Chapter XII. Key Lessons Learned, Principles, and Recommendations

A. Work from the local level up

The only long-term TBNRM initiative in the Central African region is the International Gorilla Conservation Programme. It is therefore difficult to characterize with any confidence the lessons learned from the process. The one element that all attempts at TBNRM within the region have in common is that they all started with local, informal communication and collaboration between project managers facing conservation challenges on the ground. Only after these local, tangible attempts at TBNRM were initiated did the process begin to creep up the jurisdictional ladder toward more formal, governmental discussions and agreements. Another important observation is that local TBNRM appears to not necessarily require the formal approval of government to function effectively, often needing no more than the go-ahead from the appropriate minister, permanent secretary, or chief of the local gendarmes. That TBNRM can proceed in the absence of upper-level governmental approval and oversight is particularly good news for the Congo Basin, given the instability of many national governments and the ephemerality of many government officials and institutions.

In addition, experience from community-based conservation efforts, that like TBNRM must often reconcile jurisdictional ambiguities and conflicts in land-use practices, suggests that starting TBNRM at the site level and building constituencies for conservation may generate a social and political dynamic that spreads beyond the natural resource management sector. It is likely that, as a result of their experiences and of the knowledge they gain from involvement in local-level TBNRM activities, some public sector and civil society actors will become advocates for larger political changes, that in turn will feed back into the improved management of natural resources within the transboundary area. This further reinforces the message that TBNRM in Central Africa should start at the site or local level and only progress up the jurisdictional ladder when upper-level constraints prevent the effective implementation of lower-level efforts.

What is particularly telling in the context of Central Africa is that national governments have a long history of signing bilateral and multilateral natural resource management conventions and economic accords, but that few if any of these have had a significant impact on regional cooperation and the harmonization of policies and practices (Box 6). For TBNRM to be effective in the short term, it would appear that the best advice for donors, governments, and NGOs would be to focus on local-level initiatives that address the tangible concerns of management authorities in adjoining nations that share a common ecosystem.

B. Two weaks do not make a strong

One major concern about attempts to implement TBNRM in Central Africa relates to the weak capacity to manage natural resources (i.e., to regulate access to and use of land and resources) and to the limited additional resources available for TBNRM. It is clear that, given the additional transaction costs associated with TBNRM, merely combining already weak cross-border management authorities will do nothing to improve resource management in shared landscapes, and will most likely expend scarce monies that could be applied more effectively to on-site resource management. What is often less well understood is that TBNRM may also put in jeopardy the natural resources that are overseen by a well-capitalized management authority, by obliging that authority to spread its personnel, equipment, and cash more thinly to support a weaker collaborator. While this may do little to enhance the resource management capacity of the weaker partner, it may reduce the management impact of the stronger authority, thus resulting in a net decline in management effectiveness and in the conservation of natural resources.

The critical lesson is, if any management authority within a shared ecosystem lacks the personnel, legal, or economic capacity to regulate resource access and use within its own management area, TBNRM, in the absence of additional financial and human resources, will have little positive impact on resource conservation.

C. Management in the absence of the rule of law

Given the historical failure of Central African nations to effectively implement international trade, banking, and environmental treaties it is doubtful whether formal TBRNM contracts can be any more successful in changing government policies, practices, and investments. Moreover, in the absence of rule of law, all agreements from national legislation down to individual business contracts are effectively unenforceable, making it difficult to formally prevent the illegal use of natural resources. In many cases in Central Africa where the rule of law is weakly implemented by national institutions, it is external organizations such as relief agencies, peacekeeping forces, international NGOs, and private sector companies that impose the law, at least within their zone of influence. This is typically accomplished by providing national law enforcement agents with salaries, equipment, training, and transportation, or by creating autonomous law enforcement forces. The political and state-building ramifications of this process of distributed, externally financed and motivated law enforcement are unclear.

D. The benefits from TBNRM need to be explicit and measurable to attract donor support

Too often in the past, conservation organizations have requested support merely on the grounds that conservation is a “worthy cause;” donors in turn have responded with funding merely because this is what their political constituencies expect. It is no longer sufficient, however, to argue that the underlying goal is worthy. Conservation organizations should be prepared to state explicitly what they expect to achieve, and to characterize how they intend to track and evaluate their progress in attaining their stated objectives. To attract donor financing and maintain donor interest and commitment in TBNRM, conservation collaborators should be able to characterize what their investments are designed to achieve (for example, a 50 percent reduction in cross-border commercial hunting of wildlife) and how they plan to track their progress (for example, through baseline surveys of bushmeat along key transportation axes, or through random monitoring of bushmeat transportation in areas that are and are not receiving conservation investments). The challenge for TBNRM, in other words, is to make explicit what is too often mere arm waving, and to demonstrate that investments in TBNRM will have tangible and measurable impacts that exceed the transaction costs and that produce an outcome that is greater than the sum of the project’s constituent parts. If TBNRM collaborators cannot demonstrate that the additional costs of TBNRM would generate more benefits than would continuation of the status quo of funding of individual cross-border projects, why should donors make the additional investments? Donors should be skeptical of two or more weak management authorities soliciting funding for TBNRM activities when they lack the infrastructure to insure even the basic management of their respective portions of a shared landscape. A demonstrable impact and tangible returns on investment are particularly an issue if the rationale for TBNRM investments is political (for example, to improve relations among the collaborating authorities), as few direct or proxy measures exist to effectively track the impact of such efforts over the short term.

E. Is TBNRM new or a mere extension of protected area/landscape conservation within nations?

Lanjouw and colleagues (Lanjouw et al. 2000) list nine key requisites for effective TBNRM (Table 11). When these are compared with a summary of the criteria for successful management of protected areas (Hockings et al. 2000; MacKinnon et al. 1986; Margoluis and Salafsky 1998), it becomes clear that the challenges to effective TBNRM are largely comparable to those of protected-area management in general. This begs the question as to whether or not TBNRM is, in fact, a new and innovative approach or merely an extension of intranational to international cross-border conservation.

F. When are TBNRM activities not TBNRM?

The IGCP case study includes both a trinational area, encompassing protected areas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and Rwanda, and a noncontiguous block of land, the Bwindi National Park, that is solely contained within Uganda but which has a narrow common border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. The cross-border incursion of interhamwe militia into Bwindi and their massacre of tourists is an extreme example of policies and practices on one side of a shared border that had a profound social and economic impact on the other side. Whether or not the joint training and collaborative patrols of ICCN, ORTPN, and the Uganda Wildlife Authority fall within the rubric of TBNRM warrants debate, however. If they do constitute TBNRM, then site visits across continents and multinational field training sessions might also be characterized as TBNRM. To be meaningful, TBNRM must focus on that work that is specifically undertaken to counter cross-border threats, and should avoid including generic capacity building in the catchall of TBNRM. If TBNRM just becomes another buzzword for conservation and a new tool for maintaining donor interest, it will lose the core rationale that makes it a potentially useful component of a national or regional conservation strategy.

G. Deciding when to invest in TBNRM

Lanjouw and colleagues (Lanjouw et al. 2000) note that “effective conservation involves the abatement of threats to natural resources, ecosystems, or species. When those threats come from more than one side of a border, it is necessary to focus on threat abatement at a regional level.” TBNRM activities in Central Africa accordingly should only be initiated when there is compelling evidence to suggest that threats to natural resource conservation are exogenous to the area of interest.

TBNRM has the potential to improve resource management and enhance international relations, but before nations engage in TBNRM they should ask four questions, as follows:

• Does the threat to conservation come from across a border?
• What is the objective (i.e., desired outcome or outcomes) of initiating a formal or informal TBNRM process?
• What are the expected costs of establishing an informal or formal process for managing transboundary natural resources?
• How will the TBNRM planning and implementation process differ if the desired and expected benefits are (1) primarily to regulate conflicting resource use across the borders of shared ecosystems, and (2) to achieve greater economic or political integration?

In most cases in Central Africa, exogenous threats are more important within nations across land-ownership or land-use borders than they are between nations across international frontiers.

H. Overcoming jurisdictional and sovereignty barriers

Assuming that ecosystem management is the most effective approach to long-term biodiversity conservation, the most significant constraint is the contrary land use and land management philosophies, policies, practices, and regulatory capabilities of the separate management authorities that have jurisdiction for resource management in different areas of a shared landscape. For example, where a national park abuts a forest reserve, the land management practices and policies of the forest department might conflict with those of the parks department. Competition for scarce government and donor resources furthermore may inhibit collaboration between the two departments, making collaborative management of a shared ecosystem difficult. At the same time, the department of agriculture may advocate the use of inorganic inputs to boost nearby crop production, and the department of transportation may finance a road to provide market access to enclaved farmers. Both actions could lower estuarine water quality and increase mangrove felling within the national park. For an ecosystem to be managed effectively, at the minimum a consultative process must be put in place to help reduce the unexpected and often perverse impacts of the resource management policies and practices of the various management authorities that have jurisdiction within a shared ecosystem.

Coordination and cooperation—in effect, de-balkanization—among the different jurisdictions is essential to harmonize resource management across property or land-use boundaries (i.e., between parks and forest reserves, plantations, and private game reserves); it is similarly essential within particular land-use zones. For example, when a forest reserve is a primary wet season haven for wildlife, it is often unclear if management of the haven should be the responsibility of the forest department or the parks and wildlife department. Similarly, where there are dense woodlands within a national park, should the forest department assume responsibility for those trees? Without clear jurisdiction, implementing a coherent strategy for biodiversity conservation can be exceedingly difficult.

Conflicts between management authorities and jurisdictional ambiguities within a nation are common; between nations, they simply become more complex and potentially less tractable. For example, if one nation adheres to a free-trade capitalist philosophy and the other does not, harmonizing the movement of goods and services associated with cross-border tourism in adjoining national parks will not be easy.

When ecosystems cross national property or land-use boundaries or span international borders, the key challenge is to build coalitions among the management authorities whose jurisdictions with overlap. It will otherwise be almost impossible to attain a common vision for managing the ecosystem that will provide the benefits desired by each management authority without unacceptably diminishing biodiversity.

I. National TBNRM may be more important in the short term

In Central Africa, TBNRM may be more relevant and of greater conservation significance across national land-use or land-zoning borders than between nations across international frontiers. At present, jurisdiction for natural resources management within the public sector is divided among several ministries. Typically, each ministry is in competition with the others for scarce treasury resources, and isolationism and interministerial strife is not uncommon. Moreover, as all ministries have their own priorities and implementation policies, it is not surprising that many of these conflict with those in other ministries. For example, road construction into once-isolated old-growth forest blocks promoted by the department of forestry may undermine attempts by the parks department to minimize commercial bushmeat hunter access to remote areas. Similarly, safari hunting quotas set by the department of parks may undermine investments by the department of tourism to expand photo-safaris, or may undermine the department of forestry’s attempts to promote more local control of resource use within community forests.

Both jurisdictional ambiguity and the contrary policies of ministries with authority over access to and use of natural resources can undermine efforts to conserve biodiversity. In Central Africa, more than 50 percent of the forest is allocated to logging companies for timber extraction (in Cameroon, the figure is 80 percent), and almost all protected areas are surrounded by or abut logging concessions. Ensuring that land-use and resource-use policies and practices of the forestry ministry and the timber companies do not undermine the conservation efforts of adjacent protected-area authorities may be the most important TBNRM effort in which to invest in Central Africa.

Similarly, if building a civil society constituency for conservation is a key step to improved natural resources management in Central Africa, TBNRM efforts may be more productive if focused on reconciling local community and park conflicts and local community and logging concession conflicts, rather than on international resource management.