Community Conservation in Southern Africa

Part IV describes national community-based conservation programmes in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and Mozambique. While community conservation in southern Africa has generally fallen under the rubric of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), this term was not coined in the region and nor does it adequately define southern Africa’s particular brand of community conservation sufficiently to differentiate it from practices elsewhere. This concerns us because we use CBNRM as shorthand for a set of economic, political and organizational principles within a strongly devolutionary rights-based approach (see Barrow and Murphree, 2001), though the same term is applied to different ideas in different regions of the world. The conceptual integrity of the CBNRM principles are not always followed and weak implementation is undermining the importance of these principles; it is certainly attracting academic criticism and resulting in the dissipation of support from the donor community.