic, and sociopolitical benefits from the whole ecosystem that are greater than the sum accrued in the divided parts.
A TBNRM area is one in which “cooperation to manage natural resources occurs across boundaries.” The process of TBNRM can be defined as “any process of collaboration across boundaries that facilitates and improves the management of natural resources to the benefit of all parties in the area concerned” (Griffin et al. 1999; see also Box 1).
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Box 1. Levels of the TBNRM process The scale at which transboundary cooperation and management occurs can vary depending on the objectives and the available political and financial resources. There are at least three distinct levels of TBNRM; in most cases where TBNRM activities are initiated, they develop progressively through these different levels, as follows: 1. Local collaborative natural resource management across borders. At this level, management of natural resources is coordinated between authorities across borders. Typical actions at this level would be to ease the bidirectional movement of wildlife across borders by the removal of physical barriers or by curbing threats such as illegal hunting. 2. Local collaborative people management. Though still localized to a specific TBNRM area, this level would typically require policy reforms at the national level to, for example, remove restrictions that prevent people from freely crossing boundaries within a TBNRM area. 3. Harmonization of national policies and legislation. TBNRM at this level extends beyond a specific area, affecting all TBNRM areas within a nation or collaborating nations. Actions at this level typically entail reforming and harmonizing relevant national laws and policies to promote the TBNRM process. The political complexity of TBNRM clearly increases as the process moves from level 1 to level 3. Unsurprisingly, the political and economic costs of the process typically also increase as TBNRM is advanced from local- to national-level management. Source: Adapted from Griffin et al. (1999). |
B. What this report is and what it is not
Transboundary Natural Resource Management in its broadest sense refers to the collaborative management of shared ecosystems that cross national land-ownership and land-use boundaries, and international frontiers. To retain comparability with the other regional reviews in this series (Southern Africa, West Africa, and Eastern Africa), however, this report is limited to discussion primarily of international collaborative efforts to manage protected areas with common borders. Examples of intranational TBNRM are included to highlight specific points made or to draw attention to relevant issues not illustrated by international TBNRM activities in Central Africa.
This regional overview is designed to summarize the state of TBNRM in the Central Africa region, to highlight the gaps in our knowledge that militate against the use of TBNRM, and to identify opportunities for and constraints against promoting TBNRM. It is intended to provide information to decision makers in government, NGOs, and donor organizations struggling with the challenges of natural resource conservation in an area that has few of the requisites for effective biodiversity conservation.
This report is part of a larger study covering all regions of sub-Saharan Africa. It does not presume to be the final word on TBNRM, but seeks merely to highlight the key issues, ongoing activities, and gaps in our knowledge in relation to TBNRM in Central Africa.
C. TBNRM: A component of landscape, watershed, and ecosystem management
TBNRM is a natural extension of the conservation community’s growing realization that investments focused solely on protected areas may not result in the long-term conservation of the full range of biodiversity extant in a particular region. Protected areas are often either too small or too few, and seldom encompass whole ecosystems. To ensure the long-term persistence of the assemblage of plants and animals that are characteristic of a particular ecosystem, it is essential not only to manage resources within those areas where biodiversity conservation is the primary land-use, but also to seek ways to conserve resources within the proximal and adjacent lived-in landscapes where resource consumption and economic development may be the principal land management objectives. Landscape-scale management that focuses on whole ecosystems (i.e., functional systems where nutrient and energy capture and cycling are largely endogenous and self-sustaining), of which protected areas are just one component, is increasingly advocated within the conservation community. Landscape management, watershed management, and ecosystem management all conceptualize the conservation unit as geographically large, and are characterized by interdependent processes that must be managed together if the area is to be productive, resilient, and biodiverse. TBNRM is that component of landscape management that explicitly addresses the possible need to reconcile conflicting natural-resource-use policies and practices within areas under different land-use regimes that share a common border.
1. Increasing the area under natural resource management
TBNRM is important ecologically as a way to increase the area of land under resource management regimes that do not conflict with one another, and thus to ensure the persistence of natural resources within ecosystems shared by two or more management authorities. TBNRM works by removing the barriers, tangible and intangible, that partition the management of ecosystems, watersheds, and wildlife migration routes.
Potential Benefits of TBNRM
It has also been argued that TBNRM helps create larger areas for wildlife and plant populations, thereby reducing the extinction risk from stochastic events. This is seldom true. If the ecosystems that span international or national borders are not physically separated by fences, dikes, or moats, and if they already lie within areas managed for biodiversity conservation, the ecological payoffs of establishing de jure TBNRM arrangements may be slight. Where the flow of water, nutrients, and wildlife across borders and among adjacent areas is unimpeded, there is already de facto TBNRM.
Downstream effects within even relatively small watersheds may be severe and warrant remediation, but as a general rule the need for the establishment of transboundary areas decreases as the size of adjacent shared ecosystems increases. In Central Africa, protected areas tend to be large, with several exceeding 1,000,000 hectares; Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, covers an area 1.5 times the size of Rwanda. The argument that TBNRM is essential in ecological terms to combine already large areas may only be convincing if the areas in question share resources of seasonal importance to wide-ranging animals. The seasonal migration of grazing animals from the Serengeti in Tanzania to the Mara in Kenya is an example of a long-distance, international movement of terrestrial wildlife, but few if any such mass migrations exist within Central Africa—although elephant and hornbills appear to travel relatively long distances in search of seasonally available resources.
Similarly, de jure TBNRM is much more likely to be important in ecological terms when the adjacent lands are outside of protected areas, are within areas not managed explicitly for resource conservation, or are in areas of cross-border conflict. In such cases, de jure TBNRM would help ensure that land-use policies and practices on one side of the border do not adversely affect ecosystem productivity and resilience and species composition and abundance on the other. Though TBNRM is unlikely to create larger areas for biodiversity conservation, it has significant potential for maintaining larger areas for conservation, because it helps reduce conflicting resource-use policies and practices across borders.
De jure TBNRM is also critical in cases where nations share a natural resource, the use of which is rival—i.e., use of the resource by one actor precludes the same use by another. Central African nations share many river systems, and upstream effects such as damming, water removal, water pollution, and unsustainable fishing all may conflict with downstream management concerns and practices. Growing demand for fresh water is likely to result in water being the most contested natural resource in the 21st century (Brunner 2000; Postel 1992). Groundwater aquifers, rivers, and lakes are seldom encompassed within political boundaries (Revenga et al. 1998), meaning that the transboundary management of water resources will be essential to help resolve future competing cross-border claims for water, to insure the health and welfare of nations that share water resources, and to avoid the escalation of conflicts over access to water.
2. Reducing cross-border illegal resource extraction
Improved communication and joint law enforcement activities between resource management authorities across national or land-use borders may decrease cross-border poaching and the transportation of illegally harvested resources. This, of course, assumes that at least one management authority within an ecosystem shared among nations or landowners has the capacity to regulate illegal resource use within its territory and potentially to provide financial and human resources to reinforce the regulatory capacity of management authorities in adjacent areas. If all management authorities within a shared ecosystem lack the capacity to regulate illegal resource use within even their own management areas and if additional financial and human resources are unavailable, TBNRM will have little positive impact on resource conservation.
3. Are migratory routes and flyways transboundary?
Managing migratory birds, butterflies, whales, turtles, and fish may require international or intranational agreements for the protection of breeding and feeding grounds and for the protection of migratory routes between the two. TBNRM may thus also be conceptualized as a linear series of bilateral and multilateral agreements between and among nations that contain landscapes that constitute migratory routes and flyways. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (Bonn Convention) are international tools for the management of wildlife across borders and along migratory routes.
The migratory species concept for TBNRM is also relevant for federalist nations whose component states have resource management autonomy. The Lacey Act of 1900 in the United States, for example, was designed to control interstate commerce in game and thus to protect waterfowl along their migratory flyways (Trefethen 1975).
4. Political and human capital benefits
Its ecological payoff is often cited as the leading rationale for TBNRM, but introduction of the process may also be justified most importantly for its ability to serve as a tool to reconnect cultures divided by the establishment of nation states, to share natural resource management experiences and skills, to help resolve conflicts over shared resources such as water and migratory animals, or to provide a political forum to help build trust, promote trade, and foster peace among nations in regions of political and civil instability. According to Zbicz and Green, of the 136 existing and 85 potential TBCAs that straddle 112 international borders and 98 countries, the majority were established to increase cooperation and reduce conflicts between nations with tense or strained relations (Zbicz 1999).
In Central Africa, few areas receive resource management investments sufficient to conserve biological diversity, and policies seldom exist that would minimize natural-resource-use conflicts across property, land-use, and political boundaries. Both informal and formal TBNRM within Central Africa therefore have the potential to improve the conservation status of shared ecosystems. International agreements to establish transboundary resource management areas may also encourage nations to improve the management of biodiversity on their side of a shared border, and may discourage nations from allowing unregulated, industrial-scale resource extraction within conservation areas.
E. For whom is TBNRM important?
The realistic answer to this question is that it depends on the objectives of each specific TBNRM initiative. There is an enormous range of potential winners and losers in TBNRM; the following are a few hypothetical examples to illustrate how different individuals or groups might benefit or lose from the process:
1. Political leaders
If the goal is to improve political relations between warring nations, given that negotiations over the establishment of a peace park take place mostly between high-level political leaders TBNRM may be important as a status vehicle for heads of state, and may benefit the general population if bilateral or multilateral discussions result in cessation of hostilities.
TBNRM activities may also result in embarrassment to heads of state if they are unable, for technical, financial, or political reasons, to implement the mandated provisions of international conventions to which they are signatories.
2. Resource users
If the goal is to conserve fish stocks along a shared watershed, then clearly the fish benefit, as may fishers on both sides of the border. Fisheries managers may also benefit from the sharing of management experience with their cross-border collaborators, but this is more speculative.
Certain resource users also may be harmed by TBNRM. For example, poor farmers upstream of a shared watershed might be hurt economically if, to insure that river flow and fish movements downstream are not hindered, they were to be required to reduce their use of river water for irrigation.
3. Communities of place
Ethnic groups that share traditional territory that has been divided by an international border may benefit from TBNRM if it helps them to retain links to relatives or to continue their use of land and resources that lie within two or more nations. In reality, however, the porosity of international borders in Central Africa and the limited capacity of states to enforce immigration and customs laws means that there are few obstructions to cross-border movement, with the result that TBNRM may not produce substantial changes in traditional practices.
If two different ethnic groups that share a common but divided ecosystem have wildly disparate economic and political power, TBNRM may in contrast enable the more powerful group to achieve hegemony, and may cause the dispossession and marginalization of the less powerful group.
4. Resource managers and donors
Where TBNRM reduces the costs of biodiversity conservation by facilitating the sharing across borders of equipment and facilitities, donors and governments benefit by realizing greater returns on their investment. Resource managers similarly may benefit from TBNRM by learning, through collaboration with their cross-border colleagues, new skills and by gaining access to tools that help them improve their managment of natural resources on their side of the border.
By the same token, however, the better-funded and more capable resource managers on one side of a shared ecosystem may find their resources stretched thin if they are required to supplement the weaker capacity of the adjacent management authority. This can jeopardize the efficacy of resource management on both sides of the border.
In 1925, the Belgian colonial regime established the Albert National Park across the nations of Ruanda–Urundi and the Congo. Established to conserve natural resources that span two nations, the park might be considered the first transboundary park. After independence in the early 1960s, the Rwandan part of the park became the Parc des Volcans (Volcanoes National Park), and the Congolese part, Virunga National Park.
Legislation in 1932 in the United States and 1936 in Canada established the Waterton–Glacier International Peace Park. The park was founded as an “enduring monument of nature to the long-existing relationship of peace and goodwill between the people of the Government of Canada and the United States,” and is often cited as the first de jure TBRNM area in the world. The two conjoined parks are managed separately, but both countries cooperate on nature tours, search-and-rescue operations, and fire management.
Prior to the establishment of the Waterton–Glacier International Peace Park, Poland and Czechoslovakia signed in 1925 the Krakow Protocol, setting the framework for international cooperation in the management of border parks (Thorsell 1990). The first park was not established until after the Second World War, and although the post-war period saw the number of transboundary parks grow it was not until the 1980s that most formal TBNRM areas were established. In 1988, there were 70 actual and proposed TBNRM areas; by 1997, this number had grown to 136 (Zbicz 1999).
In 1997 in South Africa, the Peace Parks Foundation was established with a donation from South African wine industry magnate Anton Rupert. The foundation is headed by John Hanks, formerly chief executive of WWF–South Africa. In May 1997, the foundation held an international Peace Parks conference at its Somerset West headquarters. During the conference participants endorsed efforts to establish peace parks in Southern Africa, in the mountain gorilla regions at the borders of Rwanda, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in Uganda; plans were also endorsed for parks in the border forests of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and between the Republic and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Seven potential peace parks have now been identified in Southern Africa, as follows:
On 7 April 1999, the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park was created when Botswana’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks and the South African National Parks agreed to collaborate in the management of Botswana’s Gemsbok National Park and South Africa’s Kalahari–Gemsbok National Park. The total area of the combined parks is almost 38,000 square kilometers. The area as a whole will be monitored by the Transfrontier Management Committee, with each nation continuing to independently manage its own sector.
In the Central African region, informal and formal negotiations are underway to establish transboundary conservation areas to: (1) conserve gorillas in the Virunga Volcanoes region of Rwanda, western Uganda, and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo; (2) reduce cross-border poaching within the Dzanga–Sangha, Nouabale–Ndoki, and Lobéké protected areas of the Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, and Cameroon, respectively; and (3) establish and maintain wildlife corridors between Odzala National Park in the Republic of Congo, Minkébé in Gabon, and the Dja, Boumba–Bek, and Nki reserves in Cameroon.