From Fences to Co-Operation: Building Credibility and Trust in the Actor-Networks

Ph.D. proposal May 2003

Jenni Kauppila

Department of Regional Studies and Environmental Policy

University of Tampere, Finland

From fences to co-operation: credibility and trust-building in actor-networks. Case Kruger National Park in South Africa

1Introduction

The purpose of my Ph.D. research is to analyse the construction of credibility and trust in actor-networks in the context of community-based natural resources management/ nature conservation in developing countries. I attempt to study this through the case of the Makuleke community in the Kruger National Park, South Africa.

Kruger National Park is Africa’s oldest natural park and one of the most famous parks in the world. It is 350 km long from North to South, at most 60km in width, and covers a surface area of around 19 000 hectares. Five rivers cross the park from west to east. There are 300 different types of trees, 1980 species of plants, 49 species of fish, 34 types of amphibian, 116 different reptilian species, 505 species of birds and 147 species of mammals in the park. 140 of the species in the park are endogenous. However, as Carruthers (1995, 1) puts it: “A national park is not merely a physical entity, a geographical area, or a suite of ecosystems and species, but a mirror of society and a vigorous symbol”.

According to Turner the black rural people in the Apartheid regime’s South Africa generally saw that their commons had been colonised and that their sustainable use of wildlife and other natural resources had been prohibited by a ruling class that had recently decimated those same resources. In fact forced removals and arrests made the conservation of nature to be one of the most hostile intrusions by the apartheid regime. This further damaged the credibility of nature conservation and of nature-based tourism in the eyes of rural people. (Turner 2000, 32-33.) In this light it is not surprising that the period prior to the first democratic elections in 1994 witnessed the growth of an environmental movement that attempted to link environmental and social justice consideration and people-centred approach to environmental issues formed part of wider democratisation process in the country (Isaacs et al 2000, 4). Currently one of the key objectives of the South African government is to narrow the gap between the park administration and the neighbouring communities (South African National Parks 2003).

Makuleke community was forcibly removed in 1969 from their land in the Pafuri Area, Northern sector of the Kruger National Park. In 1998 they regained access to the on the basis of the 1995 Land Restitution Act. The establishment of a contractual national park after a successful land claim was heralded as the beginning of the new chapter in South Africa’s conservation history. It was presented as a clean break from the legacy of apartheid and a template of how to reform the relations between parks and people. (Steenkamp & Grossman 2001, 2.) The community made a co-management agreement for 50 years with the South African National Parks (SANP), which oblige them to retain the conservation status of the land. On the other hand, they gained exclusive commercial rights to the land, including consumptive utilisation rights, which they are allowed to exercise independently of the SANP. (Steenkamp 2002.)

However, the co-management has not worked out without any controversies. Makukele Community’s development and conservation initiatives are largely dependent on revenue from elephant hunting (Steenkamp 2000). This a highly disputed question due to the uplisting of the African elephant in the CITES Appendix 1 and hunting has caused tensions in the Joint Management Board of the SANP and Makuleke community (Steenkamp & Grossman 2001, 3-5).[1] Thompson claims in his study on the Amboseli Natural Park in Kenya that land in post-colonial Africa is about independence, development, and emerging democracy, and hence conserving elephants is also about all these things. Thompson continues by showing that the stakes are high and stakeholders are various in the “elephant question” because wildlife tourism is a major foreign exchange earner and illegal ivory trade has been at various times an important underground economy. (Thompson 2002, 166-167.) Hence it is interesting to take a closer look at the actors and different stakeholders and to place the conservation objectives within the broader socio-political and economic frame.

2 Research questions

Isaacs and Mohamed (2000, 17) point out that the relationship of mutual trust and respect is of utmost importance in countries such as South Africa that suffer from a legacy of authoritarian conservation management. Steenkamp and Grossman add that the SANP has achieved much since first democratic elections in 1994, but with respect to community relations it is nonetheless facing a situation in which the contradictions between formal policy and practise on the ground has become too obvious to ignore. They highlight that: “In this regard, among the most harmful of attitudes within the organisation is ironically to be found in the propagation of the old notion that there are ‘no conflicting interests’ between the conservation authority and its neighbours. (Steenkamp & Grossman 2001, 7.)

The aim of my study is to analyse how successful indeed has been the process of trust creation and how different networks of actors are trying to gain credibility in the Makuleke co-management arrangement? Or from a different angle, how conservation and social justice objectives have turned into daily practises at different institutional levels? I look at the daily practises through the challenges that hunting of elephant poses to the needs of the community members (which not may be univocal), conservation and economic goals of the South African National Parks (SANP) and the international community (or perhaps international communities)? These questions can be divided to a variety of subquestions:

-Who are the main stakeholders and what interest they represent?

-How the actors frame the case? What are the arenas of discussion and how that defines who is considered as an expert?

-How the actors have been networking?

-Has the Makuleke community has been able to find the social coherence and management skills that managing commons require? How this was made possible?

3Material and methods

My plan is to conduct various field trips and the first one will be next autumn. I plan to semi-structured interviews with members of the Makuleke community, NGO personnel and academics who have worked with the community, company representatives and administrative personnel from various levels. I will analyse the interviews loosely leaning on Perelman’s discourse analysis technique. In addition to the interviews, the analysis will be based on literature review, archive material and participatory observation.

4References

Carruthers, Jane. 1995. The Kruger National Park. Social and Political History. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press.

Isaacs, Moenimba and Mohamed, Najma. 2000. Co-managing the commons in the ’new’ South Africa: room for manouvre? In Isaacs, Moenieba, Mohamed, Najma, Zolile, Ntshona and Turner, Stephen. 2000. Consituting the commons in the new South Africa. Papers presented to the eight biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Bloomington, Indiana. June 2000. URL: Visited 14.3.2002.

South African National Parks. 2003. Visited 13.3.2003.

Steenkamp, Conrad. 2002. The Makuleke Ecotourism and Conservation Iniatiative (not a formal name) described in TRACKER, A Tool for Real-Time Learning from Local Resource Management Initiatives in Africa. Visited 15.4.2003.

Steenkamp, Conrad and Grossman, David. 2001. People and Parks: Cracks in the Paradigm. IUCN Policy Think Tank Series. 2001. No. 10.

Thompson, Charis. 2002. When Elephants Stand for Competing Philosophies of Nature: Amboseli National Park, Kenya. In Law, John & Mol, Annemarie (eds.) 2002. Complexities. Social Studies of Knowledge Practices. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Turner, Stephen. 2000. Conserving the commons: nature conservation as common property resource management in the new South Africa. In Isaacs, Moenieba, Mohamed, Najma, Zolile, Ntshona and Turner, Stephen. 2000. Consituting the commons in the new South Africa. Papers presented to the eight biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Bloomington, Indiana. June 2000. URL: Visited 14.3.2002.

[1] In CITES COP 12, November 2002, the Botswana, Namibia and South Africa were allowed one-off shipments of ivory under certain conditions and not until 2004.