Abstract
ABSTRACTStudies have shown how centralized institutions in resource management lead to adverse impacts on communities. However, important questions remain about the mechanisms through which people thrive under unfavorable policy environments. This paper examines how locals around the Mount Cameroon National Park (MCNP) carve space for articulating their agency despite unsympathetic management initiatives. Using focus group discussions and thematic analysis of data from 17 villages, the results identified arrangements that do not entirely solicit local consent in natural resource management. In this context, locals express their agency holding onto cultural traditions through religious engagement and the use of economic incentives to enhance livelihoods. They do so with the aid of traditional institutions, awareness of system challenges, acting more wisely, and initiating constructive needs in remote areas.
Highlights
Implementing conservation policies for natural resource management requires a proper inclusion of indigenous/local people who hold local knowledge, i.e. experiences adapted to the local culture and environment, embedded in community practices, institutions, rituals and relationships, that change over time (FAO 2019)
We find the case of Mount Cameroon National Park (MCNP) and adjacent communities significant because, given that UN protocols promote biodiversity conservation in ways that should properly include local/indigenous people in decision-making, the regime in this case, implements natural resource management in ways that seem antagonistic to cultural heritage
Agency is not always overt action or active community engagement to change something, but, includes practices of alternative behavior on the part of local people. We explore this explanation based on collective agency – a concept where behavior is due to discontent against an undesirable management system, and, how economic benefits and religious tradition justify the behavior of local people
Summary
Implementing conservation policies for natural resource management requires a proper inclusion of indigenous/local people who hold local knowledge, i.e. experiences adapted to the local culture and environment, embedded in community practices, institutions, rituals and relationships, that change over time (FAO 2019) Such knowledge is integral to resource use practices, held by societies that have a long history of interaction with their natural surroundings, which is crucial for decision-making (UNESCO 2017). Both frameworks advocate for the social inclusion of indigenous/local people in development that might have an environmental, social, and cultural impact on local communities These legalities have often not lived up to expectations when state institutions apply policy initiatives for resource management at national and local levels of society (Hirsenberger et al 2019; Markkula, Turunen, and Kantola 2019; Owuor, Icely, and Newton 2019; Ramcilovic-Suominen 2019; Sen and Pattanail 2019; Sloan et al 2019). Without a critical study of these antagonistic processes, we risk extending the difficulties communities face in resource management
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