Demography and the Moral Economy of Mid-Altitude Forest Conservation in East Africa
Year: 2013
Type: preprint
Abstract: This paper is based on field research around Kibale National Park in western Uganda and the East Usambaras in northeast Tanzania as well as reviews of other protected or partially protected mid-altitude forests in East Africa. All of these are surrounded by very high agricultural populations, most of whom migrated to the areas over the last five to six decades. The key historic experience for most people living around these forests is domestication of a frontier rather than expulsion from ancestral homelands. As a result, there are few if any “traditional” institutions or incentives to preserve large tracts of forest, especially with respect to their (often endemic) floristic and faunal diversity. Instead, economic choices and moral guidelines strongly favor extraction from and conversion of forested and other undomesticated habitats into economically useful, generally privately owned resources. Natural experiments across cases indicate that external (rather than internal) sanctions are needed to preserve significant expanses of forest, and, to an even greater extent, forest fauna. The good news is that local acceptance of forest conservation can be widespread, as can appreciation of the environmental services provided by forests, provided sanctions are perceived as fairly implemented. The less good news is that there is little if any incentive or capability for local enforcement of conservation vs. conversion. Moreover, the benefits of conserving animals are far less obvious than of conserving trees, and the locally desired objective is to separate the realm of wild animals from the human realm as thoroughly as possible.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Abe Goldman
Institution: University of Florida
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2201357330