Walia Special Edition on the Bale Mountains (2011) - Zoologische ...

of wild animals (Stephens et al. 2000) 6 . However, the system fell apart with the collapse of the Derg
government in 1991. The fall of Derg regime was followed by severe reprisals against protection
based conservation; local people killed local wildlife populations7 , destroyed infrastructure and
threatened to burn Park property.
Post-1991, the early protectionist enforcement efforts have been replaced by a period of
ineffective management. This has, in turn, led to hand wringing, and wildlife and conservation
policy revision and institutional re-organization. Despite debates on the importance of conservation,
biodiversity and species endemism, continued constraints8 to efficient and effective protected area
systems have prevailed. The result has been a policy and conservation action vacuum, with little
coordinated field level action taking place.
Thirdly, is the conservation sector’s inability to change or adapt to the realities and challenges
that face protected areas. And finally, over the past fifteen years the sector has been hampered
by limited human and financial resources, poor leadership, and poor management capacity. These
combined factors have limited the conservation sector’s ability to establish an effective protected
area system in Ethiopia.
As previously mentioned, the situation outside of the proposed National Park boundaries, in
terms of land use, has also been one of rapid change and population growth. As such, the pressures
on the Park’s natural resources have been increased by an effectively open access land use situation
across the whole Bale landscape. Open access meaning that, as a result of ineffective management
since 1991, the residents of the national Park have expanded their agricultural land, and Park
neighboring people practiced unregulated seasonal livestock grazing and forest coffee management
- more or less unabated and as they please.
Although there is a general awareness of land use categories in Bale; the National Park,
Regional Forest Priority Areas (forest reserves), local people have chanced expansion of new land,
and when that expansion has gone unchallenged. The national Park residents continued with sense
of insecure land use rights, they lack incentive to invest in regulated natural resource use and also
lack power to exclude other from doing so. Although no studies have been carried out in a wider
scale, it is generally thought that forest land and grazing land around the National Park has been
converted to agricultural land due to lack of effective land administration and land management
systems.
6 For example, the mountain nyala population grew at rates of >20% per annum, both due to births and immigration,
during this period.
7 The Mountain Nyala populations around Dinsho, an Ethiopian Endemic, suffered significant losses.
8 Repeated policy change, poor coordination, poor leadership and management capacity, institutional instability
and reduced staffing and budget.
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