The Mursi and the elephant question

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 eco‑systems 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, p. 324, cited by Pimbert and Pretty, 1995, p. 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.

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