Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Southern and Eastern Africa Past, Present and Futures

How successful has community-based natural resource management, the dominant development paradigm in much of sub-Saharan Africa since the late 1990s, been in reducing poverty, empowering communities and protecting wildlife and habitats? Launched in the late 1980s as a programme that would combine nature and biodiversity conservation with poverty alleviation, CBNRM has shaped policies in forestry management, rural water-management and wildlife management, while local communities have been encouraged to establish well-defined and membership-based organisations with a clearly defined territory, land-management plans and options to liaise with the private sector. In the face of criticism and waning enthusiasm, this volume uses cases studies from southern and eastern Africa to assess CBNRM projects and offer solutions for conservation and development problems that have characterised many programmes in the region. Should the movement embrace initiatives that pivot on public-private partnerships and implement CBNRM as 'fortress conservation'? Should conservation policies continue to hinge on commoditising nature and global-local market forces? Or should conservation approaches and models break with such neoliberal ordering and instead, design new, alternative ways to distribute the added value that nature and land resources present? How would community conservation look like if wildlife, and other natural resources, are conceptualised as common goods and not as commodities? Published in association with the Collaborative Research Centre FUTURE RURAL AFRICA, funded by the German Research Council (DFG). This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung (Volkswagen Foundation), funding code Samimi 0065525, the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the collaborative research center 'Future Rural Africa', funding code TRR 228/3 and the European Union funded ERC Advanced Grant REWILDING, project number: 101020976.