Introduction

Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples

Dawn Chatty and Marcus Colchester

The close of the twentieth century has witnessed an upsurge in international concern about people's impact on the natural environment. As pressure on natural resources has intensified, the conventional means of protecting habitat and preventing species extinctions, through the establishment of 'protected areas', has increasingly come into question. Conventional conservation approaches have been accused of ignoring the wider forces causing environmental damage and, even, of being part of the same mind-set, which imposes land use categories from the 'top-down', classifying lands as protected areas or zones. This, say the critics, has only legitimized and encouraged unsustainable land use outside protected areas, placing further pressure on natural resources and the beleaguered protected areas them-selves. Some have, thus, demanded broader changes in national and global economies and focused attention on the underlying causes of environmental destruction - social injustice, the lack of secure land tenure, the enclosure of the commons, consumerism, the rise of corporations, global trade, and government collusion or indifference (WRM 1990; IUCN 1991; Colchester and Lohmann 1993; Ecologist 1993; Verolme and Moussa 1999; Barraclough and Ghimire 2000; Wood et al. 2000).

20 pages, 1 table

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Negotiating the Tropical Rain Forest

Colonizing Farmers And Lumber Resources In The Ticoporo Reserve

Miguel Montoya

The last three decades have seen a worldwide surge in awareness and concern about the loss of natural forest environments, resources and wildlife. Simultaneously, man's encroachment on unexploited or reserved areas has increased, with factors such as population increase, unrelieved poverty, and state agricultural policies contributing to scenarios where peasants resort to colonizing new lands in search of a living. In contrast to the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s, when peasant farmers were often portrayed as a positive force in opening new territories to agricultural production for the benefit of the nation,1 this sector has more recently been depicted as a threat to the environment and resources of not only particular nations, but the entire world, as deforestation and fires threaten the global climate.

15 pages, 1 table, 1 map

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Compatibility of Pastoralism and Conservation?

A Test Case Using Integrated Assessment In The Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania

Kathleen A. Galvin, Jim Ellis, Randall B. Boone, Ann L. Magennis, Nicole M. Smith, Stacy J. Lynn and Philip Thornton

A major challenge for conservation agencies and advocates is formulating workable compromises between wildlife conservation and the people who live with wildlife. This is sometimes difficult because conflicts expand as human populations expand and because each different situation has its own peculiar dimensions. Various ecological, social, political and economic factors impinge on virtually all human-wildlife interactions, but the weight of each factor varies from one case to another. Thus, despite the attractive advantages of integrating conservation with human development, i.e., community-based conservation, many obstacles remain.

25 pages, 7 tables, 11 figures, 2 maps

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Giving Conservation a Human Face?

Lessons From Forty Years Of Combining Conservation And Development In The Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania

J. Terrence McCabe

As the human population of the earth grows there is an increased emphasis on the preservation of what remains of the planet's special places and important natural resources. The number of protected areas and national parks has increased dramatically over the past twenty years, especially in the developing world. New models of conservation have also been introduced, many that emphasize the incorporation of indigenous peoples into the conservation process. However, despite the importance of linking conservation and human development, for both the protection of natural resources and for the economies of indigenous peoples, there have been few examples of real success. One problem is that these Integrated Conservation and Development projects are relatively new, and that lessons learned from failure as well as success are just beginning to be understood. Another problem is that despite the rhetoric that advocates bringing indigenous peoples into the conservation process, often there seems to be little common ground or even communication between those who advocate for indigenous rights and human development and those who advocate for conservation of natural resources, especially wildlife. Of course there are exceptions, the attempts to bring the Aboriginal peoples into the management of National Parks in Australia being one example; the Campfire Programme in Zimbabwe (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) being another. However, recent books by Ghimire and Pimbert (1997), Stevens (1997), Neumann (1998) and Honey (1999) illustrate how difficult this task has been. Indeed other chapters in this volume will attest to the fact that the overall record has not been encouraging, especially with respect to protected areas.

16 pages, 1 table, 1 map

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National Parks and Human Ecosystems

The Challenge To Community Conservation. A Case Study From Simanjiro, Tanzania

Jim Igoe

Community conservation initiatives in Tanzania claim to give rural Tanzanians direct control of natural resources, thereby creating incentives for sustainable resource management at the community level. In practice, however, the agendas of international conservation organizations, private tour companies, and state elites dominate these programmes. The primary objective of Tanzanian community conservation is currently to enroll local people in the protection of national parks. Ironically, the institutional legacy of national parks plays a central role in the very problems that proponents of community conservation are trying to solve. As colonial institutions, national parks in East Africa were gazetted without regard for local resource management systems, or even the seasonal migration of resident wildlife. This chapter considers the ecological, economic, and social problems that national parks have caused throughout East Africa, taking into account structural adjustment programmes which facilitate the wholesale alienation of natural resources from local users.

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The Mursi and the Elephant Question

David Turton

The call for 'community participation' in conservation projects has grown to such an extent over the past few years that it has virtually become current orthodoxy, along with similar calls for participation and 'bottom-up' planning and management in rural development projects (IIED 1994; Pimbert and Pretty 1995; and numerous references therein). The reasons for this turning away from a 'preservationist' approach, which sees local people as an obstacle to effective natural resource management, are as much biological and economic as they are moral and political. Firstly, since virtually all existing ecosystems are a function of human use and disturbance, artificially to exclude such disturbance runs the risk of reducing biodiversity rather than preserving it (Hobbs and Huenneke 1992: 324, cited by Pimbert and Pretty 1995: 21). Secondly, not only are the technical and logistical costs of attempting to exclude human activity from protected areas very high but such efforts are almost certain to fail. They will alienate the local population from conservation objectives and thus require an ever-increasing and, in the long run, unsustainable level of investment in policing activities.

22 pages, 1 figure, 2 maps

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Forced Resettlement, Rural Livelihoods and Wildlife Conservation along the Ugalla River in Tanzania

Eleanor Fisher

In the twentieth century, the conservation of wildlife within protected areas in East Africa involved radical change in the relationship between people, land and natural resources. Population resettlement played a part in this change; areas of land now protected under wildlife and forestry laws were once populated and people were moved - forcibly or otherwise - by colonial and post-colonial authorities.2 However, the links between population resettlement and the gazettement of protected areas for conservation purposes are complex and have led people to re-interpret and contest both resettlement and conservation goals in many different ways. Understanding how experiences of population displacement and resettlement in the past are given expression in the present is critical if we are to appreciate fully the nature of people's connections to many protected areas in East Africa today. These connections include productive activities, but they encompass also the meanings people give to conservation and to their inter-actions with representatives of the state and conservation agencies.

23 pages

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The Influence of Forced Removals and Land Restitution on Conservation in South Africa

Christo Fabricius and Chris de Wet

South Africa is one of the few countries where the forced removal of people from protected areas has been followed by land restitution. This chapter addresses the impact of past forced removals and subsequent land restitution on biodiversity conservation and the sustainable use of natural resources in South Africa. It focuses on protected areas from which people were removed and on unconserved land, on which people were settled. It questions some of the assumptions about the positive and negative impacts of land restitution on conservation, and highlights emerging challenges to conservationists and land beneficiaries.

8 pages, 16 tables

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How Sustainable is the Communalizing Discourse of 'New' Conservation?

The Masking Of Difference, Inequality And Aspiration In The Fledgling 'Conservancies' Of Namibia

Sian Sullivan

We have also come to understand and realize that many of the … people who came to introduce the [1996 Nature Conservation Amendment] Act to us, are the former all-white employees of your Ministry who as individuals resigned from Government to venture into private sector businesses.

30 pages, 3 tables, 1 map

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Representing the Resettled

The Ethical Issues Raised By Research And Representation Of The San

Sue Armstrong and Olivia Bennett

Many people have come and gone with our words … they never return, and nothing ever happens (Mogwe 1992: 49).

14 pages

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Negev Bedouin

Displacement, Forced Settlement And Conservation

Aref Abu-Rabia

There are a number of reasons to account for the nomadism of the Bedouin. One decisive factor has been the search for grazing land and water. Another has been the need to escape retribution: when one Bedouin kills another, tribal law requires him and all his relatives to move some distance away, and seek the protection of a sufficiently strong tribe. When Islam spread in the seventh century, a wave of Bedouins came to the Negev from the Arabian Peninsula and settled. A second wave of Bedouin settlement commenced in the ninth century and lasted till the twelfth; then a third wave, again from the Arabian Peninsula, took place in the second half of the sixteenth century.

10 pages

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Customs Excised

Arid Land Conservation In Syria

Jonathan Rae, George Arab and Tom Nordblom

The steppe area in Syria, as in most other countries in West Asia and North Africa (WANA), is an administrative region based on an agro-ecological division of the country. Running a crude rainfall scale from high to low, zones 1-4 are designated agricultural regions where settlement and cultivation is permitted and predominant. Zone 5, which covers all land below the 200mm isohyte (the so-called 'steppe line'), is the designated steppe area or badiyah (Figure 12.1). Covering more than half the country, or 10.2 million hectares, the steppe has been set aside as rangelands where dryland cultivation is illegal. Most of those herding in the steppe are nomadic or agro-pastoral Arab tribes. Despite their long history in the steppe and a sophisticated resource access system, these tribes are currently excluded from government rangeland management efforts. With the recent adoptions by the authorities of centrally-controlled enclosures - otherwise termed the 'plantation concept' - in steppe conservation this exclusion has resulted in dispossession and hardship for many pastoral groups.

15 pages, 1 table, 2 maps

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Animal Reintroduction Projects in the Middle East

Conservation Without A Human Face

Dawn Chatty

Conservation in the Arabian Peninsula, unlike Africa and elsewhere, does not have a long history. In other parts of the world, ideas and policies for the 'preservation of nature' and the conservation of plant and animal species were exported with the colonial administrations of, mainly, France and Great Britain. The Arabian Peninsula, however, was never a 'colony' of a Western power. Its neo-colonial period, which might have served to develop such an interest, was very short, and only lasted a few decades between the ends of the two World Wars. In addition, its mainly arid land mass was not suitable as a wooded reserve. Furthermore, it had few species of large mammals, making it unattractive for the development of wildlife reserves. Conservation and eco-tourism were therefore largely irrelevant in the Arabian Peninsula for most of the twentieth century. Only as the millennium began to draw to a close did a particular form of conservation - animal reintroduction - manifest itself in the region. Without the colonial baggage most other parts of the world had to carry, these conservation projects should have been able to avoid the mistakes and pitfalls that plagued similar efforts in other regions. That, sadly, has not been the case.

17 pages

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Environmental Conservation and Indigenous Culture in a Greek Island Community

The Dispute Over The Sea Turtles

Dimitrios Theodossopoulos

'What good can a turtle do to a human? Why do we have to pay so much attention to them? Here in Vassilikos the turtle has caused great harm to our community. It went against the interests of the people.'

17 pages

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Displacement and Forced Settlement

Gypsies In Tamilnadu

Daniel Meshack and Chris Griffin

This chapter examines the displacement in Tamilnadu of former Outcaste forest-dwellers known as Narikuravas, Vagri or Kurrivikaran, and the problems they face. Since they are neither agriculturalists nor a 'service caste' (see Mines 1984), or for that matter classified 'tribal' or 'indigenous' with an historical claim to stewardship of, or access to, particular country, they fall outside the social space usually examined by anthropologists. Rather, they are commercial nomads, peripatetics or Gypsies 2 who (like Gypsies elsewhere) have traditionally lived physically apart from surrounding populations and with little sense of identity or attachment to one particular locality (Werth 1993). This raises the conceptual issue of whether 'displacement' and 'forced settlement' are appropriate terms to apply to such inveterate wanderers? And we will say they are. We will argue that 'displacement' here refers not to induced dislocation from time-honoured places per se but instead to displacement from a specific ecological niche without geographic boundary - namely, 'the forest'. Furthermore, we maintain that because such dislocation has compelled many Narikuravas to opt for more permanent settlement than previously, the term 'enforcement' is also appropriate.

16 pages

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Karen and the Land Inbetween

Public And Private Enclosure Of Forests In Thailand

Jin Sato

Thailand has historically been a sparsely populated country with an abundance of open land. With an increasing scarcity of land, however, a legal framework limiting the rights to land use has gradually developed. To halt further 'encroachment' on state land, the government has initiated projects for land allotment, purportedly for the landless poor. It has also invested in tree planting and expanding protected areas for the environment, particularly since the late 1960s. Despite these initiatives, illegal logging has continued, forest cover has declined, and socio-economic conditions in rural areas have not improved as intended. Thailand is now considered to be one of the worst forest managers among tropical countries (Poffenberger 1990).

19 pages, 4 tables, 3 figures

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Lost Worlds and Local People

Protected Areas Development In Viet Nam

Pamela McElwee

In the last ten years, the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam has been proclaimed a 'biodiversity hotspot,' mainly due to the discovery of several new mammals previously 'unknown' to science. As a result, this small country has been the site of a concerted effort on the part of conservation organizations and inter-national development agencies to improve environmental protection. In particular, the rise in deforestation beginning with the end of the Franco-Viet Nam war in 1945, through the American war from 1960 to 1975, and continuing after reunification of North and South in 1975, has been characterized as the most pressing environmental issue facing the country. One solution to this problem of deforestation has been to develop state-managed protected areas.

17 pages, 2 tables

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The History of Displacement and Forced Settlement in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

Implications For Co-Managing Danau Sentarum Wildlife Reserve

Reed L. Wadley

Co-management or community-based management is seen by many conservationists as a humane and practical alternative to eviction and punitive sanctions of people who inhabit and use lands designated for conservation (Wells et al. 1992; Kemf 1993; Pimbert and Pretty 1995). In its ideal form, co-management involves 'the active participation in management of a resource by the community of all individuals and groups having some connection with, or interest in, that resource' (Claridge 1997b: 19), often involving some sort of economic development component. Such 'integrated conservation and development projects' are not always easy solutions (Western and Wright 1994; Vandergeest 1996), but are today regarded as the standard approach to conservation.

16 pages, 1 map

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Planning for Community-Based Management of Conservation Areas

Indigenous Forest Management And Conservation Of Biodiversity In The Kayan Mentarang National Park, East Kalimantan, Indonesia

Cristina Eghenter

Indigenous People and Conservation Areas Biodiversity conservation, sustainable exploitation of natural resources, and rights of indigenous people are dominating NGOs and government agendas in several countries of Southeast Asia. The issues are not simply juxtaposed. A 'natural connection' (Western 1994) is assumed to exist between the interests of biodiversity conservation and those of indigenous people. Moreover, in the rhetoric of conservation organizations, it is often implied that sustain-able use and conservation of biodiversity can be achieved insofar as the management of forests and conservation areas is granted to local people (van den Top and Persoon 1998).

18 pages, 3 maps

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Resettlement and Natural Resources in Halmahera, Indonesia

Christopher R. Duncan

Generally, when people write their donation cheques to conservation organizations they think about helping endangered species or saving the tropical forests depicted in nature documentaries. The effect of conservation upon the people who live in these forests and depend on them for their survival is rarely mentioned in fundraising circles. The glossy brochures sent out by conservation NGOs do not contain images of people being moved to resettlement sites against their will; yet, this is often the result. Although these conservation groups may have no specific agenda for using force to protect biodiversity,2 their support of governments that either lack the capacity to properly manage resources or that intend to control 'national' resources at any price, contributes to the disenfranchisement of indigenous people with resource claims (Contreras 1992; Peluso 1993). Some conservationists have even begun to openly advocate the removal of people from parks (MacKinnon 1994; Kramer and van Schaik 1997), stepping away from past attempts to incorporate indigenous people (see Brown and Wyckoff-Baird 1992; Kemf 1993).

15 pages

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Welcome to Aboriginal Land

Anangu Ownership And Management Of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park

Graham Griffin

Uluru sits fairly in the centre of the Australian continent. Its landscape is remote, wild and harsh. Few people live anywhere within hundreds of kilometres. Yet, Uluru is a place of great cultural and symbolic significance to Australians. Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, with the great monolith Uluru as its centrepiece, is owned by Aboriginal traditional owners and has a resident community of over 300 Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal (Anangu) people. Its tenure history reflects the changing fortunes of conservation and Aboriginal land rights movements in Australia. It has become an environmental and cultural symbol both nationally and internationally. It is a place of substantial economic importance, and a place where Territory and Federal governments contest control over the land.

15 pages, 2 figures

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People or Nature

The Myths of Conservation and their Victims in Southern Mexico

Witold R. Jacorzynski

In this chapter I am concerned with the history of the application of conservation policies to the Lacandon selva located in Chiapas, the south-eastern state of Mexico (see Figure 1). First I will present a short case history of the colonization and attempted conservation of the Lacandon selva in the second half of the twentieth century. Secondly I will mention different conservation paradigms and some of the social agents who deliver their discourses on the human/nature relationship, ecological crisis, Mexican Indian ecology and conservation, and offer my criticism of these discourses. I will argue that the ecological crisis and the loss of biomass of the tropical rainforest is due to the chaotic implementation of the different and, on occasions, incompatible conservation strategies resulting from the clashes of interests of different social actors.

15 pages, 3 maps

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Utría National Park

A Case Study in Protected Areas' Impact on Local Communities

M. Benjamín Vivas

Nature preserves or protected areas are considered to be the most important method of ensuring the in situ conservation of biological diversity throughout the world (Brandon and Wells 1992; Terborgh and van Schaik 1997; WRI, IUCN & UNEP 1992). Traditionally, protected areas have been established following biological and ecological criteria, ignoring the presence of human groups and their needs, and local and nearby residents of these areas have been viewed as agents of habitat degradation (Alcorn 1993; Campos 1992; Colchester 1994; IUCN 1993; Orlove & Brush 1996).

12 pages, 3 tables, 1 map

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Conservation Policies and Indigenous Rights in Chile

Milka Castro Lucic

Chile has 92 protected wild areas. Five of them are located in the Andean mountains in the north of the country, where Aymara and Atacameña indigenous peoples live. In these areas, preservation policies have not taken account of human presence. As a result, a major impact of these projects has been natural species proliferation. In this work we will refer to those animals that compete for food with domestic species, and act as predators within the fragile indigenous agricultural and livestock productive system, based on traditional technologies. External policies in general, and the conservation plans in particular, are imposed in these areas without any consideration of camelid and ovine shepherding which are poorly understood and valued little. Until now the impact of these conservation efforts has neither been considered nor evaluated. This situation could change with the recent promulgation of an indigenous law (1993) which recognizes the right of these people to their lands and resources. This has raised expectations among the indigenous population of achieving a better position in the overall national political structure. This would demand a legal 'reconciliation', rather than the collision of laws that is currently the case.

8 pages

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Conservation, Privatization of Land and Displacement in Tanzania

D.K. Ndagala

Tanzania has an area of 945,087 sq. km and a little more than 30 million people, of whom 80 per cent live in the rural areas. Economic development is still much tied to the relationship between land and the rural population. In order to develop on a self-reliant basis, Tanzania has to use her land and human resources in a sustainable way.

This chapter will look at the processes of land alienation and privatization and the role of conservation in trying to strike a balance between community needs and resource availability. The alienation and privatization of land have led to the displacement of many people, especially nomadic and pastoral peoples. Well-known cases of displacement due to conservation are those resulting from the creation of Serengeti and Ngorongoro National Parks in Northern Tanzania. Though I shall make references to these two cases, my focus will be on the Lake Eyasi Basin in northern Tanzania which supports the Hadzabe hunters and gatherers believed to be the descendants of the original inhabitants of much of northern Tanzania.

It will be argued that the best way to conserve biodiversity in areas already with human habitation is not by displacing resident communities, but to involve them as the number one resource. Neither conservation nor forced settlement can in themselves lead to development. Displacement enhances marginalization and impoverishment of the displaced people. What is happening in the Lake Eyasi Basin is a microcosm of what is happening in other parts of Tanzania and, most likely, East Africa in general.

13 pages

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Unsettling Realities

Pastoral Land Rights and Conservation in East Africa

John G. Galaty

Is human displacement the price to be paid for conserving wildlife in Africa? If human and wildlife interests fundamentally clash, reasoning goes, human land use and settlement may be incompatible with sustaining complex habitats for wildlife. Then, logically, conflict between humans and wildlife should decline when they are physically separated through the creation of protected reserves. But such hopes foundered on the rangeland realities of Africa where founding national parks, reserves and protected habitats - inaccessible to the local, available to the ubiquitous tourist - was accompanied by a disheartening decline in wildlife populations, especially those bearing marketable trophies. This outcome had little to do with local strategies of managing wild and domestic animals and land. Rather, it emanated from shrinking wildlife habitats outside of reserved areas, increases in subsistence hunting due to poverty, and expansion of the international market in wildlife trophies, locally sustained by a network of collaboration between entrepreneurs, corrupt officials, and poachers (Bonner 1994; Western 1997).

19 pages

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Poverty, People, Progress and Parks

A Case Study of the Proposed 'Disneyfication' of an African Landscape

Anthony R. Turton and Cheyanne A. Church

This chapter seeks to challenge the prevailing norms that underlie many of the industrial world's assessments of development projects being conducted in pre-industrial societies. It uses a case study of a very controversial and high-risk development project proposed for Southern Mozambique by a polemical American entrepreneur and millionaire. As the government has recently cancelled the project due to the death of the lead investor, James Ulysses Blanchard III, it provides a retrospective case study from which much can be learnt.

15 pages, 1 figure

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Tensions in Rural Land Use, Settlement, Migration and Leisure in Scotland, 1750-1900

Neil Summerton

Displacement and forced settlement is taking place in our own generation in many places across the world, often with the ultimate object of nature conservation and associated economic and development benefits. This chapter looks at a limited, historical case - that of North Britain,1 especially the Highlands and Islands, between 1750 and 1900. Its themes run somewhat wider than conservation strictly construed: it refers to a number of aspects of economic and social adaptation in a period when the British and Atlantic economies were in very rapid development. It also refers to the wider cultural context, in which, as it happens, changing attitudes to nature, leisure and consumption figured prominently, with significant economic and social consequences. It offers a perspective on the themes of economic and social development, leisure and conservation which remain in issue in many parts of the world today.

16 pages

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Highland Sardinians and their Environment

Philip Carl Salzman

In this chapter I want to tell you what has been happening to highland Sardinians over the past ten years or so. But I am concerned - I suppose I could dress this up in the current jargon of reflexivity, if this were not part of the problem - about exactly how to present this account, for I have become increasingly uncomfortable with modes of reporting that have recently become fashionable in anthropology. Although I would like to entertain you, I hesitate to dramatize this story, for it is hard to discern the line past which is over-dramatization and falsification. I would like to engage your interest and sympathy, but I hesitate to frame this story in terms of perpetrators and victims, heroes and villains, lest my report be reduced to a kind of glib advocacy or, worse, an expression of one or another set of ideological set answers. Finally, while I recognize that human needs and human values are at stake in the events I describe, I am reluctant to make this initially, and primarily, into a struggle of good and bad, into a tale of morality, because the leap into ethical condemnation is often over a gaping chasm of ignorance.

9 pages

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What About the Women?

Another Perspective on the National Park Debate in Highland Sardinia

L.M. Edelsward

The central highlands of Sardinia is the scene of a brewing conflict between local pastoralism and the international conservation movement. The shepherds, who spend much of their lives herding their animals in the unsettled, rocky plateaux that separate their densely built communities, see the establishment of the Gennargentu National Park as the end of local autonomy, the end of their livelihood, the end of their traditional way of life. Although the villages will remain within the park boundaries, the flocks that wander these highlands will not. On the other side of the conflict are the politicians, forest rangers and environmentalists, outsiders who see these highlands not as home and pasture but as pristine yet threatened nature, not as local resources but as the patrimony of the earth, for the world. The local herders look at these lands and see millions of sheep and goats supporting thousands of families like their own; the eyes of the outsiders focus on the now rare Sardinian mountain goat.

12 pages

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Local People's Participation in Jordanian Protected Areas

Learning from Our Mistakes

Chris Johnson and Tariq Abul Hawa

In 1993 a unique project began in the spectacular Dana Wildlands of northern Jordan, under the supervision of the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), a long-established NGO with a mandate to establish and manage protected areas. The project was the first attempt in Jordan, and probably the Middle East, to try and link the conservation of biodiversity with the socioeconomic development of local people. Several thousand people from nomadic and settled communities live in and around the Dana Protected Area, many of whom are partially or entirely dependent on it for their livelihood, most notably for grazing goats. These people are among the most disadvantaged in Jordan and include nomadic refugee families, displaced after the 1947 partition of Palestine. Their use of the protected area is causing serious ecological problems and especially the excessive grazing pressure from domestic live-stock. Furthermore, they were not consulted at the time the protected area was established and were, at the beginning of the project, openly hostile to its designation,to RSCN and to the regulations imposed on hunting and grazing.

10 pages

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Forced Occupations and Settlement of Forest-Dwelling Tribes

A Study in a Wildlife Sanctuary in South India

C.R. Sathyanarayanan

The study of change in tribal societies of India with particular reference to the changing subsistence pattern of forest dwelling tribes as a result of colonial rule and enforcement of forest regulations has been a topic of investigation for many anthropologists for the last thirty years or so. A number of such studies, including the recent works of Gadgil and Guha (1992), Agarwal (1994), Fernandes (1995) and several others on forest dwelling tribes in India, have shown that promotion of commercial forestry and State takeover of the forests which began in the late nineteenth century were the root causes for many of the problems being faced by these communities today. Declaring forest areas as Wildlife Sanctuaries and National Parks and forcing the forest dwelling tribes to go out of their original habitats often created, and still continues to create conflicts between tribals and forest authorities. Bans on the traditional practices of shifting cultivation and hunting and relocation of the forest dwelling tribes often led many of them to end up as daily wage labourers in unorganized sectors, industrial settings, forestry and agriculture. Being ignorant and illiterate, many tribal groups who moved out of their forest habitats were by and large exploited and impoverished in the outside world. Some who resisted leaving their forest habitats gradually found alternate sources of survival there; some took up the new occupations that were introduced by governmental agencies in and around their settlements, e.g. cash-crop cultivation, horticulture or wage labour in forestry. With some minor variations, this was the kind of transition that faced many forest dwelling tribes in India, particularly a number of such communities in the Western Ghats of south India.

15 pages, 2 maps

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From Shifting Cultivation to Settled Cash Crop Plantations

Displacement and Impoverishment of the Ibans in Sarawak, Malaysia

Jayantha Perera

The recent resettlement literature shows a three-step action plan to resettle the displacees of a development project with minimum damage to their social fabric and livelihood. The first step is the identification of the risks associated with displacement. The second is the planning of an implementation strategy to overcome the risks. The third is the implementation of the strategy with special emphasis on the restoration and improvement of the resettlers' income (Mcdowell 1996; Cernea 1997; Mathur and Mardsen 1998).

18 pages, 1 table

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