The Privilige to Cooperate : Assessing the Impact of Collaborative Resource Management Agreements on Local Communities' Livelihoods around Mount Elgon National Park, Uganda

Abstract

This thesis deals with the twin challenges of human development and conservation of wild nature at Mount Elgon National Park (MENP) in Uganda. With the gradual transition from forest reserve to national park, local people were deprived of access of Mount Elgon’s forest resources. In order to ease the adverse affects of banned access and eviction from the forest accruing to the park neighbors, the Ugandan Wildlife Authority offered them agreements aiming at sustainably utilizing MENPs resources. Primary objective of this thesis is to answer the question of how collaborative resource management agreements (CRMA) affect the livelihoods of the local communities residing around MENP in Uganda. Comparisons are drawn to other communities not benefiting from any agreement.

For this purpose fieldwork around MENP was conducted in the first two months of 2011, including household surveys, key informant interviews and focus group discussions, followed by data analysis using STATA. The sustainable rural livelihoods framework as defined by Scoones (1998) and Ellis (2000), served as the conceptual framework of this thesis. It allowed for the analysis of livelihood assets. Then, the introduction of CRMAs as institutional / organizational influence was assessed in terms of how they alter the access to resources and how this affects livelihood strategy portfolios and livelihood outcomes.

The analysis of livelihood resources indicated low access to assets, whereby households benefiting from agreements were on average better endowed in terms of most of the resources. Income and wealth estimation revealed a similar pattern, households residing in parishes benefiting from CRMAs earned higher farm, non-farm and off-farm incomes and also appeared to be wealthier on average. Regression analyses could not confirm a significant influence of CRMAs on income performance, whereas wealth turned out to be significantly determined by the access to resource use agreements. Major influencing variable in both regressions was the access to crop land.

The issues of livelihood diversification, forest dependence and income distribution were examined next. No particular impact of CRMAs on livelihood diversification could be found. Income equality and poverty, significantly reduced through the presence of park income, seemed not to be influenced by CRMAs. However, dependence on forest environmental income turned out to be stronger in areas where CRMAs prevail, despite the better economic performance of the respective households.

Yet, in order to distinguish between ‘effect causality’, meaning that CRMAs affect the livelihood outcomes of communities benefiting from it, and ‘selection causality’, meaning that CRMAs were assigned to communities that have been economically better off initially, investigating the targeting processes was necessary. Results point at a domination of the latter relationship, namely that the Ugandan Wildlife Authority targeted initially better off communities for signing agreements, thus granting them considerable privileges – privileges to cooperate.