ABSTRACT

During the eighth COP, in March 1992, I delivered an address to the Kyoto Forum, ‘Harmony with Wildlife’, in which I tried to draw out the conjunctions linking communities in the wildlife-rich areas of rural Africa with CITES and the dissonance which lay within this linkage. To illustrate the view from below I used the experiences and perspectives of the people of Mahenye, a community in Zimbabwe's south–east lowveld that was struggling to put in place its own version of conservation through the sustainable use and management of its wild flora and fauna. Subsequently, this address was published in revised form under the title The Lesson from Mahenye: Rural Poverty, Democracy and Wildlife Conservation (Murphree, 1995). The editors have graciously invited me to provide a reflective endpiece to this volume, using the same theme and title. With the data from seven additional years of the Mahenye experience since the Kyoto address now available, this provides the opportunity to test my assertions that the people of Mahenye have the capacity and motivation to make responsible decisions about their natural resources and implement them with greater efficiency than any regulatory regime imposed from above. It also provides the opportunity to examine whether the decisions of CITES over these seven years have had any impact on what has happened in Mahenye and, if so, what one can infer about this linkage between global regulation and communal management.