Provides a pan-African synthesis of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), drawing on multiple authors and a wide range of documented experiences from Southern, Eastern, Western and Central Africa. This title discusses the degree to which CBNRM has met poverty alleviation, economic development and nature conservation objectives.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Conservation Biology in Sub-Saharan Africa comprehensively explores the challenges and potential solutions to key conservation issues in Sub-Saharan Africa. Easy to read, this lucid and accessible textbook includes fifteen chapters that cover a full range of conservation topics, including threats to biodiversity, environmental laws, and protected areas management, as well as related topics such as sustainability, poverty, and human-wildlife conflict. This rich resource also includes a background discussion of what conservation biology is, a wide range of theoretical approaches to the subject, and concrete examples of conservation practice in specific African contexts. Strategies are outlined to protect biodiversity whilst promoting economic development in the region. Boxes covering specific themes written by scientists who live and work throughout the region are included in each chapter, together with recommended readings and suggested discussion topics. Each chapter also includes an extensive bibliography. Conservation Biology in Sub-Saharan Africa provides the most up-to-date study in the field. It is an essential resource, available on-line without charge, for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as a handy guide for professionals working to stop the rapid loss of biodiversity in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.

Natural resource governance is critical for linking poverty reduction and sustainable natural resource use. This book brings together authors from various disciplines with extensive field experience to promote an integrative understanding of cross-scale and adaptive governance in Africa and Latin America. The authors make the case for reaching beyond decentralization to promote adaptive governance that serves local priorities, but through interactions with local, district, national and global governance structures. The book focuses on the governance of common pool resources such as forests, wildlife, water, carbon and pasture resources in both Africa and Latin America. This book will appeal to development practitioners and scholars concerned about the conservation of natural resources and the sustainable development of communities. It synthesizes experience with the governance of different natural resources from a broad geographic perspective. It also provides theoretical and practical suggestions for taking adaptive natural resource governance forward, including participatory methods for measuring and monitoring governance.

This book develops the Sustainable Governance Approach and the principles of Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM). It provides practical examples of successes and failures in implementation, and lessons about the economics and governance of wild resources with global application. CBNRM emerged in the 1980s, encouraging greater local participation to conserve and manage natural and wild resources in the face of increasing encroachment by agricultural and other forms of land use development. This book describes the institutional history of wildlife and the empirical transformation of the wildlife sector on private and communal land, particularly in southern Africa, to develop an alternative paradigm for governing wild resources. With the twin goals of addressing poverty and resource degradation in the world’s extensive agriculturally marginal areas, the author conceptualises this paradigm as the Sustainable Governance Approach, which integrates theories of proprietorship and rights, prices and economics, governance and scale, and adaptive learning. The author then discusses and defines CBNRM, a major subset of this approach. Interweaving theory and practice, he shows that the primary challenges facing CBNRM are the devolution of rights from the centre to marginal communities and the governance of these rights by communities, a challenge which is seldom recognised or addressed. He focuses on this shortcoming, extending and operationalising institutional theory, including Ostrom’s principles of collective action, within the context of cross-scale governance. Based on the author’s extensive experience this book will be key reading for students of natural resource management, sustainable land use, community forestry, conservation, and development. Providing practical but theoretically robust tools for implementing CBNRM it will also appeal to professionals and practitioners working in communities and in conservation and development.

An Introduction to the African Union Environmental Treaties sheds light on the African Union legal regime related to environmental issues and provides expert analysis of how the African Union has transitioned from the former management of natural resources approach to strategies of preservation and protection. This book explores different areas of the environment, from livestock to plants, fertilizers, minerals and marine environment. Ambassador Namira Negm convincingly demonstrates the extent to which environmental issues are of critical importance to the African Union. Together with insightful commentary, the book provides full treaty texts and is an indispensable resource for all those interested in the African Union and environmental legal regimes.