Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organizations

The Ju/’hoan in Namibia 125
establishing a conservancy surfaced and the
rangers’ role grew.
In mid-1995, the new Nyae Nyae Wildlife
Management Committee held its second meeting,
bringing together MET staff, NNFC representatives,
and the community rangers. MET/LIFE
began to work with the community rangers in a
participatory mapping process that would allow
local people to visualize their resource base,
articulate the names of landmarks in the native
language, and gather knowledge that had been
scattered among individuals and across n!oresi.
This process had several beneficial results. It
allowed MET and the community to develop a
common language to discuss wildlife management
and other issues. MET began to see how
much information the community had to
contribute; perhaps even more important, the
community developed greater self-confidence as
it realized the same thing. Finally, a new set of
tools was being developed and put at the community’s
disposal. In the years ahead, new training
programs would build on the concepts involved.
Project maps would be drawn that used flow diagrams
and problem trees and allowed the board
and the rangers to plan and target research in a
variety of programmatic areas. These “maps,”
too, would have a double-sided benefit. They
would bolster the confidence and authority of the
people who made them, and they would prove to
be valuable in communicating community interests
to outside actors.
By the end of the year, MET policy was crystallizing
around the idea of conservancies, and the idea
was being discussed in Nyae Nyae. The LIFE
advisor acted as a facilitator in these discussions
and in the conservancy planning process that followed.
Facilitation can be defined as “remov[ing]
the impediments to opportunities for people to
learn from themselves and to speak for themselves”
(Murphree 1996). One of the principal
impediments is lack of access to information, and
opening the flow was the first step that had to be
taken. In collaboration with the community
rangers and the NNFC’s natural resources advisor,
the LIFE technical advisor visited a number of villages,
attended district meetings, and spoke to the
NNFC leadership about the conservancy concept
and requirements. The technical advisor also held
sessions for the NNFC leadership to prepare them
to brief the community about a conservancy.
In early 1996 a conservancy workshop and district
meetings, attended by 15 percent of adults and all
the n!ore kxaosi, were held. This coincided with
completion of the second annual performance survey
of NNFC. All these showed that there was
significant support in the community for the management
board, but that the process of institutional
transformation was not yet complete. A survey of
randomly selected community members indicated
that everyone had heard about the efforts to plan
for wildlife management. Although the depth of
understanding varied, this was a marked improvement
over results from the previous year. It was
also clear that the multiple lines of communication
that had been opened were reaching different
groups within the community:
• Community rangers had been particularly
effective in reaching their peers, young men.
• District meetings seemed more effective in
reaching men than women, who made up
less than 40 percent of the participants.
This was not surprising for an open public
forum, but the fact that few attendees
passed information on to members of their
n!ore who did not attend was unexpected.
• Board members seemed to be doing an
adequate job of reporting back to their own
age group, elders. However, they did not
move between villages, so the 55 percent
of n!oresi without a board member only
had access to information through district
meetings and the community rangers.
• People who attended the Representative
Council meetings felt well informed and felt
that they had participated in decision making.
However they, too, did not communicate
results to residents of their n!oresi.
• Young women had the least effective and
most indirect means of learning about
board decisions and were dependent on
information filtering down to them by
word of mouth.
The Board of Management took steps to address
some of these problems. Agreeing that the interests
of women were not adequately included in
the decision-making process, the board decided
to expand its membership to facilitate communication
with women in the community. Each district
would add a representative to bring total