The National Parks were created with two main objectives. The first reflected the need to protect biodiversity, as conceived by the international community. The second was to develop an eco-tourism economy to provide income to sustain conservation, foster rural development and decrease Gabon’s dependence on oil and wood exports. ANPN originally appointed two
“conservateurs” (National Park Wardens) to Loango National Park. Since 2010, only one conservateur has been in charge of the park, assisted by a “conservateur assistant”. Twenty-one
“écogardes” (park rangers) are divided into two teams, one for the northern and one for the southern section of the park. However, due to technical and financial constraints, the first group of trained écogardes from ANPN were not present and active in the northern part of the park until 2009.
In 2001, a collaboration between Africa’s Eden, the NGO working locally, MEF and the conservateur was created and referred to as Operation Loango (Van de Weghe 2007). This collaboration served as the park administration and supported research projects (e.g., the Great
Ape Habituation Project in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Anthropology).
Operation Loango officially terminated in January 2010, when administrative and financial difficulties in the tourism company precluded further funding. This collaboration included almost all sources of institutional power – the state through its national and local representatives, scientific expertise and tourism – but excluded local communities. This is still the case today.
Currently, conservation is run by the Gabonese authorities (box 1 in Fig. 3.5) and international NGOs (box 2), which work in collaboration and also support independent research (arrows marked A). Current tourism activities are independent of conservation activities but provide informal support to authorities and should provide funds through park fees (box 3 and arrows marked B). Tourism in Loango comprises three tourism operators. The first is Africa’s Eden and the second, Gavilo Lodge, focuses on sport fishing. A third, local, tourism operator, based outside the park but using the park for safaris, started activities during my study period.
National Parks were imposed on local communities by the state following the Western model of conservation. ANPN states on its website that socio-economic surveys were carried out prior to the creation of parks, to limit their negative impact on communities (ANPN 2012). A draft of the 2009-2014 management plan for Loango National Park, to which I had access (ANPN 2009), suggests that local community representatives were present at two meetings where decisions were made concerning the future management of the park. It also states that public audits were carried out with local people to identify key challenges and issues in 2003. However, this contradicts what I was told by local people, who said that they were not consulted in any way about management strategies, either before or during the creation of the park, as exemplified in the quote below. This confusion around consultation suggests that parks have been imposed on local communities, whether directly or by lack of proper inclusion, regardless of the extensive literature devoted to the need to effectively involve local communities in the early stages of conservation actions (e.g., Adams and McShane 1996; Lahm 1996; Peters 1999).
One local leader said:
Apparently, the area has been taken to make a National Park. We don’t know how they chose a place like that, without asking the people to whom the place belongs.
Through the creation of the park, ANPN gained proprietorship over the land which is now controlled by the conservateur. S/he is in charge of determining access to the park and the validity of land claims through familial relationships, although it is unclear what levels of relationship are considered valid. While the policy supposedly follows the kin-based, customary land-tenure system (see Chapter 2), local leaders, who were previously in charge of land allocation, have effectively lost control over the land inside the park boundaries. New conflicts have arisen as a consequence of this transfer of power. For example, a member of the community returned to an old family camp inside the park to farm and fish when he retired.
However, the park authorities did not consider the camp as belonging to anybody, as it had been abandoned for decades when the park was created and mapped. When the villager claimed the camp, park officials declared his action illegal and asked him to leave. His status was still in abeyance at the end of the study. Several villagers inside the park complained that the park did not consider their customary rights with reference to that particularly case. We can expect similar tensions to arise in the future if conditions of land access and land tenure are not clarified and agreed by all parties.
After the creation of the park, most conservation activities focused on biological monitoring of the park. For example, a survey that lasted several years aimed to map and assess the biodiversity of the park. Wildlife-based research received a great deal of support from
Operation Loango, but no surveys of human communities, local livelihoods or perceptions of biodiversity conservation were undertaken during this period. In 2008, the NGO working in Loango north carried out a socio-economic survey in the park; a survey that had in fact already been carried out by WWF, according to Blaney et al. (1999). This survey aimed to map areas of activity for the villages inside the park and to re-classify these areas as “terroirs villageois”
(village multi-use zones), in which communities could maintain subsistence activities (ANPN 2009). While this survey could, in theory, be classified as including local communities, it did not provide communities with a platform of expression or any power in relation to the data collected or what the data would be used for. Indeed, one of the survey members told me that the team struggled to “do their job” because villagers kept complaining about crop-raiding and were reluctant to discuss any other topics. The survey clearly did not aim to record local views and issues, but rather to collect data according to the conservation actors’ priorities, which were to define clear areas dedicated to human activities. Finally, due to the technical and logistical support provided by Operation Loango, the local wildlife brigade carried out education sessions about the National Park and the legislation with people from the regroupements in the park and the periphery. However, apparently these sessions did not include any consultation of, or collaboration with, local communities. Instead, conservation actors described them as
“education campaigns”, which stressed control over, rather than inclusion of, local communities’
views and needs. These examples quite clearly demonstrate that behind the discourse of consultation, conservation in Loango neither facilitates consultation with local people nor their inclusion in decision-making processes.
3.3 Community subsistence and conservation
3.3.1 Contrasting views of livelihood
On paper, the subsistence activities of local communities in Loango are protected by legislation and included in the park management plan. As mentioned earlier, the management plan proposes the creation of terroirs villageois within which local communities will be able to continue their traditional subsistence activities (ANPN 2009). In theory, these activities will be regulated through a contract, defined in collaboration with local communities. This contract
Neumann (1997) warns us that the use of the term “traditional” is dangerous as it is imbedded in a Western notion of “non-western primitivism”, which precludes changes for the society under its constraints. Similar trends occur in Loango. When conservation actors use the term
“subsistence”, they often convey a sense of non-market economy, as market economy is construed as leading to over-exploitation of resources. According to this interpretation, farming and fishing should be carried out mostly, if not solely, for household consumption, which is rather restrictive in a society where cash is needed for most aspects of life. The presence of tourism and conservation in Loango lead to a daily display of expatriates and technology (e.g., high technology mobile telephones, cameras, Global Positioning Systems), a tourist lodge with permanent electricity and running water, numerous cars, quad bikes and boats. It seems naïve to believe that these communities will happily pursue a “traditional” way of life, when development in all its forms is within sight daily. Similarly, the creation of new villages and camps will be forbidden in the park unless it follows “rural” criteria, which are undefined in the management plan (ANPN 2009). A clash between development and conservation emerges in the specific context of Loango as exemplified by the following quotes. One informant living inside the park said:
The people from water and forest tell us to use lianas, ropes and cans to protect our field. But that is completely archaic. We cannot move forward with that.
Another informant living in the buffer zone believed that conservation prevents local development purposely:
There are rumours that people from conservation are scared to make a proper road. They are scared that more people will come and do illegal activities in the park. I say it is dangerous, people live here, you shouldn’t condemn them.
Conceptualisation of sustainable livelihoods at different spatio-temporal scales also leads to misunderstanding between conservation actors and local communities. On one side, conservation actors consider conservation challenges at a global scale, and embed local conservation within the global context of biodiversity loss. Conservation actors generally make decisions and conduct research to plan the long-term management of natural resources. For example, the NGO working in Loango surveyed fish-catch to evaluate the sustainability of subsistence fishing in the Ngowé lagoon. From the conservation perspective, this study facilitates quota-setting, which in turn should allow local communities to practice sustainable fishing that could increase livelihood security in the long run. The views of local people inside the park, however, differ consistently from those of the NGO. Local people question the emergency of conservation needs in a place where basic human needs, such as access to food or drinking
water, are not always fulfilled, and where animals and the forest seem to be abundant. Some fishermen believe research is another way in which conservation actors exercise control over their livelihood. Some express severe frustration because they consider that conservation actors should control the intensive fishing with trawlers they believe occurs at the entrance of the lagoon, rather than the dozen small-scale fishermen in the park. The aims of conservation actors do not address the current concerns of the local communities and do not share their priorities.
Hence, communities feel that conservation does nothing to protect their livelihoods.
Despite these differences, a large majority of conservation actors acknowledge the need to work with local communities, and all the actors interviewed believe conservation can help local livelihoods in both the short and long term. In addition, most actors, especially these of Gabonese origin, empathise with community issues and acknowledge that poverty remains the main challenge to communities’ support for conservation. However, the reactions of some conservation actors suggest a less definite position. In a few cases, I heard conservation actors saying that illegal fishermen deserved to go to jail, although this would lead to increased poverty for the fisherman’s family. Similarly, I once heard a conservation actor call all villagers poachers.
Poaching is a grey area and definitions of poaching can vary both between groups (for example conservationists vs. fishermen) and within groups, according to the methods used, the poacher’s origin and the aim of poaching (subsistence vs. commercial) (Hampshire et al. 2004; Bell, Hampshire and Topalidou 2007). The bushmeat market is undoubtedly flourishing in some parts of Gabon (e.g., Coad et al. 2010), and is certainly a threat to wildlife conservation, as it is elsewhere in Africa (Bennett et al. 2007). In Loango, however, most conservation actors claim that subsistence hunting by communities is not a direct threat to wildlife or the park. Different individuals within the same categories of actor can therefore hold divergent views of local people’s impact on wildlife. Different individuals also expressed contradictory opinions over time, shifting from empathy towards farmers to anger when faced with proof of hunting, for example. These anecdotes tell us that while conservation actors view collaboration with local people as necessary, they can hold ambivalent, and even contradictory, opinions and feelings regarding local people and local people’s relationship with nature.
3.3.2 Differing priorities
For most farmers, crop-raiding represents the main challenge to subsistence and to support for
Of course it is, but first, we need to implement law enforcement and make the park run. Then we are seriously concerned about the impact of global warming and invasive species. Human-wildlife conflicts will definitely be tackled, but in the future.
This statement is problematic, as it clearly highlights the fact that local communities’ problems are not seen as a priority by ANPN. In line with this, discussion with the newly appointed écogardes revealed that they did not receive any form of introduction to the management of relationships with local communities, the record of crop-raiding events and crop loss, or possible conflicts during their training. Their training, provided by a conservation NGO, and their description of duties suggest that écogardes are mainly considered, and consider themselves, as conservation police1.
The lack of priority accorded to crop-raiding by ANPN is surprising, as wildlife officials seem to see it as a pressing issue at the national and local level. Most conservation actors in contact with people at the study site said that crop-raiding was their major topic of discussion and source of conflict with local communities. The Director of Fauna and Hunting in Libreville classed crop-raiding, and human-wildlife conflict more generally, as his major issue of concern when we met in 2009. In 2010, the MEF even organised a workshop for the management and resolution of human-wildlife conflict, in collaboration with the FAO, to draw up guidelines to mitigate these conflicts. Despite the obvious call for management of these conflicts, actions in the field remain very rare. The local authorities mostly blamed lack of funds and logistics for this lack of action. The local NGO manager stated that there was insufficient time or money left to work with local communities, due to the need to organise, and support, research and conservation. Logistical constraints are serious in Loango, as communities are scattered and difficult to reach, requiring a dedicated budget and staff to work with them. Ultimately, and despite the widespread recognition that local communities need to be better integrated, the meagre resources allocated to conservation in Loango favour support for natural science research, law enforcement and the questionable education campaigns, over what local people see as a priority.