The Political Ecology of Poverty Alleviation in Zimbabwe's Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources CAMPFIRE) B

Geoforum 33 2002) 1±14 www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum The political ecology of poverty alleviation in Zimbabwe's Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources CAMPFIRE) B. Ikubolajeh Logan a, William G. Moseley b a Department of Geography, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-2502, USA b Department of Geography, Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL 60115-2854, USA Received 13 November 2000; in revised form 25 June 2001 Abstract The CAMPFIRE program in Zimbabwe is one of a `new breed' of strategies designed to tackle environmental management at the grassroots level. CAMPFIRE aims to help rural communities to manage their resources, especially wildlife, for their own local development. The program's central objective is to alleviate rural poverty by giving rural communities autonomy over resource management and to demonstrate to them that wildlife is not necessarily a hindrance to arable agriculture, ``but a resource that could be managed and `cultivated' to provide income and food''. In this paper, we assess two important elements of CAMPFIRE: poverty alleviation and local empowerment and comment on the program's performance in achieving these highly interconnected objectives. We analyze the program's achievements in poverty alleviation by exploring tenurial patterns, resource ownership and the allocation of proceeds from resource exploitation; and its progress in local empowerment by examining its administrative and decision making structures. We conclude that the program cannot eectively achieve the goal of poverty alleviation without ®rst addressing the administrative and legal structures that underlie the country's political ecology. Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Political ecology; Poverty alleviation; Community-empowerment; CAMPFIRE 1. Introduction sorship of the country's Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management DNPWLM with a focus on Over the past few decades, rural-based, grassroots game management), the World Wildlife Fund with a programs GRPs) have become increasingly popular in focus on resource conservation), the Zimbabwe Trust the Third World. These community-based enterprises an NGO, with a focus on rural development), and the have gained impetus in the 1990s from ecotourism and University of Zimbabwe Center for Applied Social Sci- the global environmental movement and its associated ence with a primary interest in policy research) Mur- international conferences, especially Rio, the 1992 phree, 1997). CAMPFIRE is one of the most celebrated United Nations Conference on Environment and De- of its genre because of its perceived success in taking velopment cf. Ahmed and Doeleman, 1995). GRPs aim policy and its rewards `to the people' Metcalf, 1994; to encourage local communities to engage in sustainable Camp®re Collaborative Group, 1991; CASS, WWF, resource management for their own direct as opposed ZimTrust, 1989; CASS, 1998). The program aspires to to national) economic development. In this sense, GRPs reduce rural poverty by convincing local communities are, ®rst and foremost, poverty alleviation programs that wildlife is an economic asset rather than an im- that are underpinned by a conservation philosophy. pediment to agricultural production. Its de®nition of Zimbabwe's Communal Areas Management Pro- agriculture, therefore, compares arable cultivation, cat- gramme for Indigenous Resources CAMPFIRE) is a tle rearing and wildlife management as economic alter- GRP established in 1989 under the direction and spon- natives vying for the use of the same scarce land and water resources. CAMPFIRE approaches wildlife management both E-mail addresses: [email protected] B.I. Logan), moseley@geog. as an antidote for rural poverty and as a proactive niu.edu W.G. Moseley). mechanism for redressing the negative economic im- 0016-7185/01/$ - see front matter Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 7 1 8 5 0 1 ) 0 0 027-6 2 B.I. Logan, W.G. Moseley / Geoforum 33 02002) 1±14 pacts of environmental crises like droughts. The pro- Broch-Due and Schroeder, 2000). A number of recent gram is guided by three fundamental principles towards political ecology studies speci®cally examine land tenure these ends: i) wildlife is an agricultural resource and issues and human±wildlife interactions in eastern and game management may be perceived as a form of agri- southern Africa e.g., Shivji, 1998; Neumann, 1999; Igoe culture; ii) tensions should not exist between arable and Brockington, 1999). agriculture and game management since scarce re- Our approach to poverty alleviation is restricted to sources are being allocated to the best economic alter- the program's stated objective to increase rural food native; iii) game management can be a complement to access. In this sense, poverty alleviation may be assessed arable agriculture and vice versa, ipso facto, there by comparing household income from food crop har- should be no con¯ict between the economic survival of vests and game management household revenues ob- agricultural communities and the foraging needs of tained directly from the program). Admittedly, wildlife cf. Murphree, 1993, 1997). households are likely also to gain bene®ts from com- General perception that CAMPFIRE has successfully munity-wide projects. However, the longer term bene®ts put these principles into practice has led to widespread of rural education and health projects are beyond the scrutiny of its implementation strategies, performance scope of this study. record, impacts on rural communities, and possible The rest of the discussion in this paper is in three transferability to other African countries with similar sections. After presenting a brief background to the resources see, for example, Derman, 1991; King, 1994; program in Section 2, we use Section 3 to assess our Hill, 1996; Metcalf, 1994; Wunder, 1997; Dix, 1996; initial proposition by outlining the political ecology of CASS, 1998; Patel, 1998). We attempt to contribute to poverty, ®rst from a general conceptual perspective, and this general discourse by contemplating upon the im- second with speci®c reference to rural food access under pacts of the program on poverty alleviation and com- CAMPFIRE. 1 In Section 4, we discuss CAMPFIRE's munity empowerment. We frame this broad objective in limitations at poverty alleviation by drawing attention terms of the working proposition that certain design and to two problems: i) design shortcomings related to the administrative weaknesses of CAMPFIRE limit its de®nition of the community of resource owners; ii) ability to redress problems of resource autonomy and, implementation shortcomings related a) to failures in therefore, to tackle eectively the political ecology of the legal transformation of state resources to commons rural poverty in Zimbabwe. resources, and b) to administrative bottlenecks that This study is based largely on a critical review of the undermine local autonomy in resource management. literature, including the synthesis of a number of case studies of speci®c CAMPFIRE programs. This analysis is supplemented by information from over 160 semi- 2. Background to CAMPFIRE structured interviews that were conducted by the second author in 1996 with villagers and civil servants in 25 of One of the more robust features of CAMPFIRE is Zimbabwe's 50 districts) in order to understand the seen to be its local, Zimbabwean origin. As noted by Zimbabwean rural economy Earl and Moseley, 1996). Murphree 1997, p. 1) `its initial conception was in a The CAMPFIRE program was often discussed within government agency and not by ``NGOs'' and their al- the context of these interviews in areas of the country lies;... and its implementation has had a high degree of where the programme was active. heterogeneity'. There is sucient evidence to indicate We contextualize political ecology in Zimbabwe in that the program's original conception aspired to true terms of the historical, administrative and legal struc- bottom-up planning with a focus on community input tures that relegate the poor to marginal areas, and the and autonomy. This objective apparently emanated legal structures within which CAMPFIRE is being im- from the experiences of an earlier program, Wildlife plemented and which maintain the status quo in re- Industries New Development for All WINDFALL), source distribution and control. Political ecology initiated in 1978 as a conservation strategy by ecologists broadly refers to the political economy of human±en- at the DNPWLM Derman, 1996). WINDFALL's ma- vironment interactions. Bryant and Bailey 1997) note jor goal was to reduce soil degradation in the communal that political ecology helps situate the ®ndings of local areas. The program's poverty alleviation goals were level empirical research in theoretical and comparative subsidiary to its broader environmental concerns. Eco- perspective. Unequal relations between actors are a key nomic bene®ts to rural communities were speci®c to factor in understanding patterns of human±environment minimizing con¯icts between wildlife and local agricul- interaction and associated environmental problems. A ture, increasing the protein intake of villagers by making variety of approaches to political ecology have been discussed in the literature see, for example, Blaikie, 1985; Blaikie and Brook®eld, 1987; Watts, 1987; Basset, 1 Our de®nition of food security is limited to the narrow case of the 1988; Peet and Watts, 1996; Stott and Sullivan, 2000; amount of food harvest with or without

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