25 September 2009
Social Impacts of Forest Conservation
Part 6 of podcast series on U.S.-African development partnerships
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Narrator:
Today, the U.S State Department’s CO.NX podcasting team presents part six of our crowdsourced podcast series on development partnerships between the United States and Africa.
Today, the social impacts of forest conservation. Joining us is John Flynn, Director of USAID’s Central African Regional Program for the Environment, also known as CARPE.
President Obama:
We must start from the simple premise that Africa's future is up to Africans.
I say this knowing full well the tragic past that has sometimes haunted this part of the world. After all, I have the blood of Africa within me, and my family's — (applause) — my family's own story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs of the larger African story.
But despite the progress that has been made — and there has been considerable progress in many parts of Africa — we also know that much of that promise has yet to be fulfilled. Countries like Kenya had a per capita economy larger than South Korea's when I was born. They have badly been outpaced. Disease and conflict have ravaged parts of the African continent.
Narrator:
When President Obama spoke in Accra, Ghana, on July 11, good governance was one of four important areas he addressed with the Ghanaian parliament. But where does good governance begin? Obama said in Cairo, Egypt, a month earlier that each nation gives life to democracy in its own way and in line with its own traditions. But one common theme that applies to all democratic and prosperous countries is strong institutions.
Forest conservation may seem an unlikely place to find the roots of strong democratic institutions. But in Central Africa, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, is bringing together villages, businesses and local governments under agreements for sharing wealth from the forest. These agreements, with proper measures that enforce accountability, are creating the relationships and legal structures needed for strong institutions. As President Obama said in Ghana, improved governance and emerging civil societies are important advances.
President Obama:
This progress may lack the drama of 20th-century liberation struggles, but make no mistake: It will ultimately be more significant. For just as it is important to emerge from the control of other nations, it is even more important to build one's own nation.
Narrator:
The Central African Regional Program for the Environment is an example of how U.S.-African partnerships are helping African nations build a foundation of sustainable economic prosperity — not only for local African communities, but in fact the entire planet. The program’s director, John Flynn, tells us how it’s about more than conserving forests.
John Flynn:
We feel like our program, while we’re promoting it as a conservation program, it’s really much more than a conservation program. Because conservation implies working together for a common objective — sharing wealth. It implies developing systems of governance that will allow that to happen on an equitable basis, and most of all in Africa particularly, and maybe anywhere, but in Africa it’s very obvious: Competition over basic natural resources is at the root of so much conflict. Fighting over gold, diamonds and other kinds of easily accessible wealth, or whether it’s fighting over the right to water one’s cattle in the stream, or whether it’s trampling somebody’s crops with your herd, or whether it’s taking somebody else’s trees to burn for your fuel — it’s the source of almost all types of conflict. So creating a system and building incentives to create the kinds of collaborative work towards common objectives is good not only for the planet, but it’s good to prevent and mitigate and manage conflict and promote good governance. So we have a deliberate part of our program geared exactly towards that. And while we can’t claim massive success, we have several examples of where we’ve helped facilitate agreements between different groups on how to use a certain forest. We have created other agreements between communities and logging companies on who can do what and how. And even between tourism companies and local communities where there’s revenue sharing — tourists pay out a certain amount, it goes into a kitty, and it goes back to the community. And the community can decide if they want to build a road, a school, a pharmacy. It’s empowering communities to make their own decisions towards what they want in life. We have the ingredients at our disposal through the window of conservation to build sustainable societies – sustainable economically, sustainable environmentally, and we believe socially, although that’s still a work in progress.
Tribal orientations are not what they’re always played up to be, by outsiders particularly. You get a lot of people that try to take that angle. My own experience and research on this subject shows to me that, yes, when it comes down to real competition, people often align themselves with people with some other common interest in order to get their own personal objectives accomplished. But that is only in the absence of good governance systems. So if you can create a way that people can work together, I don’t care if they’re from one tribe or another, or even if they don’t even like each other. If they can see they’re going to both benefit from some kind of a joint action — it isn’t simple, but we’ve created training modules for this, we’ve got people working with these communities to talk about that. It’s big, it’s a big deal. We even have problems between, for example, the authorities that manage the parks and people that live around these parks. These people don’t like it that they can’t go in there and harvest and hunt and do what they used to do hundreds of years ago in some cases, but if you can work with them and find ways that they can benefit from this park, then they can buy into it. So it’s all about creating incentives, creating openness, and trying to listen to people. This is what we’re trying to promote.
Narrator:
Next week we continue our conversation with John Flynn. We’ll discuss the Obama administration’s commitment to Africa and how forest conservation is playing its part in building a U.S.-African development partnership.
To learn more about U.S. partnerships with central Africa, visit carpe.umd.edu
Visit CO.NX on Facebook. Search for “C-O-N-X — Listen to the World.”
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