| A. Potential benefits of TBNRM in Central Africa | |
Given the general constraints that exist across the region of a shortage of personnel and inadequate funding, there are three primary opportunities for TBNRM in Central Africa: site-level cooperative management of established protected areas; collaboration between protected-area managers and private sector companies; and collaboration between protected-area managers and local communities. In all three instances, it should be understood that while the harmonization of policies that directly or indirectly influence the use of natural resources is important, without the institutions and resources to implement and enforce those newly harmonized laws and regulations, their impact will be, at best, minimal.
A. Potential benefits of TBNRM in Central Africa
There is much wishful thinking regarding the value of TBNRM. Potential benefits range from the sharing of knowledge and the improvement of ecosystem management all the way to the outbreak of regional peace and prosperity. High expectations certainly encourage bold thinking, but overoptimism that is not reflected in tangible short-term results also risks a donor or practitioner backlash against “ineffective” TBNRM. This chapter addresses a number of critical questions and seeks to provide possible answers.
1. Ecological benefits
In the Central Africa region, there are few physical barriers impeding the movement of animals, seeds, and water across national and international borders. TBNRM is therefore unlikely to alter or enhance the flow of resources across borders.
TBNRM is not an ecological process, but is a sociopolitical process designed to reduce or minimize the resource-use behaviors of private, public, and communal landowners that conflict with the resource management needs and interests of landowners in a shared ecosystem.
2. Regulation of illegal wild resource exploitation
Local-level collaboration between or among neighboring management authorities, given Central Africa’s limited experience with these initiatives, appears to have the potential of reducing the level of poaching of elephant, apes, and other threatened and endangered species. The collaborative patrols undertaken by park staff of ICCN (Democratic Republic of Congo), ORTPN (Rwanda), and the Uganda Wildlife Authority along the borders of the Virunga/Volcanoes trinational area, and by ecoguards of the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo along the border of the Dzanga–Sangha Special Forest Reserve and the Nouable–Ndoki National Park, are two examples of cooperative antipoaching TBNRM activities.
TBNRM may help reduce threats to species that either cross borders or are the targets of cross-border exploitation. It may help reduce the overexploitation of shared fish stocks and reduce downstream environmental impacts that cross international or property borders. In areas prone to destructive fires, TBNRM may also help enhance fire management and minimize the adverse effects of fire on plant and animal communities.
3. Local management authority benefits
The sharing of experience, skills, and attitudes between the staff of neighboring management authorities can build staff confidence and aid the development of more professional management. The sharing at the local level of expenses associated with the purchase and maintenance of capital equipment and with research, training, and tourism infrastructure may also reduce the recurring and capital costs of adjacent resource management areas.
4. National-level benefits
National-level efforts to increase transparency, representation, and accountability in land-use management decisions and to protect citizens against illegal acts by other citizens, companies, and government have great potential to promote effective TBNRM. The success of such efforts should enable resource managers in one sector of a shared ecosystem to halt illegal, environmentally damaging practices by resource users in abutting lands.
5. International-level benefits
International initiatives to reconcile conflicting immigration, customs, and forestry policies could do much to inhibit smuggling and the cross-border trade in threatened and endangered species. International discussions to remove barriers to the comanagement of natural resources could energize latent constituencies for reform, undermine the position of those who have a vested interest in protecting the status quo, and raise the profile of resource management within the public sector. International agreements to establish binational or multinational transboundary parks may also insure that parks are not subsequently degazetted or their resources turned over to commercial interests. Given that heads of state tend often to be more inclined to honor commitments made to other heads of state than those made to their own citizens, it can also be argued that international laws carry more weight than national laws.
B. Potential constraints to TBNRM in Central Africa
As with the potential benefits of TBNRM, the constraints against the successful application of TBNRM can best be divided into those constraints that affect local-level collaboration and those that limit attempts at the national or international level to reform policies that would promote or facilitate cooperation to manage natural resources across boundaries.
1. Constraints to local-level TBNRM
From a local perspective, the key constraints to TBNRM are: (1) the absence of rapid, affordable, reliable, and legal forms of communication between or among neighboring management authorities; (2) immigration and customs policies that prevent the flow of people and goods between neighboring management authorities or that dramatically increase the costs of that flow; and (3) the absence of systems of recourse that would allow a management group on one side of a shared landscape to take a group on the other side to court to prevent the latter’s land-use practices from impacting the resource base of the former.
Throughout Central Africa, there is typically little access to telephones, cell phones, or email, and communication is often easier with Europe than it is within nations and between bordering nations. While the situation is improving, government intervention in the telecommunications marketplace continues to stifle competition, keeping prices higher than they need to be, service quality low, and access to telecommunications difficult. Additionally, most Central African nations consider short-wave radio transceivers to represent a national security risk, consequently maintaining severe restrictions on intranational radio communication and often prohibiting international radio traffic. The shortage of telephones in the isolated regions where national parks are most common and the prohibition of short-wave radio communications is a severe constraint to the collaborative management of shared natural resources.
Similarly, although most Central African nations have signed treaties to harmonize customs and trade regulations and ease the flow of goods and labor across international borders, any traveler will confirm that there are little or no provisions made to do so in reality. On the contrary, international travel—even between Franc Zone nations that supposedly have the most integrated economies—is anything but easy, requiring visas, passport stamps, military checks, letters of permission to travel, and prolonged customs searches and frequent seizures or levies. The general ambivalence in Central Africa toward international visitors does nothing to ease the exchange of staff for training and experience sharing, and is a major impediment to the sharing of capital equipment and the movement of tourists within an international TBNRM area.
Finally, if managers of a section of a shared landscape do not have legal authority over the land and its resources, they have no legal standing to complain if others directly or indirectly degrade their resource base. Even if resource managers had clear and free title to the land and its resources, in the absence of national and international systems of recourse they have no way to stop the owners of abutting land from exercising land-use practices that degrade the quality or quantity of their resource base, nor can they seek compensation for such cross-border environmental impacts. Only when resource managers have the capacity to take transboundary resource degraders to court can national environmental standards be upheld—assuming first that such standards exists and that governments are willing and able to enforce them.
2. Constraints to national- and international-level TBNRM
At the national level, the main constraints to effective TBNRM are weak environmental governance and a lack of respect for and trust in government. More specifically, three conditions militate against TBNRM: (1) unclear, informal, and insecure land tenure; (2) the absence of an independent and effective judiciary that applies the law equally to all citizens, private sector enterprises, and government officials and departments; and (3) natural resource policy and law making that is neither transparent nor democratic, and typically does not represent the interests of the majority.
Resource managers with informal and insecure tenure have typically responded to the absence of transparent, representative, and accountable systems of governance by disregarding the law and participating in illegal “self-compensation” activities such as land encroachment and poaching. Even those with formal tenure have little incentive to minimize their downstream or transboundary environmental impacts, as there are no provisions for civil suits to be brought against them and government enforcement capacity is weak or nonexistent.
At the international level, the two most important factors militating against greater integration are (1) the economic value of smuggling and reexportation that is made possible by international disparities in tariffs, taxation, and commodity prices; and (2) jingoistic nationalism that views foreign workers, enterprises, and investments as a threat to the national economy. The former is clearly a major impediment to harmonizing customs regulations and commodity subsidies in instances where the smugglers are politically influential, but the latter is more pernicious. Anti-foreign sentiment undermines the flow of expertise and capital to where it is most needed, and in the extreme, xenophobia can result in the expulsion of non-nationals and the loss of their technical skills, the jobs they create, and their often disproportionate contribution to the domestic economy. Notable examples of this are the expulsion by Idi Amin of Indians from Uganda, and the expulsion by Laurent Kabila of West Africans from Kinshasa.
Nationalism and the desire for control over economically valuable minerals and natural resources such as ivory and timber has since the 1990s fueled a series of internal and interstate wars within the Central African region. Wars create a political vacuum within which international TBNRM negotiations are unlikely to proceed; they also diminish the capacity of nations to regulate the use of natural resources and therefore risk the loss of endangered plants, animals, and habitats to poaching and encroachment.
A further significant potential constraint to both national and international TBNRM is the absence of clear, proven, and assured benefits. Without firm evidence of such benefits, which are important to offset the transaction costs and the perceived or actual loss of sovereignty or ministerial authority associated with the process, it will remain difficult to persuade policy makers to embrace the principles of TBNRM.