UK showdown exposes urgent need for CBNRM law

Mbongeni Mguni | Friday March 22, 2024 15:48

CBNRM is a conservation-based development approach that recognises that natural resources coexist with people who rely on them for their subsistence.

A CBNRM Act would have been a powerful tool in the arguments presented by the communities who spent this week in London lobbying the House of Commons and the House of Lords on the anti-hunting bill being considered by the UK. Professor Brian Child who specialises on inclusive wildlife economy, which emphasises involving rural people through CBNRM, explains the critical importance of CBNRM.

“The term CBNRM emerged in the 1980s when Southern Africa was transferring the massive success of the private wildlife economy to previously marginalised rural communities,” he said in notes shared in response to Mmegi enquiries this week. “Contrary to common perception, CBNRM was designed as an economic development programme. “It aimed to uplift livelihoods in rural households, and to rebuild the governance systems of these communities to manage their environmental resources. “But because wildlife earned two to four times as much as conventional farming practices, including livestock, it followed that if wildlife was used commercially and sustainably, it would be too valuable for communities to lose.” When MPs passed the policy in 2007, their focus was on empowering the then 94 or so registered Community-Based Organisations covering 150 villages. In debates in Parliament, legislators noted that communities would be encouraged to invest proceeds from the CBNRM in income generating activities like tourism lodges as a way of citizen empowerment.

According to Child, CBNRM addresses the challenge that rural people in agriculturally marginal communal lands are locked in a spiral of poverty and environmental degradation, including widespread loss of valuable wildlife species. “The root cause of this is a tragedy of the commons,” he said. “CBNRM recognises that wildlife is a powerful economic engine for rural livelihoods. “However, CBNRM, like the private wildlife economy before it, recognises that this economic engine can only be unlocked by reforming outdated economic institutions from an early era. “Thus CBNRM requires the full devolution to communities of proprietorship to the wildlife they live with, including the rights to access, use, manage, sell, retain 100% of benefits, and exclude others from their wildlife.” In 2007, the CBNRM policy was touted in Parliament as guaranteeing communities 35% revenue share from the values produced in their concessions. However, critics of the revenue sharing model communities have with investors, argue that these percentages are rarely reached.

This point has been regularly seized upon by the anti-hunting lobby to poke holes in the argument that ordinary, remote area villagers benefit from hunting. Last year, communities raked in more than P31 million from hunting activities, but efforts continue to improve these distributions and also to empower villagers to move into equity and ownership positions in the industry. Monametsi Sokwe, the executive director of the Southern African Council of NGOs, explains the importance of moving from a CBNRM policy to a law. “We used to have the CBNRM policy and we said it’s time to have that Act rather than a policy, which would help us so that in the future we don’t find ourselves in a situation where community benefits depend on who the president is at that particular time,” he said. “A law would allow or force that there should be consultation with communities. “It’s again time to talk about the need for a law,” said Sokwe.

In his reference to presidents, Sokwe was alluding to perceptions amongst communities that the progress towards a CBNRM Act was especially slow during the tenure of the former president, Ian Khama. The former president unilaterally introduced the hunting ban in 2014 and was accused of ignoring the numerous negative impacts on communities. Momentum towards a law has redoubled under President Mokgweetsi Masisi, with draft legislation reportedly circulating for consultation. “We need an Act that will be done together with all of us as partners, with government, legislation that talks about the use of our natural products,” Sokwe said. “If not, tomorrow someone will be saying we cannot even cut grass to sell it.

“The UK are doing their law and we need our own law that we can stand on.” A law would also address another area the anti-hunting lobby has focussed on in their dismissal of the arguments raised by Botswana and other countries. Each season when hunting quotas are released, reports emerge of governance issues in some of the community trusts, including allegations of corruption or actions which disrupt the optimal flow of revenues to ordinary villagers. Opponents of hunting have jumped on such reports to paint a cowboy or Wild West picture of the hunting industry, where hunters and communities act beyond the law. “The law could also help with the regulations to say how should these trusts be run as a standard,” Sokwe said. “The regulations would say this is how it should be done and improve governance.

“They would say this is whom you must engage as a trusts to run your affairs.” According to Child, setting up place the legal or policy conditions for CBNRM should involve community governance. “Rights should be associated with requirements, responsibilities and compliance with conditions for transparent, equitable face-to-face governance and benefit sharing,” he said. “The current Trust system needs to be overhauled because is strengthens committee-based management when what is needed is community-based governance in which community members are shareholders not stakeholders.

“An ideal structure would be a “village company” constituted legally as a voluntary association in which members are registered in the manner of shareholders, that are able to use commercial law to build the wildlife economy and address issues of mis-governance.” He said fully empowering communities through CBNRM legislation would unlock value that could radically transform the lives of ordinary villagers and break the cycle of poverty.

This also benefits wildlife management, the issue at the centre of the showdown in Westminster. “Data shows that where communities have sovereignty over wildlife and where they also obtain tangible benefits, 80% of villagers want more wildlife even in the face of human wildlife conflict and problems with committees and governance. “One of the puzzles of post-colonial Africa is the persistence of laws designed to control rural people, and prevent them from playing a genuine role in the modern economy, especially wildlife management. “In Latin America and elsewhere, and much more recently in Kenya and even Mozambique, communities are now able to get non-tradable group titles as the foundation for economic development and natural resource use.

“If Botswana is brave enough to give communities the same rights as everyone else in the country, it would rapidly become the world’s leading wildlife economy with well-governed CBNRM unlocking the true value wildlife over vast landscapes,” he said.