Stuart A. Marks. 2014. Discordant Village Voices: A Zambian Community-Based Wildlife Programme

Stuart A. Marks. 2014. Discordant Village Voices: A Zambian Community-Based Wildlife Programme. Braamfontein: University of South Africa Press. 325 pp. Whereas community-based resource programmes are a technical prescription for conserving wildlife and habitats in rural areas, they are never innocuous, straightforward, apolitical or neutral exercises (pp. 202-03). Stuart Marks--ecologist, anthropologist, development and conservation advisor--has accompanied the Valley Bisa for five decades in Zambia's Luangwa valley. He offers a unique long-term and intimate perspective on these people and how they relate--as individuals in many cases, as lineages or associations or communities in others--with wildlife, governments, management systems, and projects. By considering processes of cultural change, governance, representativeness, participation, and benefit-sharing, he reveals the complexity of influences and effects that interact to generate often unexpected outcomes. The author initially resided with the Bisa in 1966-1967, shortly after Zambian independence (1964), collecting data to build cultural and environmental baselines. A second long stay in 1988-1989 coincided with the inception of Zambia's national community-based wildlife management program. He undertook shorter visits each decade, through 2011, in order to monitor developments and changes over time; before, during and after the community-based wildlife management scheme. Together with local field assistants, he has applied a wide range of methodologies: active participant observation, passive participation in meetings, interviews, household surveys, censuses, daily activity recalls, timed activity records, informant diaries, questionnaires, land use assessments, wildlife counts, and reviews of local materials and national archives. Historically, Bisa livelihoods depended on subsistence hunting, subsistence farming, migrant labor, and have been strongly influenced by national conservation policy. Marks argues that local people have experienced a remarkable, and by no means positive, continuity of government imposition beginning with colonial Northern Rhodesia (British South Africa Company in the 1890s, British Protectorate 1924-1963) and continuing under post-colonial Zambia. The Nabwalya settlements lie between North and South Luangwa National Parks (created in the 1940s). Outside the protected areas, large spaces, which after independence were named Game Management Areas, were declared in 1950 as first class safari hunting concessions for private operators, or second class hunting areas reserved for native residents. Authorities thereby assumed the rights to land and wildlife, and consistently viewed local people principally as poachers responsible for game extermination through overhunting, population growth, and conversion of habitat to farms and settlements. …