People-State Interactions: Gender and Institutional Dimensions of Natural Resource Management in the Nechisar National Park, Ethiopia

Protected areas have long been seen as the cornerstone for the conservation of biodiversity, preserving terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and offering general global environmental benefits. Protected areas cover 12.7% of the world's terrestrial area and 1.6% of the oceans. The conservation strategies of most protected areas aim at minimising human influence while human dominated landscapes are assumed to be of lesser ecological value. Such a strict conservation strategy excludes local actors who live within or around conservation areas from participating in the resource governance process. However, with a rising concern over sustainable development, in recent decades' new conservation strategies emerged with a greater role given to local people. The discussion of which approach works better has been a long winding debate, and more evidence is needed to better understand under which conditions particular approaches are the most appropriate. This dissertation contributes to the ongoing debate by looking into the ecological, social and economic impact of Nechisar National park in southern Ethiopia. The park hosts considerable terrestrial and water resources and has a large biodiversity, with many endemic plant and animal species. Though the park was heralded as a success protected area management in the 1990s, today it is stated as a park on the verge of collapse. The overall goal of the dissertation is to address people-state interactions in relation to the ecological, social and economic impact of conservation in the Nechisar National Park and to shed light on possible implications towards balancing local people interests, governance and sustainable exploitation of natural resources. In the second chapter the relationship between people living in and around the Nechisar National Park and the park as a state-imposed institution are presented, and how this relationship evolved over the three Ethiopian governance regimes is analysed. From the semi-structured interviews and life stories of key informants it appears that the strict conservation strategies of the park during the authoritarian regimes actually backfired as pastoralist and farmers became hostile towards the park. The hardship imposed by the park made that pastoralists got involved in agriculture and farmers into hunting, which led to additional pressure on the park's resources. The finding illustrates how the initial exclusion of local people from a protected area can lead to a severe degradation of the natural resources in the longer run. Hence, the current critical conservation status of Nechisar National Park should be taken as an opportunity to elaborate a new conservation strategy, whereby the park authorities should seek to involve local people in the conservation project. In the third chapter the gender controlled access to natural resources and violence in the context of the management of a protected area is examined. Access to livestock, land, forest and fish - the economic most valuable natural resources in the context of the local livelihoods - are clearly controlled by men. The widespread violence against women should be seen as a mechanism for maintaining male dominance over the natural resources. The displacement of people from the park and the restrictions on access to resources in the park increased the vulnerability of women to violence and abuse. The results imply that appreciating these gender inequalities and outright injustices should inform policy makers on natural resources management in general and on nature conservation in particular. In the fourth chapter the actors, activities, transactions and coordination challenges in the supply chain of the fishery from Lake Chamo are identified. Original survey data collected from fishermen and information from semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders are used to characterise the fish supply chain, with particular attention to cooperative versus non-cooperative intuitional set-ups. From theory, one would expect revenues and returns to increase with more efficient horizontal and vertical coordination. However, this chapter presents a case where fishermen in more coordinated and more efficient systems receive the lowest revenues. An important factor explaining the lack of performance of fishery cooperatives is the state control on marketing and prices. A consequence of the lower income, fishermen leave the cooperative and work as private (illegal) fishermen. This trend might put the sustainable exploitation of the fish resources at jeopardy. In the fifth chapter the institutional factors governing the exploitation of fish resources in Lake Chamo are identified, whereby the cooperative fishery as an institutional set-up for common-pool resources management is analysed in particular. Insights from a bio-economic model fed with primary data from stakeholder interviews and a quantitative survey - besides secondary data from literature - are used to understand the institutional characteristics of the fishery. It turns out that the fish resources of Lake Chamo are economically overexploited due the poor law enforcement and lack of a monitoring system. Though fishery cooperatives could potentially improve the economic condition of its members and while at the same time lead to a sustainable fishery, the cooperatives of Lake Chamo fail to do so. On the one hand, the government's control over marketing and fish prices leads to the cooperative fishermen getting lower revenues than private fishermen. On the other hand, the government authorities are not succeeding in controlling the private fisheries and hence cannot enforce regulations on the use of nets, mesh size, fishing ground and other fishing practice. This implies the government control over market prices should be relaxed while fishing rules should be enforced. Overall, the dissertation shows that policies aiming at a sustainable management of the park and its natural resources should find better ways of meeting the social, cultural and economic needs of people who are directly impacted by the conservation project.

Jaar van publicatie:2018

Toegankelijkheid:Open