UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the start of a new era in the history of biodiversity conservation. While new parks, nature reserves, and other conservation areas are being created all over the world, many older parks have lost funds for continued management. Waza National Park in northern Cameroon, is one such site. I analyze the effects of a crumbling fortress conservation area and demonstrate that the absence of authority within it has been devastating to both the surrounding populations and the animals previously protected by the park. Farmers and pastoralists in the region are exposed to physical violence and food insecurity on a par with those faced by those evicted in the early years of park establishment and an open access situation has taken hold. I locate these problems of park management in the region's history, tracing the articulations of territory, access, governance, and subjectivity from the precolonial period.

The creation of the Waza protected area was an act of enclosure as well as a form of state territorialization. Before the creation of this reserve, the territory that became Waza was governed by sedentarized village leaders under a larger system of indirect rule by German and French colonials. Before German colonialism, local people had managed the space for farming, pastoralism, fishing, and other subsistence activities. With the French colonial government's creation of the reserve in the 1930s, the space was violently transformed, becoming a strictly governed protected area. Local people's access to and control over land and natural resources were lost and they were evicted from the Waza Protected Area. The reserve was both a symbol of colonial power in the region, and an economic resource for the French administration. Subsistence users and former residents were legally relegated outsiders as squatters, poachers, and thieves within protected area limits. The maintenance of this enclosure was continued by the independent Cameroonian government until the 1990s.

The lines between those the government administrators construed as insiders and outsiders were not as circumscribed in everyday practice as they were in French and Cameroonian law. Though local residents had no formal rights to their former village territories, they maintained access. Locals deployed gender, ethnic, spatial, and political subjectivities to achieve an insider status that afforded them access to park resources. Outsiders, generally users from areas distant to the protected area, were less able to negotiate access and were targets of enforcement and often subjected to violence if they transgressed the park's limits. Alliances were formed, however informally, between locals and park guards, with the effect of protecting the park's resources from certain subjects and not others.

Due to economic crisis, changed presidential priorities, and structural adjustment projects, state-led park management began to wane in the 1990s and NGOs took on park management responsibilities. In the early 2000s as global conservation discourses shifted their focus from biodiversity to global warming, these NGOs left the park and management declined.

Waza National Park became an open access space with all the attendant wildness associated with such a status. Local leaders were unable and unwilling to defend this space and the animals within. Waza National Park's empty and ungoverned territory has also created an ideal spot for criminals to use as a base of operations for kidnapping, murder, and theft causing local people to fear for their physical security.

The case of Waza National Park illustrates the problems that arise when conservation is imposed from the outside without real participation by local people. The promoters of protected areas profess extensive commitment to control of the boundaries, legal and physical, created by the initial enclosures. Without either the institutionalization of more viable long term management structures, or local engagement in and benefit from the process from the start, the goals of both biodiversity preservation and community well-being cannot be guaranteed.