| A. Results | |
| B. Opportunities | |
Although the idea of a trinational protected area has been envisioned by international conservation NGOs and government institutions for more than a decade, collaboration “on the ground” has only solidified during the past two years. Therefore it is too early to judge whether the transboundary approach will prove an overall asset for the Sangha River Trinational protected areas or whether it will be an added burden to the projects involved.
However, the numerous achievements and collaborative activities so far illustrate the potential of continued trinational collaboration:
A. Results
1. Antipoaching patrols on the Sangha River
The Sangha River, as a shared and somewhat legally ambiguous border among the three countries, has been the focus of antipoaching missions. From January 2000 through June 2001,14 river patrols were conducted with the following results for the first 8 missions:
2. Shared capacity building: Training
Four binational or trinational training programs have been organized since December 1999 with different project sites providing equipment, funding, and/or technical backstopping:
3. Synergy of monitoring methodologies
Training programs in the use of technologies such as CyberTracker are intended to harmonize data collection across the trinational region. The CITES-led initiative MIKE will be used to collect data as part of wildlife guard patrolling. The data from the four trinational project sites will be compiled, analyzed, and, in theory, used as the basis for future management decisions.
A report has been produced that synthesizes the different phenological studies of researchers. A standardized method of data collection has been developed and agreed upon, which should facilitate the sharing of inter-project data and results as well as contribute to a better understanding of the forest dynamics of the contiguous trinational zone. A similar synergy exists among the various studies of the ecology, social dynamics, and movement of forest elephants.
4. Cooperative meetings
Programming regular meetings is particularly important in a region characterized by communication difficulties. The different meetings can be grouped as follows:
5. Political support
Worthy of mention is the significant political backing the project has gained during the last two years—starting with the Yaoundé Declaration, closing the year 2000 with the signing of the Sangha River Trinational Cooperative Agreement, and followed in 2001 with the official creation of Lobéké National Park. Ideally future actions will grow to encompass the resolution of problems such as increasing human immigration into the area, unsustainable logging and associated illegal hunting, and the involvement of local, regional, and national businesspeople and authorities in poaching, including the lucrative ivory trade.
B. Opportunities
1. Shared conservation strategies
Partners are working together to develop shared strategies addressing conservation issues explored below.
a. Antipoaching
Carcasses discovered as well as anecdotal information point to a continuing problem with elephant poaching. Major conduits of ivory trade are often river-based towns and villages located within or near the Sangha River Trinational protected area boundaries. Curtailing this trade necessitates a multi-prong approach: halting or reducing elephant poaching in all three countries, as well as reinforcing each project’s capacity to monitor trade and poaching activities in and around river towns such as Libongo, Cameroon. Sharing information on poaching activities among the three protected area teams has clearly resulted in a greater impact on poaching than any single project could have achieved. This effort should be expanded.
b. Logging
The logging industry is making rapid inroads into northern Congo at the same time as Dzanga-Sangha’s principal timber concession has been reopened. In Cameroon, a total of four logging companies are operating in the trinational area and the government is in the process of granting the last non-attributed forest concession in the area. New roads, settlements, and increased human movement into formerly uninhabited areas are expected to result in increased pressure on faunal resources—in the National Parks, buffer zones traditionally reserved for local residents, as well as across borders into adjacent protected and unprotected areas. The collaboration between the Zone Périphérique and the logging company Congolaise Industrielle du Bois (CIB) to reduce impacts of logging on wildlife is providing important lessons that may have wider applications. The transport of logs from Congo and CAR onward to Cameroon necessitates a coordinated approach not only at the project level but also as part of a sub-regional conservation strategy, i.e., the Yaoundé Declaration.
c. Safari hunting
Safari hunting companies operate in two of the trinational countries—Cameroon and CAR—with the principal attraction being bongo and to a lesser extent elephant (only in Cameroon), buffalo, sitatunga, and forest hog. Although relations between safari hunters and protected area managers are somewhat ambiguous owing to contention over quota numbers, there is great potential to collaborate on antipoaching activities in their concessions. At the same time, safari hunting is very lucrative and might provide substantial revenue to local people in support of their adherence to conservation practices.
d. Ecotourism
Each of the three protected areas includes sites of potential tourism value. The prospects for significant revenue generation from ecotourism are currently rather limited because of regional unrest (perceived or otherwise), inadequate infrastructure, difficult and unnecessarily strict travel conditions (including unprofessional behavior by military, police, and customs officials), and lack of coherent national strategies for tourism. Nonetheless, a coordinated regional approach in the future, which allows visitors to move easily among the three countries, may add value to any tourism package than that resulting from any one site.
e. Ecological and human impact monitoring
The Nouabalé-Ndoki/WCS plane is available to trinational partners for conducting overflights of critical areas including forest clearings where animals congregate, legal and illegal human settlements, and potential poaching hot-spots. Concurrently, biologists are working to harmonize methodologies of ecological monitoring that will extend the geographic scale of sampling. The common methods allow greater comparability of results, but the ultimate goal is to share and synthesize data for use in developing protected area management strategies.
f. River resources
Fishermen from the north of the Dzanga-Sangha Project Reserve are encroaching on the ‘traditional” fishing grounds of local residents as far south as the Congo. Developing a strategy to reduce fishing by people living outside the trinational zone (e.g., by creating a fishing permit or license system) may be an opportunity to integrate local communities into the trinational collaborative process.
2. Funding
Donors appear to be developing greater interest in funding regional conservation initiatives, as opposed to individual protected areas. The opportunity to promote conservation of more than three million hectares (including the buffer zones around all three sites) of lowland forest from a coordinated trinational perspective should improve the likelihood of securing adequate long-term funding not necessarily available to the individual projects. At present, organizations such as the World Bank, WWF, and GTZ are studying, in collaboration with sub-regional governments, long-term funding mechanisms such as trust funds in support of the activities outlined in the Yaoundé Declaration, and in particularly the Sangha River Trinational initiative.
3. Sharing resources: Economies of scale
Although it is too early to quantify the impact, the sharing of human, material, and financial resources has benefited the Sangha River Trinational process. For example, while it would be prohibitively expensive for each project site to maintain its own airplane, trinational collaboration has made it possible for WCS and Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park officials to make their plane available to regional partners. At the same time expertise at one site (e.g., ecological monitoring methodologies, paramilitary training capacity) can technically and financially assist other partners, eliminating the need to seek costly alternatives such as consultants.
C. Constraints
Constraints impacting current activities and the future stability of the trinational initiative can be categorized into those with the potential of resolution at the project or institutional level (e.g., conservation organizations) and those outside the control of trinational partners.
1. Constraints inherent to the Sangha River Trinational process
a. Financial, human, and material resources
Although some funding was secured for trinational efforts from 1995 to 2000 (e.g., through the MacArthur Foundation), future support will be required to successfully implement a comprehensive strategy. There is no doubt that the official creation of a Sangha River Trinational zone will prove more costly to each project than if the status quo were maintained. The creation of numerous committees and the need for these committees to meet (some several times) each year will put a burden on project budgets. Human and material resources are already insufficient at the project level. Expanding activities to the national and regional level has put additional stress on these scarce resources. For the Sangha River Trinational project to succeed there is a clear need for additional funding as well as support mechanisms—positive economies of scale are only expected to materialize in the long term.
b. Time limitations
There needs to be a balance between individual project responsibilities and that of the trinational initiative. The seemingly slow development of trinational collaboration reflects the complexities and time constraints inherent in conservation projects in the central Africa region as well as the evolution of approaches such as ecoregion-based conservation. Furthermore, the first responsibility of project managers and personnel remains their individual sites. Thus trinational collaboration takes a backseat, leading to delays in implementing activities and exchanging information.
c. Project autonomy
The various committees proposed in the Cooperative Agreement risk intruding upon the administrative and decision-making structures of the existing project. Each project is guided by a variety of bilateral agreements and/or memorandums of understanding that outline the responsibilities of the host country and the different donor and technical support agencies. Under the cooperative agreement, regional government representatives are responsible for overseeing the implementation of trinational activities—yet they are not traditionally involved in the administration of the projects and nor do they have the technical background to supervise protected area management.
d. Differing levels of commitment to the creation and management of a trinational protected area
The lack of a cohesive strategy document and long-term action plan results in each project site prioritizing trinational activities according to its own criteria. While one site may consider antipoaching patrols of paramount importance, another project may consider the establishment of a legal structure of greater importance. The varying levels of engagement vis-à-vis different activities introduces the risk of eroding, with time, inter-project communication and ultimately collaboration.
e. Lack of a strategic plan guiding Sangha River Trinational activities
Project partners perceive the lack of a strategic plan guiding activities as a handicap. Fortunately, the Cooperative Agreement provides an institutional framework for the continuation of Sangha River Trinational activities instead of relying solely on the “goodwill” of project managers.
f. Communication
Communication outside of scheduled meetings is intermittent in the best of times given the technical difficulties and/or the absence of project managers at their sites because of other commitments. This situation leads to misunderstandings, delays, and only partial participation of Sangha River Trinational partners.
g. Insufficient time to “field test” working relations
The Yaoundé Declaration can in some sense be perceived as a double-edged sword vis-à-vis the development of the Sangha River Trinational initiative. The signing of the Sangha River Cooperative Agreement as part of the Declaration obligates partners to organize activities that they may not be prepared to undertake as frequently as dictated, because of financial, logistical, or human constraints. The Sangha River Trinational Cooperative Agreement also necessitates that projects develop the capacity to work at multiple levels within the national administrative structure (regional and national), establishing new nontraditional partnerships that will need time to grow. At the same time, the four project sites are struggling to develop a method of collaboration based on decision making through consensus building and to ensure the development of shared and coordinated management practices. It may take several years for a consensual working relationship to be developed among the different project sites as well as with their respective government partners.
2. External constraints that have an impact on the Sangha River Trinational initiative
a. National sovereignty and security
In recognition of the sovereignty of nations and potential misconceptions regarding armed wildlife guard movement on the river, every effort has been made to keep local authorities and law enforcement officials informed of trinational missions. Governments remain concerned, however, about the risk of increased and uncontrolled human movement across borders and the influx of arms and other illegal contraband. These concerns have a particular legitimacy given the instability of the region. Both CAR and Congo have experienced civil wars during the past four years; and war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) continues to negatively impact the region
b. Centralized management structures
Political support at the national level is critical, but ultimately management will need to be in the hands of protected area managers and other partners residing in the trinational area. Traditionally, African governments and power structures are centralized and decentralizing decision making is difficult. For example, decisions such as the granting of forest and safari hunting concessions are occasionally made at a national level, without consulting the technically competent site-based staff of the concerned Ministry.
c. Differing levels of commitment to conservation
The inferior ranking of conservation in the political agenda of Sangha River Trinational countries is understandable considering the relative poverty of the sub-region. Economic interests come first and often rely heavily on the exploitation of natural resources. It is important for project leaders to recognize that trinational collaboration, particularly conjoint antipoaching and other checks on resource exploitation, will not be supported by certain stakeholder groups and individual actors.