World Bank Experience in Community Conservancy as a Social Development Movement in Namibia

naMibia

over 40 percent of Namibia’s land area is under a conservation regime, the most interesting of which is the communal conservancy, an institutional arrangement that gives local communities property rights over commercial utilization of wildlife and other resources. The 71 community conservancies now support 25 percent of the rural population and greatly contribute to the growing wildlife populations in Namibia, which include the largest population of free-roaming black rhinos, the only growing population of free-roaming lions, and others.

These conservancies have also enabled communities to more easily form joint ventures with commercial enterprises (primarily for tourism, but also enterprises that make commercial use of indigenous plants), which have generated income and other economic benefits for remote rural communities. Their formation has become a social development movement as well as an accepted and holistic approach to conservation.

With the U.S. Agency for International Development’s LIFE Program, the World Bank and the GEF have provided support to conservancies for participatory land use planning, development, and extension of community wildlife management and monitoring. Through the program, communities are provided incentives to manage and use resources in sustainable and productive ways to reduce deforestation, land degradation, and biodiversity loss. This support has facilitated the strategic introduction of wildlife in conservancies with low game densities and diversified income-generation opportunities to increase nonfinancial benefits and new income to households.

The project supported community-based integrated ecosystem management practices in 16 conservancies, covering a total area of 38,595 km.2 The project’s overall impacts are numerous, particularly in terms of the participatory management of the conservancies, the conservation and sustainable utilization of biodiversity, and the improved livelihood of local communities.

In addition, the project put a legal framework in place and built human capacity by incorporating integrated ecosystem management into the national program. It also created enabling conditions to link economic incentives with environmental management and wildlife conservation through strengthened ownership at the local level.

Between 2005 and 2009, the total revenues for all the conservancies— including cash (salaries, jobs from the tourism sector, and various payments) and proceeds from other sources (such as meat sold and consumed and plants utilized and sold)—increased substantially from US$1.4 million to US$3.5 million (NACSO 2010). Also, the increase in the number of registered conservancies established since the start (from a baseline of 42 in 2005 to 59 in 2010) indicates that the community-based natural resource management initiative has grown in popularity over the years at both the national and international levels.

The program in Namibia has already demonstrated the effectiveness of devolving management authority over wildlife to landholders as a conservation mechanism. Still, to enhance conservation efforts, more effort is needed to improve community coordination and management of conflicts between people and wildlife.

Web site: www.worldbank.org