The history of conservation in West Africa is often written as a record of loss: wildlife depleted, institutions stretched thin, and well-intended projects undone by conflict or poverty. Less often does it include examples of enduring recovery. When such cases do exist, they tend to rest on compromises that look unorthodox on paper but make sense on the ground. One of those compromises took shape in southern Burkina Faso in the late 1970s and 1980s, at a time when elephants were scarce and hunting had shifted from subsistence to eradication. The idea was simple and, to many specialists, implausible: allow local communities to retain a controlled right to hunt, in exchange for protecting wildlife and habitat. The approach ran against prevailing conservation doctrine. It also ran against the expectations of international development experts, many of whom dismissed it outright. The person who pursued this arrangement despite the skepticism was Clark Lungren, who was raised in what was then Upper Volta and spent most of his life there. When he proposed that villagers who had long depended on hunting should become partners in conservation, he was told the plan would fail. It did not. At Nazinga, a game reserve south of Ouagadougou, wildlife populations rebounded sharply over the following years, including elephants that had all but vanished from the area. Tourism followed. Some of the men employed as wardens and guides were former poachers. Lungren’s authority in such negotiations did not come from formal credentials. He did not hold a university…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via this RSS feed