Optimal principles and pragmatic strategies:creating an enabling politico-legal environment for Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM)

Abstract

Let me start this address with an hypothesis. I suggest that the mixed profile of success and failure in CBNRM in the Region owes much of its ambiguity to our strategic pragmatism in its implementation. We have placed policy and practice before politics and thus have encouraged the birth of CBNRM (in its "modern" version) into a politico-legal environment which, if not hostile, is hardly a nurturing one. In so doing we have put an ironic twist on the conventional approach to planned change. A recent draft article on rhino conservation sent to me for review complains that "much time and money get wasted in the political battlefield trying to shape out policies that do not get implemented on the ground." We in CBNRM programmes have done the opposite. We have spent a lot of time and money in implementation on the ground, leaving the outcomes of the political battlefield which surrounds it largely unresolved.