Progress in Human Geography 23,3 (1999) pp.

359–378

Geographies of environmental
intervention in Africa
Richard A. Schroeder
Department of Geography, Rutgers University, 54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway,
NJ 08854-8045, USA

Abstract: This article analyses geographical assumptions underlying the latest in a long history
of environmental interventions in Africa, including: 1) the distinct political problems of
managing natural resources under the divergent ecological conditions of dearth and diversity;
2) the attempt by planners to resolve spatial conflicts arising in connection with land-use zoning
strategies (protected areas, buffer zones, wildlife corridors); 3) the changed political ecological
relationships resulting from the commodification of natural resources; and 4) the politics of scale
embedded in environmental planning efforts.

Key words: Africa, commodification, environment, intervention, political ecology, scale, spatial
politics.

I Introduction

There has been a long history of foreign intervention in the name of environmental
protection and management in Africa. To take but one example, the British intervened
repeatedly in their African colonies to force environmental management strategies on
rural cultivators and pastoralists. In southern Africa, British colonial administrators,
responding to fears engendered by the American dustbowl of the 1930s, made contour
plowing, ridging and other soil improvement techniques compulsory for peasant
farmers, and mandated that pastoralist groups privatize wells and boreholes in the
interests of rationalizing water use (Beinart, 1984; Peters, 1987). In Kenya, Tanzania and
other parts of East Africa, peasants and pastoralists alike were forced off their lands and
dispossessed of the basis of their livelihoods in order to create game parks to suit the
hunting and wildlife viewing appetites of European elites (Anderson and Grove, 1987;
Neumann, 1995b; 1996). In West Africa, forested areas were placed off limits to shifting
cultivators and select tree species were protected from use by farmers in periurban
areas when prevailing land-use practices were deemed incompatible with the
generation of colonial forestry revenues (Cline-Cole, 1994; Leach, 1994). Dozens of other

© Arnold 1999 0309–1325(99)PH243RA

360 Geographies of environmental intervention in Africa

stories could be told with regard to former British territory alone (Wilmsen, 1989;
Feierman, 1990; Mandala, 1990; Moore, 1993; Moore and Vaughan, 1994; Hodgson,
1995; Fairhead and Leach, 1998).
As Leach and Mearns (1996) demonstrate, the pattern of such interventions has often
been determined from outside African borders in accordance with prevailing interna-
tional political economic conditions or shifting ideologies of environmental
management. Thus, the penetration of the African interior by trading companies under
the political economic conditions of the latter decades of the nineteenth century went
hand in hand with economic botanical expeditions meant to identify and protect
sources of medicines effective against malaria and other tropical diseases (Brockway,
1979); ecological justifications used to restrict African populations to so-called ‘native
reserves’ after the turn of the century effectively precluded Africans from competing
with European settlers in the production of coffee and other key cash crops, and
rendered their labor available for colonial enterprises (Berry, 1993; Hodgson, 1995); and
forest management policies during the second world war often eschewed conservation
objectives altogether in favor of meeting the energy needs of colonial armies (Cline-
Cole, 1993). In terms of management ideologies, Clements’ theories regarding ‘climax
vegetation’ communities (1916), Herskovits’ notions concerning the ‘cattle complex’ of
pastoralist groups (1926) and Stebbing’s fears about ‘the encroaching Sahara’ (1935)
each held tremendous sway in different parts of the continent as settler groups, colonial
governments and resident populations struggled to secure their respective positions on
the African landscape (see further discussion in Kjekshus, 1977; Anderson and Grove,
1987; Bassett, 1993; Leach and Mearns, 1996).
What is clear from this cursory review of the colonial record is that the impulse to
conserve, protect or otherwise ‘manage’ natural resources has historically been central
to efforts by ‘external’ powers (including national governments in some cases) to exert
social, political and economic control over African polities. This article reviews two
bodies of literature in an attempt to analyze the most recent round of environmental
interventions in Africa dating from the mid-1980s. The first consists of published and
unpublished policy statements, plans and reports generated by (and largely for) the
principal agencies responsible for developing and implementing policy with respect to
African environmental problems. And the second comprises the growing body of
critical studies scholars and activists have produced in response to these efforts.
Notably, after more than a decade, both the practices of developers and environmental
groups and critical analyses of these interventions have coalesced around issues that are
central to geographical theory, including spatial relations, questions of scale and
fundamental changes in nature–society relations brought about through ever-
deepening processes of commercialization and commodification.
The article is divided into five sections. In the first, I consider two competing prob-
lematics that dominate the political ecology of the region, namely, problems of dearth
and diversity. These policy domains are centered around proposals for resource
management focused on drought and degradation (dearth), on the one hand, and the
preservation of wildlife and rare habitats (diversity), on the other. Each has captured
popular imagination relating to contemporary African affairs, and accordingly holds
far-reaching ramifications for natural resource management (NRM) policies and
practices across the region. The next three sections analyze particular forms of inter-
vention that have taken shape since the mid-1980s by illustrating geographical
 Richard A. Schroeder 361

dimensions of the region’s natural resource management politics. They focus in turn on
1) the attempt by planners to rationalize resource use through zoning strategies such as
protected areas, buffer zones and wildlife corridors, and the acute spatial conflicts that
have often accompanied this effort; 2) the commodification of natural resources (e.g.,
via tourism and different forms of benefit sharing), nature-based accumulation
strategies and accompanying patterns of economic differentiation; and 3) the use of the
politics of scale to facilitate interventions ranging from the systematic development of
national environmental action plans to the recent groundswell of interest in
community-based resource management initiatives. In the concluding section, I argue
that, current emphases on decentralization and community-based resource
management notwithstanding, initiatives launched under each of these rubrics have
served to extend external control over African populations and resources with
sometimes dubious social, political and economic consequences.

II The dual crises of natural resource management in Africa

The problems that have most exercised developers and state officials responsible for
managing natural resource management programs in contemporary Africa relate to the
contrasting conditions of ecological diversity and dearth. The diversity problematic has
centered around concern for the continent’s unique, but sometimes threatened, wildlife
reserves and habitats. In this connection, a crisis mode (Watts, 1989) has been
engendered by fears that Africa’s natural wealth, the defining feature of a latter-day
Eden, might be lost (Anderson and Grove, 1987; Adams and McShane, 1992;
Biodiversity Support Program, 1993; Bonner, 1993; Njiforti and Tchamba, 1993; IIED,
1994; Jarosz, 1996; Neuman, 1995b; 1996). As key resources have declined in quantity
and/or quality, the need for stringent protection and preservation measures has
become paramount, and the scope for ‘external’ interventions by the state and interna-
tional agencies has broadened. The question of dearth, by contrast, has involved the
twin specters of drought and famine, and the seemingly intractable related problems of
inefficient food production and appalling rates of environmental degradation on urban
and rural landscapes (Franke and Chasin, 1980; Watts, 1983; Peters, 1987; Hjort af Ornäs
and Salih, 1989; Drinkwater, 1992; Ghai, 1992; Massaro, 1993; Turner, 1993; Beinart,
1984; 1996; Hoben, 1996; Scoones, 1996). Here policies favoring the designation of
protected areas have given way to interventions in the realm of production itself (cf.
Leff, 1995). Instead of protection and preservation, the need for reconstruction and
restoration has taken precedence. Once again, the scope for outside intervention has
been quite broad, as production systems have been redesigned and deployed in far-
reaching efforts to stabilize regional and national political economies.
Two countries, Tanzania and The Gambia, lie at opposite ends of the continent and
coincidentally occupy what might be considered opposite poles along this diversity-to-
dearth biogeographical spectrum. These two sites serve well to illustrate the range of
approaches to NRM envisioned under contemporary development plans, as well as the
many political problems these approaches entail. Both countries (and perhaps
especially Tanzania – cf. Maddox et al., 1996) contain a variety of landscapes, embracing
the full spectrum of environmental problems (and opportunities), yet their respective
positions within existing policy frameworks are relatively distinct. Tanzania is seen as
362 Geographies of environmental intervention in Africa

being endowed with biodiversity ‘hotspots’ fairly teeming with charismatic wildlife,
while The Gambia is simply hot, the site of recurrent drought and pervasive environ-
mental degradation. In Tanzania, where the diversity problematic has been the
dominant (if not exclusive) factor in a complex resource management setting, the
principal task has been to preserve existing resources. In The Gambia, where prevailing
climate conditions have left a seeming dearth of natural wealth, the task has been to
produce those resources anew.
The most crucial distinction between dearth and diversity problems is that they pose
starkly different political challenges to would-be resource managers. Tanzanian
strategies of environmental intervention have necessitated relocating populations out
of protected areas in the interests of natural resource protection and conservation.
Gambian plans, by contrast, have been premised on enticing recalcitrant peasants back
on to the land, and into resource management, through ‘participation’ in broad-based
environmental restoration programs involving reforestation and soil and water
reclamation efforts. Thus, one set of policy interventions has been premised on the
exclusion and reformulation of pre-existing livelihood practices, whereas the other has
hinged directly on their extension and elaboration.
Resource use conflicts have varied accordingly in the two countries. In the case of
Tanzanian protected areas, property rights issues have often been at the forefront of
policy debates (Parkipuny, 1991; United Republic of Tanzania, 1994a; 1994b; Bradbury
et al., 1995; cf. Juma and Ojwang, 1996, for discussion of neighboring Kenya). The state,
international environmental groups and private businessmen involved in wildlife
tourism and hunting concerns have asserted sovereignty over resources that were once
the focal point of broad-based common property systems (Borner, 1985; Enghoff, 1990;
Homewood and Rodgers, 1991; United Republic of Tanzania, 1994b; Hodgson, 1995;
Neumann, 1992; 1995b; Lane, 1996; Leader-Williams et al., 1995; 1996). Resource politics,
especially along the much-frequented northern tourist corridor, have centered on
boundary disputes resulting from forced displacements, and conflicts related to
competing land uses on territory not (yet) assigned protected status.
In The Gambia, situated on the fringe of the Sahel region, land politics have been
pressing around forest parks and nature reserves (Government of The Gambia, 1992;
Bobb et al., 1994; Freudenberger, 1994; Freudenberger and Sheehan, 1994), but in
keeping with the biodiversity production focus that characterizes resource management
regimes under conditions of ecological dearth, some of the most protracted conflicts
have centered on the question of how and whether rights to land extend to rights over
labor (Watts, 1993). NRM planners have, for example, sought to capture peasant (often
female) labor to valorize investments in ‘drought-proof’ irrigation systems, reconstruct
the base conditions of production through the construction of earthen dikes for erosion
control or anti-salinity purposes, and generate ‘biodiversity’ directly through
community forestry and agroforestry initiatives (United States Agency for International
Development, 1992; Carney, 1993; Schindele and Bojang, 1995; Schroeder, 1995; 1997;
1999).
 Richard A. Schroeder 363

III Spatialized environmental management

When the whites first arrived in this area, they thought we were wild animals and chased us into the forest.
Now that they have found out that we are people they are chasing us out again (Okiek hunter-gatherer, Mau
Forest, Kenya, 1991, cited in IIED, 1994; see also Anderson and Grove, 1987).

The hallmark of diversity-based interventions such as those practiced in Tanzania has

been the highly complex zoning systems they have engendered. The creation of
protected areas in colonial and postcolonial Africa took place on the basis of several key
assumptions regarding the human ecology of African land-use systems. At first, the
colonial governors allowed African settlements to coexist with wildlife (i.e., wild game):
Africans were effectively equated with wildlife and were allowed to remain on the land
on that basis. Subsequently, however, it was determined that joint occupancy of land by
African livelihood seekers and wildlife was impossible, if wildlife was to be preserved
for the recreational needs of safari hunters (Anderson and Grove, 1987; Adams and
McSchane, 1992; Bonner, 1993; Neumann, 1996). Furthermore, African livestock herds
were identified as potential vectors of tsetse fly and rinderpest infestations, and were
accordingly considered threats to the Europeans’ own herds (Kjekshus, 1977). Thus, the
land-use systems imposed by colonial powers served a dual purpose: they kept
Africans confined to the poorest agricultural land, preventing any direct economic
competition between Africans and settler populations; and they blocked Africans from
disrupting hunting and game parks.
Some of these same assumptions regarding the relationship between human and
wildlife ecologies continue to underpin contemporary conservation zoning systems. As
Guyer and Richards (1996) demonstrate, ideas supporting the separation of these land-
use domains have resurfaced in connection with the issue of biodiversity. According to
‘the conventional argument’:
[p]ristine environments are naturally rich in biodiversity, and unknown biodiversity tends to a maximum in
such localities. Unknown biodiversity is potentially valuable. Applying the precautionary principle (restrain
human agency where intervention is not demonstrably safe), these natural environments of exceptional
potential richness in biodiversity should be protected from further human interference at least until fully
assayed. In practical terms, this leads to sets of strict policy prescriptions to exclude humans from protected
areas and to strengthen the capacity of state elites to enforce those exclusions (Guyer and Richards, 1996: 6).

As Guyer and Richards imply, this position involves several problematic assumptions.
The argument that environments rich in biological resources occur ‘naturally’ assumes
that their African occupants had no role in producing them. Yet numerous studies have
documented how systems of range, forest and soils management practiced by Africans
have both produced the ‘wild’ areas, and worked actively to protect and conserve them
(Anderson and Grove, 1987; Adams and McShane, 1992; IIED, 1994; Fairhead and
Leach, 1996). Similarly, the notion that biodiversity is necessarily highest, or of greatest
value, in ‘pristine’ environments has been contested in studies of the anthropogenic
roots of heavily forested lands (Leach, 1994; Kandeh and Richards, 1996), the
production of biodiversity through seed selection and trials (Kiriro and Juma, 1991;
Amanor, 1994; Richards, 1996), the establishment and maintenance of complex agro-
forestry systems (Rocheleau, 1987; 1991) and the cultivation of crops in urban spaces
(Linares, 1996).
An elaborate classificatory scheme drawing distinctions between resource use
domains has nonetheless been built upon these premises. The World Conservation
364 Geographies of environmental intervention in Africa

Union (IUCN), for example, has categorized protected areas into eight separate
management domains: scientific reserve/strict nature reserve; national park; national
monument/natural landmark; managed nature reserve/wildlife sanctuary; protected
landscape; resource reserve; natural biotic area/anthropological reserve; and multiple-
use management area/managed resource (IUCN, 1985, cited in IIED, 1994: 10).
Similarly, in some areas, degraded areas have been classified ‘in terms of increasing
degree of limitation of use’ (Ivy, 1981: 1, cited in Drinkwater, 1992: 171; see also Östberg,
1986; Kikula and Mung’ong’o, 1993). The resulting zoning systems have often been
rationalized to a remarkable degree, as the following quotation illustrates:
One model of a land-use plan might be to surround protected areas with concentric or adjacent zones of
increasing exploitation and therefore lesser degrees of biodiversity protection. For example, a central national
park or core non-use area could be surrounded by conservation areas (or corridors or buffer zones) and abutted
by a traditional hunter/gatherer zone or a pastoral zone. In turn, these could be surrounded by game ranches,
forest reserves, agroforests, and traditional agriculture. Still further out from the core could be zones of
specialized mechanized agriculture, urban areas, and manufacturing industries. Some uses or production
systems could overlap several zones, such as traditional pastoralism overlying a traditional hunter/gatherer
zone, a controlled hunting zone and a game ranching zone (Biodiversity Support Program, 1993: 74).

The sheer extent of the enclosures associated with the many different forms of territorial
claim advanced on behalf of nature and the environment has been extraordinary.
Figures vary, depending upon the definitions used to identify ‘protected area’ status,
but several African countries rank among the world’s leaders in terms of land area set
aside for conservation purposes (see Table 1), with the aggregate total for sub-Saharan
Africa accounting for nearly half of all protected areas in the tropics (Adams and
McShane, 1992). Much of this territory was gazetted, or enshrined in the legal code,
during the colonial period, and the system of parks and reserves it contains has been
maintained through contributions from international environmental NGOs such as the
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), and the major
bi- and multilateral development agencies. In this regard, then, the relatively heavy
emphasis on wildlife preservation in Africa is itself testimony to the historical depth
and extent of external intervention and control (cf. Bonner, 1993).
In practice, the insular character of both wildlife areas and native reserves has often
undermined efforts to rationalize land use. In particular, the wildlife and human
ecologists who planned the reserve system neglected seasonal movements of human
and animal populations, and thereby underestimated the areal requirements of both
(Enghoff, 1990; Homewood and Rodgers, 1991; Metcalfe, 1995; Zube, 1995). This led
natural resource managers to enlarge existing wildlife reserves by annexing adjoining

Table 1 Land set aside for protected areas (est. % of national territory)

Tanzania 25
Botswana 18
Malawi, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, Togo 11–14
Zambia 8
Zimbabwe, USA 7
UK, Kenya 6
Australia 5
Canada 4.5

Source: Adams and McShane, 1992; Groombridge, 1992; Bonner, 1993.

 Richard A. Schroeder 365

lands outright in order to create ‘buffer zones’ (Brown, et al., 1992). In their simplest
form, buffer zones form concentric rings around a protected core. Whereas the
protection of the core area is supposedly absolute, selective human uses deemed
unthreatening from the standpoint of wildlife or habitat protection have sometimes
been allowed in buffer areas on a seasonal or semi-permanent basis (see further
discussion below). Such arrangements have theoretically accommodated population
movements of wildlife and human groups across buffer zone boundaries in both
directions.
From a biogeographical standpoint, however, the proposed zoning systems have
mainly comprised a disparate and disconnected chain of habitat islands, an
arrangement that has not only blocked ‘natural’ wildlife migration patterns, but has
placed rarer species at risk due to the lack of genetic mixing. Thus, an additional
territorial allocation, the ‘wildlife corridor’, was created which restricted human access
to critical passages linking individual reserves, and facilitated the movement of
elephants and other wide-ranging species into areas with sufficient water and food
stocks to sustain them during periods of ecological stress. The logic of territorial
expansion through the continuous exclosure of resident human populations has carried
its own momentum:
Conservation of biodiversity has, up to now, largely revolved around the creation and maintenance of formally
designated protected areas. Recently, increased attention also has been given to promoting conservation
activities in buffer zones around protected areas. It is crucial, however, that biodiversity conservation be
extended even further, beyond buffer zones and protected areas, to include all elements of the African landscape
and all ecosystems . . . [P]rotected areas represent but one element of a comprehensive conservation strategy
(Biodiversity Support Program, 1993: 29, emphasis in original).

In resolving these technically defined ‘management’ issues, the international alliance of

wildlife managers and state agents responsible for protected area expansion has been
quite heavy handed in its dealings with human groups (see further discussion of the
shifting composition of this alliance and its actions in Bloch, 1993). Historically, the
establishment of parks and preserves involved the creation of new categories of
criminal activity by fiat in the interests of preserving designated ecosystems (Neumann,
1995a; forthcoming). Entire livelihood systems practiced by local groups were
accordingly outlawed. The collection of fuel for cooking and heating, the use of pasture
lands and forage resources for livestock rearing, the hunting and trapping of protein
sources, the gathering of materials for immediate use and sale as petty commodities in
one guise or another – each of these practices was either banned outright, or confined
to impossibly small territories, contributing thereby to the inevitable degradation of
resources within them. Simultaneously, resident groups were often physically
displaced from their homes with disastrous results:
People are often relocated to areas in entirely different socio-economic and climatic zones. They are denied the
right to continue cultivating their customary fields and refused access to the resources necessary for subsistence
survival. Many of the marginal areas used for dwellings, fallow cultivation and grazing are incorporated into
buffer zones with restricted use. The alternatives that are provided appear attractive on paper but are meagre
in reality, forcing many to emigrate, or to re-enter protected areas as poachers and for unauthorised cultivation,
hunting and extraction of forest products (IIED, 1994: 14; see also Ghimire, 1994).

Abruptly and repeatedly, subsistence and petty commodity production activities have
been branded ‘poaching’, and increasingly stiff penalties have been exacted.
A widespread crackdown on the new classes of perpetrators has been implemented
366 Geographies of environmental intervention in Africa

despite the fact that most unauthorized use of protected area resources has taken place
on a small scale by local groups exercising rights that pre-existed protected area
creation (Milner-Gulland and Leader-Williams, 1992). The most egregious forms of
poaching, which often serve to justify more repressive police actions, have been carried
out by relatively small, but well organized, gangs. Responding to the demand
generated in specialty markets located primarily in Asia, these groups typically travel
into protected areas to hunt rhinos, elephants, certain primate species and rare birds.
Since poaching gangs often originate from outside national borders – e.g., the Zambians
in Zimbabwe, Somalis in Kenya, Sudanese in Chad, Nigerians in Cameroon, and
Liberians in Sierra Leone – checking their encroachment has been construed as a
defense of national sovereignty as well as a defense of the environment (see discussion
in Milner-Gulland and Leader-Williams, 1992). Thus, the response of wildlife and
habitat preservationists has become increasingly militarized (Bonner, 1993; Peluso,
1993; cf. D’Souza, 1995). In Kenya, for example, the year’s worth of wildlife
management training that park personnel typically receive has been complemented by
an additional nine months of paramilitary training (Olindo, 1991). Elsewhere,
helicopters bought by environmental organizations have been used to help enforce anti-
poaching regulations (Bonner, 1993). With park rangers mobilizing in military convoys,
a full-fledged escalation of violence has ensued: official ‘shoot to kill’ policies have been
adopted in Kenya and Zimbabwe, while de facto policies of killing poachers exist in
several other countries (see Adams and McShane, 1992; Hitchcock, 1995).
Faced with the curtailment of historic rights, displaced human populations have
frequently and forcefully resisted the geographical expansion of protected areas and
related elaboration of conservation strategies. Park and reserve boundaries have
routinely become battle lines between resident peasant and pastoralist groups, on the
one hand, and the state and international groups supporting the creation of reserves on
the other. One of the best-known cases is that of Amboseli National Park in Kenya,
where Maasai farmers and pastoralists were forced off their land to accommodate the
lucrative wildlife tourism business. In a brilliant, if tragically desperate, move, Maasai
residents responded by deliberately attacking elephants and rhinos, the park’s prime
tourist attractions, in order to pressure conservation groups to take seriously Maasai
claims (Bonner, 1993). Less dramatic, but equally effective resistance strategies have
emerged to subvert conservation efforts across the continent for decades (Anderson and
Grove, 1987; Adams and McShane, 1992; Bassett, 1993; Bonner, 1993; IIED, 1994).
Over time, the difficulties of policing conservation venues, and the emerging issue of
distributive justice (see discussion in Schroeder, forthcoming), have compelled NRM
planners to initiate policies that have taken more explicit account of local sentiment and
concerns. Specifically, policies were developed in many areas that had the explicit intent
of neutralizing opposition through broader distribution of the economic benefits
generated by resource management programs (IIED, 1994; Anderson, 1995). So called
‘integrated conservation and development projects’ (ICDPs) have typically been built
on the basis of carefully articulated, if not always successfully implemented (Stocking
and Perkin, 1992), ‘linkages’ between conservation and development objectives.
Communities posing the greatest threat to wildlife and habitat within or near ICDP
target areas have been offered development assistance in exchange for agreements not
to encroach on protected resources. As Brown and Wycoff-Baird (1992: xiii), two of the
principal proponents of ICDPs, explain: ‘All material benefits of a project must be
 Richard A. Schroeder 367

clearly tied to its conservation actions.’ Thus, the scope of purpose for buffer zones,
originally rationalized strictly in terms of environmental protection and subsequently
conceived as a way to resolve spatial conflicts between competing land uses, has
broadened considerably under the new ICDP policies.

IV Commodification of nature

By recasting parks and protected areas as the source of economic gain for local peoples,
NRM planners have helped center African resource management plans around the task
of revenue generation. Joining forces with the regional development banks, natural
resource managers have worked hard to attract new tourism ventures, and capital
investment in the sector has increased accordingly. Neumann (1995a) reports, for
example, that investments for tourism-related infrastructure totaled over $80 million
for a three-year period in Tanzania alone. Mowforth and Munt (1998) note that, during
the period 1985–94, tourist arrivals in East Africa rose 8% per annum (compared to the
world average of 5.5%), and tourism receipts saw an annual increase of 14% (compared
to the world average of 12.6%) over the same period. Zimbabwe, which received over
a million arrivals in 1994, posted the most dramatic increase among African countries,
with a tripling of the number of tourist visitors and a quadrupling of receipts during
this period.
In this favorable financial climate, both new and existing tour operators have begun
marketing themselves as purveyors of nature tourism, ecotourism or wilderness
adventure experiences. The assumption behind these changes is that tourists traveling
to Africa have become better informed on environmental issues, and will therefore be
willing to pay a special premium for the privilege of visiting areas they judge to be
pristine or relatively unaffected by human activities. Thus, the designation of
‘ecotourism’ or ‘nature tourism’ has been appropriated by proprietors of a full range of
tourist packages, from bird-watching and other demonstrably ‘low impact’ or ‘noncon-
sumptive’ tours, to luxury wildlife safaris that extol the virtues of wilderness, but cater
to the sumptuous lifestyle demands of their wealthy clientele just the same. In such
‘high end’ tourism, issues of class and race have rarely been far from the surface:
It is the colonial emphasis on discovery and expropriation that has been rediscovered within a neo-colonial
tourism . . . [F]or tours to Africa, Dr. Livingstone is frequently invoked to assist in hedonistic discoveries . . . ‘[of
areas] unchanged since the first appearance of the white man.’ . . . Forms of colonial travel and holidaying have
also re-emerged . . . with luxury safaris widely offered, such as the ‘Classic Kenya’ described . . . as ‘an escorted
private safari in the old style traditions’ in a ‘series of luxuriously appointed mobile tented camps’ . . . [The]
racism and class subordination [of the colonial period] are recreated in more invidious forms. Racism is not only
institutionalised, but commodified as well. And it has invoked a nostalgic longing for untouched, primitive and
native peoples (Munt, 1994: 53–54, emphasis in the original; see further discussion in Mowforth and Munt,
1998).

The emphasis on ‘primitivity’ (Neumann, 1997), so effectively packaged and marketed

by tour operators, has had the additional negative consequence of forcing caricatures of
cultural identity on to local groups, from which they often find it difficult to escape
(Gordon, 1992; Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1994; Hodgson, 1995).
The economic rationale for ecologically orientated tourism often centers on the
notion that revenues from tourism projects may be used to help cash-strapped local
governments maintain conservation programs that would otherwise be unaffordable
368 Geographies of environmental intervention in Africa

(for variations on these arguments, see Boo, 1990; Whelan, 1991). But in this regard,
many African governments have been sadly disappointed. In Kenya (‘the old man of
nature tourism’ – Olindo, 1991) in the late 1980s, for example, the national parks system
remained vastly underfunded despite sizable tourism revenues:
[N]ature tourism has been a big foreign exchange earner, [but] until recently very little of that money ($7 million
of $350 million) was put back into the resource that supports it – the parks system. Parks personnel and guards
were underpaid and worked long hours, equipment was lacking, and poaching was rife – in short, the
Department of Wildlife Conservation and Management was unable to manage the areas it was charged to
protect due to a lack of funding (Olindo, 1991: 30).

Thus, while the goal of underwriting conservation efforts through tourist revenues may
have seemed reasonable enough, the lion’s share of revenues from eco- and nature
tourism in Africa – like most other forms of tourism around the world (cf. Pattullo, 1996;
Mowforth and Munt, 1998) – has not in fact been reinvested locally.
Tourism has done a great deal to legitimate NRM policies being promoted by entre-
preneurs and conservation NGOs in the region in one respect: tourists with first-hand
experience in visiting protected areas often become vocal advocates on behalf of con-
servation causes. Private entrepreneurial interests have sought to encourage such
political activism through ‘conservation education’ campaigns conducted through
films, lectures and discussions in the lodges and camps where tourists are housed, and
on the safari trail during visits to tourist sites. The zeal of newly returned tourists on
behalf of wildlife and habitat preservation causes has worked to the advantage of the
tour industry by creating political pressure favorable to its interests, and by promoting
the further consumption of the industry’s product by future visitors who rush to
glimpse elephants, rhinos and other endangered species ‘before it is too late’. The
cynical actions taken by some of the major African environmental NGOs to manipulate
public sentiment surrounding the international ban on ivory sales for fund-raising
purposes is a case in point (Bonner, 1993).
If funds generated by tourist companies have not always served the purposes of
providing fiscal relief to cash-strapped central governments, they have, nonetheless,
sometimes been deployed to much greater effect in connection with efforts to win over
communities to conservation objectives at the local level. The oft-cited model for this
approach is Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE (Communal Area Management Program for
Indigenous Resources) program, which devolves both management responsibility and
some financial control to district-level committees in several parts of the country on the
principle that ‘rents [should be] appropriated to the lands they came from’ (Metcalfe,
1995: 276; see also IIED, 1994; Metcalfe, 1994; Murphree, 1995; cf. Leader-Williams et al.,
1995; 1996). Thus, while Zimbabwean community leaders have been given the respon-
sibility to cull wildlife stocks and issue visitation permits to hunters and tourists, they
also enjoy the opportunity to distribute wildlife revenues to district residents directly
on a per capita basis, and they pay compensation to farmers and livestock holders who
suffer damages from wildlife encroachment.
Conservation initiatives conducted by the former apartheid regime in South Africa
within so-called ‘bantustans’ or ‘African homelands’ illustrate the wide range of
incentives that have been used to curry favor with protected area residents and
neighbors. In the South African case, these have included lease payments paid by parks
boards into tribal authority trust funds; the direct allocation of a percentage of park fees
 Richard A. Schroeder 369

to local communities; the granting of permission to specific groups to remove

fuelwood, medicinal plants and thatching grass from protected areas (the latter on
condition that an equivalent amount of thatch is harvested for use by park authorities);
the distribution of subsidized or free meat taken from game reserve areas; the granting
of permission to local pastoralists to graze livestock in reserve areas; the exemption of
community residents from paying entrance fees; and preferential hiring status for
community residents in filling unskilled jobs (for further discussion of these arrange-
ments, see Anderson, 1995). The African Wildlife Foundation’s ‘good neighborliness’
program, which has had operations in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, has extended the
range of potential community benefits further to include the construction of schools,
dispensaries and water supply facilities in communities immediately adjoining
protected areas (Leader-Williams et al., 1995; Snelson, 1995). And bioprospecting efforts
in Cameroon, Madagascar and several other countries have explored a range of
mechanisms for benefit distribution, including paying royalties on sales of locally
derived medicines, issuing of licenses for processing collected materials within source
countries, supplying commercial drugs at cost and providing training courses for
national research scientists (Cunningham, forthcoming; Laird, et al., forthcoming).
While these various initiatives would seem to afford numerous opportunities for
mutually beneficial agreements to be struck between commercial interests, national
governments and local populations, the goal of equitably distributing gains from con-
servation and protection measures has proven difficult to realize. Instead of winning
the trust of local groups, commodity-based incentives programs have often tended to
inflame political-economic tensions, thereby threatening to undermine conservation
objectives:
The majority of these schemes aim to compensate local people for loss of access to natural resources by
providing an alternative livelihood source. By so doing, it is assumed that the economic incentive to exploit
wildlife is removed. However, in practice, these schemes . . . view local people as passive beneficiaries. Benefits
are not always distributed equally, compensation is rarely proportionate to the amount of income foregone, and
the services provided do not address sufficiently the needs of the people. As a result, it is not easy for a sense
of ownership to develop, and local people do not feel committed to the upkeep and maintenance of [project
sites] (IIED, 1994: viii).

Bioprospecting benefits pose special challenges along these lines. The time lag between
the flurry of initial excitement surrounding the ‘discovery’ of a promising plant
compound and eventual production of a commercially viable product is typically so
lengthy that the prospects for distributing direct benefits to local groups are greatly
reduced. Moreover, whenever significant economic gains appear to be forthcoming in
the search for new drugs, such as occurred with the development of promising
treatments for AIDS and prostate cancer on the basis of compounds found in Cameroon
(Cunningham, forthcoming; Laird et al., forthcoming), the likelihood that the state or
private commercial interests will in some way intervene to divert benefits away from
local areas increases proportionately. (Parry, forthcoming; Schroeder, forthcoming, offer
more detailed discussions of the dilemmas of distributive justice related to bio-
prospecting efforts.)
The most successful partnerships between communities and conservation authorities
have arguably occurred when the latter have offered at least partial recognition of the
communal rights to resources within community boundaries. Thus, for example, in
Tanzania, several communities willingly struck land-use agreements with ecotourism
370 Geographies of environmental intervention in Africa

concerns when tour operators first explicitly recognized community sovereignty, and
then worked with community leaders to negotiate fair terms of access, including
payment of a share of the company’s profits (Dorobo Tours and Safaris Ltd and Olivers
Camp, 1995). As this case suggests, the root problem involved in many benefit distrib-
ution efforts lies in the fact that such approaches tend to overlook critical noneconomic
incentives to community participation in resource management. The maintenance of
tenure security, freedom from displacement and other forms of repression, and preser-
vation of cultural ties to the landscape may be more valuable to a broader spectrum of
local residents than cash or in-kind contributions, especially when the distribution of
cash or other economic benefits has previously been monopolized by community or
national elites (Schroeder, forthcoming).

V The production of environmental scales

The multifaceted efforts to rezone African territory and market its natural resources
have received a major impetus in the past two decades as a sense of ecological ‘manifest
destiny’ has swept through western development agencies (Schroeder and Neumann,
1995). One of the key institutional actors asserting ‘global’ primacy in the justification
of particular scientific, political and economic management rationalities has been the
World Bank. Under the guise of ‘mainstreaming’ environmental concerns (World Bank,
1995), the bank and collaborating agencies such as the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID) have initiated a series of strategic planning
exercises, each scaled to engage a particular political constituency. Since roughly 1990,
for example, the bank has encouraged dozens of African countries to prepare full-blown
national environmental action plans (NEAPs) for attacking environmental problems. As
of 1995, 42 of 54 African countries had either adopted national plans or had them in
preparation in hopes of rapidly reorientating national development priorities around
newly defined environmental objectives (World Bank, 1996; see also Greve et al., 1995).
The bank’s controlling interest in rationalizing environmental planning processes
across the African region was especially evident in cases where bank officials deemed
existing governments unprepared to implement full-scale NEAPs. In these cases, the
bank simply issued its own plans in the form of Country Environmental Strategy
Papers (CESPs), blueprints for action whose scope was so sweeping that even bank
employees saw them as a particularly acute form of ‘environmental imperialism’ (Bojö,
1995: 13).
A countervailing trend against such seemingly heavy-handed, donor-initiated
approaches has adopted the local scale as the most effective level at which to implement
natural resource management policies in the region. This invocation of locality derives
from several sources. First, community-based approaches have been developed with an
eye toward overcoming the legacy of ‘suspicion and mistrust’ left in the wake of the
long history of resource management failures initiated and imposed by outsiders on the
continent (Biodiversity Support Program, 1993: xiv). Secondly, community-based
approaches have been designed to capitalize on the belated recognition that local or
indigenous environmental knowledge may be critical to successful management of
particular ecological resources (cf. Brush and Stabinsky, 1996). And finally, local
management objectives have been coupled with economic incentives, as described
 Richard A. Schroeder 371

above, to further the aims of neoliberal reformers working to promote the privatization
of natural resources and liberalization of national economies across the region (World
Bank, 1995; 1996).
At face value, the goal of community-based resource management has seemed simple
enough: environmental planners have been asked to scale down approaches and invite
more local involvement in project activities. There have, however, been several
problems with this premise as fundamental political, economic and conceptual issues
have come into play. In conceptual terms, Giles-Vernick’s (1999) study of migration and
resource management claims by and for ‘indigenous’ groups in the Sangha River Valley
of the Central African Republic demonstrates just how complicated the notion of ‘the
local’ can be in the context of environmental policy-making. Giles-Vernick uses the case
of the Mpiemu people(s), a group that recounts its own history as one of repeated
movements to and from, and among, different locations along the Sangha River Basin,
to challenge the dual notions that ‘migrants’ constitute environmental villains while
‘indigenous’ groups are deemed inherently environmentally sensitive. The complex
settlement and migration history of the Mpiemu gives rise to a host of critical policy
questions that are at once fundamental and potentially unsettling to the prospects for
successful integration of ‘local’ residents into resource management programs in
‘migrant’ communities.
In the broadest terms, Giles-Vernick’s analysis begs the question of who, precisely, is
a ‘migrant’, and who is a resident? What unit of analysis (historical, spatial) applies to
this designation? Are all ‘migrants’, by definition, ecological threats? In more concrete,
policy-related terms, who should be entitled to ‘local’ benefits from park revenues
when the history of resident groups is short lived, or when those groups have been
involved in circular or interannual migration patterns? (This question has surfaced in
connection with the distribution of ‘community’ benefits in some of the CAMPFIRE
communities – see Metcalfe, 1994.) In ‘co-management’ scenarios, whose ‘traditional’
patterns of resource use should be acknowledged and/or sanctioned? Whose claims to
usufruct rights are most legitimate? Critically, with the creation of parks and protected
areas, protected area managers have become arbiters of these definitions, and it is their
actions that have invited parallels to some of the most egregious excesses of the colonial
period.
The premises of most resource management plans pitched at the local level have
included increased ‘participation’ by local communities, both within and outside
protected areas. Once again, however, a key concept motivating hundreds of NRM
projects across the region has been challenged. As several authors have shown, the
notion of participation as articulated in NEAPs and other development plans has
encompassed a wide variety of political processes, ranging from full empowerment of
community decision-makers to the enforcement of ‘old-style corvee’ (Peters, 1996: 22;
see also IIED, 1994; Ribot, 1995a; 1995b; Schroeder, 1999). Peters (1996: 22) observes
that developers have mistakenly tended ‘[t]o assume that participation is new, that
it is absent from local communities, and that it needs to be taught . . . ignor[ing] the
vigor of social associations that exist in most communities.’ Ribot (forthcoming)
reminds us that local leaders in rural African communities are rarely democratically
elected, and may not, therefore, be accountable in any way to their constituencies –
‘Neither representation without power nor power without representation can be
considered community participation.’ Brown and Wycoff-Baird (1992: 15) caution
372 Geographies of environmental intervention in Africa

against approaches that only offer opportunities for ‘token participation’ to community
groups:
[Participation] is not the occasional gathering together of target beneficiaries in pro forma forums wherein
external change agents direct the timing and flow of information between beneficiaries and other ‘participants’
in the development process . . . [Nor is it] the occasional or intermittent querying of target beneficiaries as to
their perceptions, needs, and wants regarding development.

These authors concur that the key to ultimate success in promoting participatory
community resource management involves a genuine ceding of power from the
national and international authorities to local groups and individuals, and
development of planning and negotiation processes that facilitate substantive contact
between them and conservation authorities. Ignoring these crucial stages of community
involvement has all too often undermined the legitimacy of otherwise worthwhile con-
servation objectives.

VI Conclusion

Contemporary environmental policies and practices have profoundly altered social,

political and economic geographies across the African region. The continued
elaboration of zoning strategies through the creation of new protected area types, the
design of innovative mechanisms for sharing benefits with communities displaced by
conservation measures, and the development of new forms of political engagement
with Africans around environmental concerns have helped ensure ever deeper
involvement by international experts in managing the region’s environmental
problems. Key NRM initiatives, including drought and famine relief programs,
sustainable forestry and agricultural projects, and protected area management schemes,
continue to absorb territory and donor funding. With the struggle to control this
largesse in full swing across the continent, the stakes involved in environmental
management could hardly be higher.
It is in this broad political economic context that contemporary NRM policies and
practices have acquired a distinctive, albeit highly ambiguous, political character.
Despite a long history of efforts to reshape environmental policy, acute problems have
continued to plague the region. Consequently, managers of the major NGOs, state
agencies and development bureaucracies responsible for NRM policies have come
under increasing scrutiny, sometimes by colleagues from within their own ranks. Faced
with mounting criticism, agency heads have recently adopted a number of ostensibly
progressive political principles to guide their efforts. The initiation of participatory
planning exercises, the acknowledgment of values inherent in many local environmen-
tal knowledge systems and proposals for preserving multiple access rights to critical
resources have created political openings that local and international activists
motivated by prospects for securing social and economic justice have sought to exploit.
All too often, however, the bureaucratic and political inertia of the major donors and
the self-serving accumulation strategies launched by local political and economic elites
have prevented these opportunities from being fully realized. While plans to share the
economic benefits generated on newly commodified ‘natural’ landscapes have at times
sought to recognize the needs and rights of rural populations, these groups have
 Richard A. Schroeder 373

frequently been swept aside by the state and private entrepreneurial interests whenever
large-scale profits have been at stake. Similarly, planners have turned increasingly to
local environmental knowledge systems for ideas on how to manage resources
effectively and information regarding the sources of valuable medicinal compounds.
Yet governments and elite groups have rarely ceded effective control over the resources
in question. The impression left in each of these circumstances is thus one of giving with
one hand while taking away with the other, of promoting the devolution of authority
and sharing of ‘natural’ wealth, but allowing this to take place only under the most
highly circumscribed of conditions. In such cases, the patina of ‘green goodness’
(Rocheleau and Ross, 1995) attached to environmental initiatives has worn off quickly,
and the opportunity to strike a new social compact with rural African groups over
resource management issues has gone unfulfilled.

Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a writing fellowship at Rutgers University’s Center for
the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, and a grant from the Rutgers University
Research Council. I am grateful to Maria Espinosa, Dorothy Hodgson, John Kasbarian,
Neil Smith, Paige West and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on earlier
drafts of the manuscript.

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