Land Use Plans:
Community land use plans define a community's commitment to their natural resources and now they wish to benefit from these resources
To be effective, land use plans act as local laws communities impose on themselves to protect their natural resources from possible abuse by ignorant or selfish people in the community. A land use plan also serves to both educate and punish, but it requires strong leadership with fair judgment to help all community members understand the need to use resources carefully so as to reduce these abuses.
The College has worked closely with a number of Community Resource Boards to help local leaders appreciate land use planning as an annual exercise that provides increased understanding to the causes of resource abuses like snaring and bushfires. As a public process, land use planning also provides CRB leaders with the important opportunity of reminding residents of their responsibilities in supporting and even helping enforce land use plans. Land use planning involves many people in the community and seeks their opinions of what resource use conflicts exist, thinking of possible causes, and developing appropriate solutions. It therefore draws heavily on the knowledge of local residents as opposed to expensive inputs from external consultants.
| Members of the Resource Management Committee and other trained residents in resource management skills facilitate meetings in each of the CRB Village Area Groups to consult with residents on issues and views for ways to reduce human disturbances. From such meetings people often explain how their own problems of poverty are contributing to resource use conflicts. Through such public meetings important decisions regarding... | ||
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| ...community-imposed restrictions on certain land use practices and community development needs that require VAG support to reduce the causes of land use conflicts. These resolutions are finalized into a community land use plan for the entire game management area. The map above shows each of the VAG areas and their respective village settlements for two CRBs: Chitungulu (green) and Kazembe (red). | ||
The College has facilitated the training of local leaders to administer and lead this planning process. From this experience it has realized that the level of complexity and thoroughness to land use plans will evolve over time as local leaders gain experience in analyzing cause and effect relationships between land use conflicts and household livelihood needs. To facilitate this, continued mentorship by the College is required to help develop these skills. Another challenge is to ensure the excellent ideas and resolutions that emerge from a land use planning process is carefully documented, disseminated and explained to all residents by their elected leaders. Requirements for paper and printing are usually not available in rural communities and the College has played a pivotal role in offering secretariat services to the printing of these community documents, both in English and in local language dialects, and in sufficient supply to enable all villages to have multiple copies.
The documents themselves are usually short, averaging about 10 pages with maps that illustrate where land use decisions apply or where land use conflicts were identified. A collection of community-based land use plans developed through the ADMADE program is provided in the next section: Research Papers. These documents provide the basis for the CRB and its RMC and Unit Manager to prescribe an annual Resource Management Plan, which provides specific activities and targets intended to support the community's Land Use Plan. After about three years, the CRB then calls for another land use planning exercise in which all the VAGs participate, facilitated by the Unit Manager and the RMC, to develop a new set of resolutions that will respond to new issues and problems affecting their land.
KEY Lesson Community developed and driven land use plans is an important way to reduce land use conflicts threatening natural resources in a communal area. They require committed and qualified leadership to be successful as well as full support by the Patron, who traditionally administers land use decisions for his subjects.
KEY Lesson: Land use plans have proven highly beneficial for resolving such problems as too many fishing camps in tourism sensitive areas, unnecessary tree-cutting for collecting honey, regulating the number of fishermen in an area, reducing rates of snaring, resettling households in areas critical for wildlife, and so forth. All of these achievements were self-imposed and self-policed in order to increase revenues from CBNRM initiatives.
KEY Lesson: Maps provide an important basis for local leaders as well as ordinary residents to visualize land use needs and decisions.
