Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organizations

126 The Ju/’hoan in Namibia
board membership to 5 women and 12 men.
Since the Representative Council meetings
seemed to involve in decision making only the 70
or so people attending them, the board decided it
would be better to hold the meeting once rather
than twice yearly, and to use the savings to
engage more community members directly. An
annual general meeting, open to all residents,
would be held each May or June. 4
None of these procedural steps, however,
addressed lingering doubts in the community
about the proposal for a conservancy. Most
people had responded positively, but some
feared that the idea was a ruse to expand the
game reserve and evict local people. An
exchange visit in March 1996 that allowed
NNFC leadership and rangers to talk to the people
implementing the CAMPFIRE Program, a
similar effort in Zimbabwe, proved to be an
important turning point.
The most encouraging lesson was that the
CAMPFIRE Program had a five-year track
record of providing benefits from game management
that local residents were using for projects
they had identified as priorities. As one
Zimbabwean told a Namibian counterpart, “We
also didn’t believe the program would work. We
didn’t think we could trust the Department of
National Parks and didn’t understand how we
would benefit. Now we have a community center,
a small store, and an electric fence to protect
our crops from elephants. The elephants are paying
for our development.” The Ju/’hoan visitors
were also impressed with the participatory planning
of the various CAMPFIRE projects, and
agreed to undertake a similar planning effort in
their own community to identify its priorities.
While the apparent success of CAMPFIRE was
reassuring, some of the things they saw and heard
raised concern among the Namibians. Most
importantly, they wondered about the lack of feedback
channels between decision makers on management
committees and the community at large.
Community meetings were not apparent, and
many residents complained about being uninformed.
The fact is that the communities, including
the decision makers, were excluded from some
information channels. The Department of
National Parks, for example, controlled wildlife
monitoring and set the quotas. The Ju/’hoan
became more convinced than ever of the importance
of community rangers. Unless they completed
their patrols thoroughly and transmitted the
results accurately, the Ju/’hoan would lack the
independent information needed to make management
decisions and convince others to honor them.
When they returned home, NNFC leaders took
their message to the community in a series of local
meetings. There they attested to their belief that
the conservancy was the right path to follow, and
through the new structures of communication the
community gave them the go-ahead to proceed.
3.3 The Community as Effective
Stakeholder (1996–1998)
The LIFE Program had taken an “empowerment”
approach to participation by the Ju/’hoan for two
interrelated reasons. First, the community could
not manage its resources over the long-term without
effective organization. Second, it would not
get the opportunity to do so unless it could alter
the prevailing pattern that favored the concentration
of power in the hands of external actors.
Aided by the change in legislation, it became possible
to move forward on both fronts. Establishing
a conservancy would require the community to
demonstrate it could formulate a management plan
and had the means to carry it out. In doing so it
would begin the process of realigning power relations
so that the Ju/’hoan were on more equal
footing with the other stakeholders in the area.
Parliament set the bar for establishing a conservancy
and specified requirements that had to be
met (Aribeb 1996). There had to be clear physical
boundaries that neighbors accepted and
respected. The people living within the conservancy
had to define its membership, and there
had to be a plan for equitable distribution of
benefits. A representative body, accountable to
the community, had to be in charge of running
the conservancy, and it had to demonstrate commitment
to and capacity for sustainable wildlife
management. Before a conservancy could be
legally established, MET had to certify an offtake
quota, and the governor of the region had to
approve the boundaries.
To prepare the ground for final approval, the
LIFE Program pursued two strategies. First, both
directly and by supporting the efforts of the institutional
consultant, the program provided skills,