Tobias Haller - The Contested Floodplain: Institutional Change of the Commons in the Kafue Flats, Zambia

Foreword

Almost a hundred years ago, Edwin Smith and A. Murray Dale published The Ila-Speaking People of Northern Rhodesia (1920). This quickly became a classic among ethnographic studies. Since then various anthropologists have done research in Ila territory leaving us little the wiser although three produced unpublished PhD dissertations and three (one of whom did not write a dissertation) published a number of articles. We have had to wait a long time for another full length study of the Ila who pasture their large herds of cattle on the floodplain known as the Kafue Flats. Tobias Hallers The Contested Floodplain is likely to become another classic but one that speaks to a much larger audience including those alarmed at what is happening to environments throughout the world, for Haller is concerned with how changes in resource management due to ideologies that underlie public policy reverberate throughout a natural regime.

The Kafue floodplain is one of the worlds treasured wetland areas. It is famous for its herds of lechwe, buffalo, wildebeest, water buck and zebra, and for its fish as well as for the diversity of its bird life. All this is now under threat. Haller shows how the Flats have been transformed since the Ila lost control of their territory, first to the colonial government of Northern Rhodesia and then, after 1964, to the government of independent Zambia, as the Flats were invaded by outsiders intent on exploiting its rich resources of game and fish, which had become valuable commodities in markets serving growing urban areas, whom the Ila were now powerless to regulate or expel. Whereas once local leaders controlled access to resources, regulating who could use and when and with what methods, now the central government preempts the right to regulate both access and usage but gives priority to the interests of powerful external actors. It, however, has neither the resources nor the will to control poaching or encroachment on pasture lands. As a result, the Ila who once lived well from the land now often go hungry.

Throughout the world local community control over land and natural resources is being challenged by powerful interests who claim that only private ownership can lead to effective development of resources, that local communities are unable to regulate usage resources they hold in common and so individuals have no incentive to husband or improve resources, and thus common ownership leads inevitably to resource degradation. This view is epitomized in Hardins 1968 paper The Tragedy of the Commons now often cited to justify the transfer of land and other assets to private investors. But as Haller points out this thesis fails to square with what in fact happens. He provides an illuminating study of how local controls over what he calls common pool resources were subverted and how this in turn impacted land usage and led to the deterioration of the Kafue floodplain, its waters and its adjacent woodlands, its fisheries, game, and other resources. As he shows, common property in the Kafue floodplain did not mean that everyone could use resources when and how he or she pleased. Resources belonged to a community until they were harvested when often they became private property. Until that point, the community decided how its members should use them and whether or not to admit outsiders whose use was only tolerated if it conformed to local expectations. If necessary it responded forcefully against invasive outsiders.

In the twenty-first century, central governments throughout Africa (although often unable to provide essential services for their people, including security of life and property) are courting international investors who together with local political elite obtain land for tourist facilities such as game parks, lumbering, mines, ranches, and large farms that cater to foreign tourists and to export markets fueled by the international demand for metals, oil, biofuels, cotton, flowers, and food. Often they act with the encouragement of the great international agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Those already occupying desirable lands under so-called communal tenure are told to stand aside in the interests of national economic development from which they often gain little. This today is the real tragedy of the commons: those who depend upon them for their livelihoods are unable to protect them from exploitation or prevent land grabs carried out by large-scale investors encouraged by central governments that claim both ownership and stewardship of their countries resources and have the political power to back up such claims with force.

Elizabeth Colson, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

Chapter One

Introduction

The Role of Institutions in the Management of Common Pool Resources

I can tell you that in olden days we were not fishing anyhow! We had rules and regulations.

Headman in Chiefdom Hamusonde, Kafue Flats, Zambia

Mainstream debates on environmental issues dealing with overuse of renewable natural resources, still show a remarkable tendency to focus on only the way local people use resources at a certain moment, without referring to historical, political, and social-institutional background information. This is in contradiction to the important debate on political ecology, initiated more than two decades ago by Blaikie and Brookfield (1987), which has led to a different tendency within ecological thought (from Zimmerer to Biersack and Escobar; see Zimmerer and Basset 2003) and in much of the work published in journals such as Human Ecology, Society and Natural Resources, Development and Change and others). Although Elinor Ostroms Nobel prize for her groundbreaking work on institutions does help to open eyes as to how and why resource management leads to sustainable or unsustainable use of common pool resources, state administrators and international organizations continue to doubt local capacities and tend to focus on deficiencies instead. As a result, they uphold the ideology of pure nature and the discourse on conservation. This is in contrast to views of the local people, as the quotation at the beginning of this chapter illustrates: it shows that there is a local discourse and that people are aware of the historical changes that have taken place in resource management. The quotation also illustrates the discourse of blame which has been identified by many scholars working in conservation areas (Adams 1990; Neumann 1998; Brockington 2002; Galvin and Haller 2008; Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008): Colonial debates on resource use focused on mismanagement and led to early conservationist measures, implemented without the involvement of local people and with the clear notion that the environment they saw was pure nature and not the result of local resource use and maintenance (see Ellen 1982; Neumann 1998; Escobar 1999; Haller 2007a; 2007b; for an overview, see Haller and Galvin 2008a, 2008b; Haller 2010b). Although there has been a subtle paradigm shift, leading to approaches of comanagement or community management (Hulme and Murphree 2001; Haller and Galvin 2008a, 2008b), the dominant discourse has been biased since colonial times by the view that local people in so-called Third World countries, and particularly in Africa, are at the centre of the problem. Or to put it polemically: While white men in Africa are considered hunters, Africans are regarded as poachers. Similarly, forests were and still are viewed as under threat from a growing population and the required expansion in agricultural production. This notion overlooked that forests in countries such as Guinea, Western Africa, have to be seen as cultural landscapes, which evolved the way they did as a result of human intervention (see Fairhead and Leach 1996). Many other authors argue in the same way (see Ellen 1982; Neumann 1998; Haller 2007a; 2007b; Brookington, Igoe, and Duffy 2008; Haller and Galvin 2008b). Most of these analyses draw attention to the colonial bias, which was still prevalent among resource use planners until the 1990 and could experience a revival after 15 years of unsuccessful participatory approaches.