Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organizations

132 The Ju/’hoan in Namibia
groups of collaborating n!oresi could then form
the basis of village associations. This would
build on the traditional networks for managing
common resources. One or more members of the
board could represent these “n!oresi associations.”
Current board members would probably
remain—the change would be in the extent of
area covered and number of people to whom they
must report.
5.6 Outsiders have an important role to play
as facilitators of community analysis and
decision making, and as brokers between
the community and other stakeholders.
The facilitative role of LIFE’s technical advisor
for community-based natural resource management
was crucial to the development of the Nyae
Nyae Conservancy. Underlying this role was a
commitment to the community’s inherent right to
plan, manage, and benefit from their resource use.
The community learned from mistakes and
adjusted its program accordingly. The outside
organization played an important role in undertaking
independent annual assessments and assisting
the community with analyzing the issues and
developing possible solutions. But facilitators
must consciously recognize the potential dangers
of inadvertently co-opting the community to the
facilitator’s point of view rather than sparking the
development of the community’s own ideas. Cooption
can too easily subvert rather than support
community-based conservation.
The goal is to prepare the community to participate
in authentic partnerships. An authentic partnership
has four qualities: mutual trust, transparency, reciprocity,
and accountability. Both parties must
know that promises will be honored, and this must
be demonstrated over time. Agendas must be
clearly stated; sources of funding, allocations,
monitoring and evaluation reports, and other pertinent
information must be shared. Neither party
should impose a condition on the other that it is
unwilling to undertake itself. Finally, partners
must agree on procedures by which they will be
held responsible for their actions.
LIFE thought of partnership in two ways. The
first involved its own relationship with the community
in building strong and flexible representative
institutions. The LIFE Program played a
critical role in facilitating community-level discussions
of the key issues in order to identify solutions
(Jones 1996b). Providing the community
with an annual independent assessment and then
facilitating their analysis and integration of the
results into project management was key to building
skills in problem solving, gender analysis,
institutional development, and strategic planning.
LIFE also facilitated training and helped the community
hire and learn how to manage the technical
assistance it needed, based on the belief that previous
low levels of participation in decision making
stemmed from the community’s lack of skills and
knowledge. Care was taken to make sure that the
community set the pace so that facilitation did not
mutate into a patron-client relationship in which
the community took a secondary position as the
“less skilled, less informed” partner.
As the community found its own voice, attention
turned to helping it become an effective partner
with other stakeholders in resource management.
This would eventually involve other actors, but
the key early relationship was with MET. The
LIFE technical advisor acted as a broker in the
evolving relationship. Experience has shown that
for an authentic partnership to form, all stakeholders
must recognize the community’s right to
participate in decision making. So a key early
decision was to narrow the focus of the
NNWMC to wildlife issues within Nyae Nyae.
As a result, the stakeholders were limited to
MET staff, subsequently including the
Directorate of Forestry, and the NNFC, represented
by its board and the community rangers.
By limiting the topics and thereby the interest
groups, it was easier to reach concrete decisions
and implement them. Generally LIFE’s technical
advisor would meet with NNFC representatives
before the NNWMC meeting to help them plan
strategy, prepare discussion points, and decide
what they believed was or was not negotiable.
During the meetings, the advisor helped each
side see the other’s position, understand the motivations
behind it, and develop a mutually understandable
language for seeing the big picture and
bringing issues and solutions into focus.
To ensure that the community could participate
fully, meetings were scheduled whenever possible
in Nyae Nyae since MET headquarters in the
capital city is a hard eight-hour drive away. That
placed a burden on MET, which is also often