Property Rights and Environmental Conflicts in Africa: An Exploration of the Main Issues

Shared resources often engender environmental conflict. This is because the activities of some groups of users of a resource are often detrimental to others. This paper discusses the relationship between property rights and environmental conflicts in Africa. It illustrates this relationship both at intra-state as well as at inter-state levels. Gender relations and property rights are also discussed given that women, who undertake about 80% of farm work on the continent, are not accorded equal say as men in resource ownership and resource management. The paper suggests how the problem of resource ownership can be addressed in order to minimize or preventenvironmental conflicts and promote development at country as well as at continental level

“We Used to go Asking for the Rains”: Local Interpretations of Environmental Changes and Implications for Natural Resource Management in Hwange District, Zimbabwe

In Hwange District, Zimbabwe, people living in the vicinity of the largest protected area of the country are facing rapid climate and environmental changes. Adopting an ethnoecological perspective, we sought to understand the way changes are understood locally in an area where people have interacted with their environment for centuries. In this chapter, we examine local people’s knowledge, expertise, and interpretative diagnoses about the environmental and climate changes they perceive around them. Qualitative fieldwork, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and structured free-listing interviews, was carried out over a three-month period in the communal lands of the district. Among changes related to wildlife interactions and landscape transformations, people mainly mobilize knowledge of trees and birds to predict rainfall and explain climate variability (related to seasons, precipitation, and temperatures). The most important findings of this research lie in people’s descriptions of ecological changes and their interpretations and explanations for these changes, which focus on arguments that are cultural (abandonment of ritual practices, access to ancestral sites), demographic (population growth), and political (wildlife management). For example, the disturbances in precipitation patterns are understood as a manifestation of the anger of ancestral spirits. We argue that these interpretive frameworks reflect the strong marginalization of the communities of the district from the national program of community-based natural resource management, CAMPFIRE, and that these discourses allow silenced voices to express themselves about sociopolitical concerns in an authoritarian context