History of the CBNRM program
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| W | ildlife and land is sacred to all whose lives are bound so tightly to it. | ||||||||
| For Zambia, both as a nation and as a people, land is what connects its rich | |||||||||
| traditions with the growing economic and social needs of Zambia today. Community-based approaches to managing the land and its resources is culturally acceptable and provides locally supported solutions for both the management of natural resources and rural community development needs. Zambia's protected wildlife estate consists of 18 national parks and 34 surrounding buffer areas (called Game Management Areas, or GMAs). All combined, they cover over 200,000 km2, or approximately 33% of the entire country. This wildlife estate, with its rich biodiversity of 156 species of fish and 190 species of mammals, has become a valuable asset to Zambia's people, especially those communities who have learned to live with these resources for long-term sustained uses through legal markets. This is the primary objective of community-based natural resource management, or CBNRM. | |||||||||
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n the late 1970's Zambians who shared their lands with wildlife had | ||||||||
| no legal way of benefiting from this resource, yet their lives were mired in | |||||||||
| poverty and fraught with hardships. The vast size of protected areas in Zambia and depleted manpower made it impossible for the Zambian government to enforce its wildlife laws and prevent the slaughter that left vast areas of the country depleted of wildlife. | |||||||||
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aws and policies that governed wildlife management prior to 1980 | ||||||||
| largely ignored rural communities and their traditional chiefs, who constituted a | |||||||||
| recognized local authority over resource use. Chiefs and their community members felt that wildlife benefits were not fairly apportioned to them. The crisis of Zambia's vanishing wildlife continued unabated. | |||||||||
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evelopment of Zambia's Wildlife Authority (formerly National | ||||||||
| Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS) raised questions as to why traditional societies | |||||||||
| were excluded from the management of wildlife. Such reflections and concerns gave rise to the program known as the ADmininstrative MAnagement DEsign for GMAs or more simply, ADMADE. It was conceived in 1988 as a result of pilot studies conducted in one of Zambia's GMA called Lupande and represented the beginning of devolution of power from Government to rural-based community authorities. | |||||||||
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and surrounding National parks are given special status called | ||||||||
| Game Management Areas and within these areas traditional communities reside. | |||||||||
| As the ADMADE program developed and demonstrated the strong traditional interest by communities for participating in the management of natural resources, Government began to recognize the enormous impact that ADMADE could have in protecting wildlife in Zambia. Unfortunately, ADMADE was not without problems, most of which were related to policy conflicts governing resource use rights and levels of authority by local chiefs in dictating how resource use benefits should benefit community members. | |||||||||
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f guided by the right incentives, skills and customs, people living | ||||||||
| as communities can often "do" conservation better than institutional agencies | |||||||||
| because of their closeness and intimate knowledge of the land. Zambia's rural communities living in GMAs are no exception. They represent a diverse heritage of customary land ethics and land use practices that are recognized and assimilated in the ADMADE approach to resource management. Support of ADMADE by the Zambian government has provided unique opportunities to explore and re-evaluate conservation methodologies that are community-based and Afro-centric, and apply key lessons to the need for democratic leadership in conservation. | |||||||||
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rom 1984 to 1988 Zambia's (then) NPWS undertook a pilot scheme | ||||||||
| in Lupande Game Management Area, to work out and test administrative designs | |||||||||
| that allowed
community leadership to support conservation in their area. Results
included dramatic reductions in poaching, positive shifts in public attitudes
toward conservation, and improved community relations with wildlife tourist
operators. Government molded these lessons learned into
a national program, ADMADE, in 1988.
There were a number of key threats that prompted Government to help spearhead ADMADE's development:
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merging over the next ten years were many important experiences | ||||||||
| and lessons that ADMADE provided to CBNRM policy development in Zambia. | |||||||||
| One of the key lessons was to organize communities into democratically elected structures for managing resources and allocating their benefits to household-level needs. In 1999 the new Wildlife Act incorporated these lessons into its policy. Key policy components included the establishment of village Community Resource Boards (CRB's), CRB Committee's and Village Area Groups (VAG's). | |||||||||
