Welcome to Conservation Gateway
The Gateway is for the conservation practitioner, scientist and decision-maker. Here we share the best and most up-to-date information we use to inform our work at The Nature Conservancy.
Science ChroniclesBaseline Socioeconomic Assessment: Mahale National Park, Tanzania
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - 11:21am
As we approached the stripe of dirt that’s the Mahale National Park airstrip, the Missionary Aviation Fellowship pilot casually noted that he’d never landed here before — but that he’d done lots of remote strips in Sudan, and this one looked easy. I wasn’t so sure — mainly because the airstrip ends in Lake Tanganyika, the world’s second-deepest lake. But after a bumpy landing and a hard stop before we hit the water, the core team and I were glad to finally be at the field study site. After four months of preparation, I am in Tanzania to lead the baseline socioeconomic assessment for one of the most exciting Conservancy projects I’ve been part of in my eight years at TNC.
Imagine one of the most isolated parts of East Africa, a national park filled with iconic African animals that migrate in and out of the park, a lake with off-the-scale endemism, and 50,000 people living around the park who depend on the forests for firewood and the lake for fish. Grow the local population at a 15-year doubling rate, give it an infant mortality rate that’s among the worst in the world, and add a widely perceived crisis in fisheries and forestry, and you have the situation in the study area. Challenging? Of course. But it’s also a local situation that lends itself to an integrated solution.
To protect the nature in the area, a project will need to combine fisheries, forestry and reproductive health objectives to empower the people who live around the national park to better manage their natural resources. This is just what this new Conservancy project will do, in partnership with Pathfinder International, Frankfurt Zoological Society and several Tanzanian government agencies.
As with most of what I do in the Conservation and Poverty Reduction (CPR) Project, it was Sanjayan who created the opportunity for the assessment and gave me the idea. He was the one who found the funding and encouraged me to talk with the Africa team about a potential study. He knew I’d love the challenge.
Working in a remote part of Tanzania with no roads, electricity or cellphone coverage, sleeping in a tent, eating anything that’s put in front of me, avoiding malaria and dysentery, while seeking to understand the issues local people face was… fun actually. (Though one needs to be several standard deviations away from the mean to enjoy such things.) Click here for a video tour of our camp that you’ll never see on nature.org.
With 21 people (mostly university students) on the field team, we divided into groups to conduct focus group discussions, expert interviews and a household survey of the people who live around the national park. Going geek for a minute, the study was a mixed-method, quasi-experimental design to measure 10 well-being indicators based on the World Bank’s multi-dimensional definition of poverty. The TNC CPR team has done these kinds of studies in eight countries, so I knew we’d be fine methodologically. But I wanted to try something innovative in this study.
It may be hubris, but I think at this point in my career that I can predict which communities are likely to be successful in a conservation project. It is not as hard as it might seem. There are a number of studies looking at the success factors for community management of natural resources, including Pollnac et al. 2001, Ostrom 2009, and Gutiérrez et al. 2011. Elinor Ostrom, in fact, won the Nobel Prize for showing why the tragedy of the commons is not all that common. But these studies all look backward at what worked. I wanted to look forward, so I chose the most widely agreed success factors and measured them locally using a random sample household survey to assess: (i) able local leadership; (ii) level of community conflict; and (iii) conflict resolution. We surveyed approximately 500 people in 10 villages to ask:
- “How satisfied are you with the services provided by the village and district leadership,” and “do you feel that your household has influence on decisions made by the village government?” These questions gave us data on the ability of local leadership, which we know matters for organizing and implementing activities.
- “Do disputes or conflicts about land use or the use of forest products ever occur in this village?” This gave us data on the level of conflict in a community — a proxy for social cohesion and cooperation — which suggest how effective community organizations might be in governing natural resources.
- “If there is a dispute or conflict, how do you try to solve it” and “are these disputes or conflicts usually resolved in fair way?” This gave us data on the effectiveness of local conflict resolution mechanisms, which are critical for resolving competing views of resource use.
Aggregating the questions into three indicators, giving equal weight to each indicator, and normalizing the results by village, I predict that if we work in all 10 Mahale villages, we’ll have greater project success in three villages (Buhingu, Katumbi and Nkongkwa); modest success in four villages (Rukoma, Kalya, Kashagulu and Kalilani); and little success in three villages (Sibwesa, Igalula and Lubalisi). A “village” in Tanzania, BTW, is akin to a township in most countries and can have 8,000 residents.
My hope is that such pre-project scoping can help us maximize our success in multiobjective projects like the one around Mahale National Park. Read our baseline socioeconomic assessment.
For the trip out, the Missionary Aviation Fellowship pilot met us at the boat, took a look at our luggage, and said: “We have a problem here.” Because of new weight limits on the Cessna, we had to leave most of our bags behind. It was four months before I saw my bags again (thanks Tim Tear!), but it was a small price to pay for the privilege of sharing local people’s lives for a short while, eating dagaa fish on local rice, and helping a great project to gain a detailed understanding of the local socioeconomic indicators.
Image credit: Amy Vitale
The Nature Conservancy is the leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people.
VISIT NATURE.ORG»
Comments
Login or Register to post comments.