Terrain of "how's": community based conservation in practice

April 8, 2019
By Bethlehem Abebe

Community based conservation (CBC) presents the rhetoric of people-centered, inclusive and participatory approach to conservation in attaining the dual goals of resource protection and rural development. In practice however, CBC programs show mixed outcomes in effectiveness, confronted by complex social and ecological contextual factors. The implementation of CBC programs in Ethiopia is a more recent phenomenon. There is limited assessment of different forms of community-based conservation interventions, including how these different approaches have been implemented and the types of outcomes they are achieving.

The Bale Mountains region has recently grown to become a hotspot for collaborative and community-based conservation initiatives. As the push for CBC programs rises in the Bale Mountains and other parts of Ethiopia, there is an increasing need for evidence-based conservation that closely examines how and under what conditions CBC approaches work. To this end, my dissertation research focuses on examining the effects of CBC programs on social and environmental outcomes in the Bale Mountains, Ethiopia.

I had conducted my first trip to the Bale Mountains in the summer of 2018, where I was introduced to different CBC initiatives, held meetings with practioners from government and non-government conservation organizations, as well as different community groups. The goal of the first field trip was to establish relationships, better understand the conditions under which different conservation programs operate and co-design relevant research questions in collaboration with stakeholders working on the ground.

Based on the information obtained and the lessons learnt from the scoping field trip, I am focusing my research on an assessing the implementation processes and short-term outcomes of a new joint controlled hunting area (CHA) program in the Bale Mountains. The program employs two main mechanisms to link conservation goals with local community's well-being. One is direct payments from conservation gains from hunting fees in return for desired conservation behavior while the second mechanism involves sharing of power and decision-making processes with organized community groups.

In January 2019, I conducted a three-week long field trip to two hunting areas in Bale Mountains. The goal was to collect qualitative data from focus group discussions with community groups to get in-depth contextual data on relevant indicators of social equity, conservation attitudes, and behavior. I selected four communities from the two hunting areas. Between January 11th and 18th 2019, I conducted a total of 15 focus group discussions with different age and gender groups of the community as well as community leaders in Abasheba Demro and Besmena Udubulu CHAs.

The focus group discussions shed important light on the factors behind the progresses made as well as the challenges encountered so far in implementing the programs across different communities. These findings highlight normative issues of equity, differences in power, access to benefits, and tradeoffs resulting from conservation interventions.

Using these results, I am developing a peer-reviewed paper that provides a rich description of the contextual variables and processes affecting community's perception of the conservation program. I am also using the findings from the focus group discussion in informing the design of surveys for the second phase of the research that assesses the generalizability of results across different socio-demographic groups.

I will provide periodic progress reports and a compiled final report of this research in the form of a policy brief to the organizations implementing the program. By providing an assessment of implementation processes and short-term impacts of the new community-based CHA program, this research informs the management, monitoring and long-term evaluation of the CBC program that is mainly based on mountain nyala trophy hunting. Furthermore, at the of the end of the study, I will organize a consultative workshop to present my findings with Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority, Oromia Forest and Wildlife Enterprise, Frankfurt Zoological Society, Farm Africa, and community representatives. The workshop will serve as a platform to bring together relevant stakeholders and discuss collaborative conservation approaches in light of my findings.

The final practical conservation output of this research is improving the conservation status of endangered and endemic mountain nyala and its broader habitat range. Through the inclusion of diverse and grounded community perspectives on the CHA program, this research informs effective program design, implementation and upscaling of the CBC programs in the Bale Mountains and beyond.