Transboundary Natural Resource Management (TBNRM) has become so fashionable among the donor and NGO communities that its benefits are in danger of being grossly oversold. TBNRM investments may be warranted where the primary threats to sustainable natural resource management and biodiversity conservation originate beyond a national or land-ownership border. At a minimum, they should promote land-use policies and practices that do not compromise natural resource management efforts beyond the border; ideally, they should produce a level of resource management that is more effective than the sum of the individual parts.
For TBNRM to be effective, at least one management authority within a shared ecosystem must have the capacity to regulate illegal resource use within its territory and ideally should have sufficient financial and human resources to reinforce the regulatory capacity of weaker management authorities within the ecosystem. Throughout Central Africa, however, the management authorities within a shared ecosystem typically lack the capacity to effectively regulate illegal resource use even within their own management areas. Where this is the case, and in the absence of additional financial and human resources, TBNRM would have little positive impact on resource conservation. Given the additional transaction costs associated with TBNRM, combining already weak management authorities would do nothing to improve resource management in a shared landscape and would most likely fritter away scarce monies that could be applied more effectively to on-site resource management. What is often less well understood is that TBNRM, inappropriately applied, can put in jeopardy natural resources that are overseen by a well-capitalized management authority. By requiring that management authority to spread its personnel, equipment, and cash more thinly to reinforce the weak capacity of a cross-border collaborator, TBNRM may not only do little to enhance the resource management capacity of the weaker partner but also may reduce the management impact of the stronger authority.
For TBNRM to be affordable and effective in Central Africa, it should start with local-level initiatives that address the tangible concerns of management authorities within the shared ecosystem. It should not in the short-term focus on developing formal bilateral and multilateral agreements between and among states, because national governments have a long history of signing natural resource management conventions and economic accords that have little impact on regional cooperation or on the harmonization of policies and practices. Regional integration and cooperation is predicated on the existence of real political will, comparable levels of development and volume of intraregional trade, and on available, affordable, and reliable forms of communication, none of which are assured in Central Africa at present.
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. Ensuring that land-use practices in areas zoned for economic development, such as timber concessions or coffee plantations, do not increase the threats to plant and animal populations and thus conservation costs in adjacent protected areas is a transboundary issue clearly within the management interests of national governments, and certainly within their capacity to influence. Moreover, the conservation pay-offs associated with improving TBNRM within nations may be easier to achieve and may affect a much larger land area than is likely to be possible with TBNRM between nations.
While TBNRM has the potential to improve resource management and enhance international relations, before nations engage in TBNRM they should ask four important questions: