Anthropocene conservation : governing environmental change, biodiversity and local resistance at Mount Elgon, Uganda

This thesis examines the manner in which the global context of anthropogenicenvironmental change influences the nature of conservation governance at one specificprotected area: Mount Elgon National Park (MENP) in Uganda. In doing so, it presentsthree academic papers, each of which tests a widely held assumption in the literature onconservation and development. Utilized methods include semi-structured interviews,focus group discussions, ethnographic observation, content analyses, and archivalresearch. Fieldwork was conducted between July and December 2011 at sites in bothKampala and throughout the Mount Elgon region.Paper I finds that the ‘triple-win’ policy rhetoric of an integrated conservation and carbonoffset project at MENP contradicted management realities both during its tenure and afterits collapse. Although external auditors expected the project to sequester 3.73 milliontons of CO2 equivalent between 1994 and 2034, conflicts forced the scheme to ceasereforestation in 2003. Examining the efficacy of attempts to avoid such conflicts, Paper IIdiscovers enormous inequalities in both the spatial and the temporal distribution of sharedrevenue and other ‘benefits’ redistributed from biodiversity conservation. To highlight asalient example, the worst-off park neighbours received assistance equivalent to only0.0085 USD per district resident over a nine-year period. Consequently, through the lensof ‘guerrilla agriculture’, Paper III examines the strategies that local people employ toprotest the perceived illegitimacy of the policy arrangements that uphold these inequities.It reconstructs nonviolent-symbolic, militant, discursive-representational, and formallegaltypes of resistance, which enable local people to raise monetary incomes, whennecessary, and also to withdraw into subsistence cultivation when terms of trade becomeexploitative or undesirable.Transitioning from diagnosis to prescription, the thesis concludes by offering a set ofrecommendations for addressing the problems outlined in the above papers. Collectively,these recommendations constitute an enforced sustainability approach to conservation atMENP. The model seeks to minimize arbitrary divisions between ‘human’ and‘nonhuman’ territory, and instead emphasizes restricted and sustainable use.Collaborative Resource Management Agreements (CRMAs) form the core of thisapproach, albeit in substantively revised form. These will grant local residents inalienablerights to noncommercial resource access, which are linked to existing customary landtenure, and greater ownership over enforcement processes. Carbon finance andalternative funding mechanisms are also considered, although only in ways that synergizewith customary land tenure and economies. By implementing these measures, it ismaintained that all stakeholders will have achieved progress toward developing a moreequitable model for conservation in the Anthropocene.