Unisa Press

Discordant village voices

A Zambian ‘community-based’ wildlife programme

Author: Prof Stuart Marks
Published: March 07, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-86888-707-1
Number of pages: 350
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About the book

This book will be of great interest to researchers on wildlife management in Africa who must appreciate the essentially intertwined aspects of socio-cultural, socio-political and socio-economic processes, and who can find here an outstanding synthesis of the findings. FOCUS: Discordant Village Voices is a quest for a more telling narrative about what continues to happen to people and wildlife on one resource frontier. Survival depends on our relationships with human and other life around us, relationships that are fragile, unconscious and uncertain. Sustainable practices and the ideas supporting them must be worked at and worked over continuously: such practical resolutions are rarely found within textbooks, but in practical cultivations on the ground, and often appearing when least expected. The future of the rural community of the central Luangwa Valley. This area, designated as a game management area, has been subject to profound cultural and economic changes resulting from colonial and later government initiatives to conserve wildlife. A shift in focus to environmental and biodiversity conservation in the 1980s released a new web of myths, problems and contradictions, without resolving earlier dilemmas from the state-dominated eras.  In this study, initiated in the 1960s and carried out over the subsequent six decades, Stuart Marks examines the interface between the Munyamadzi rural communities and the wildlife institutions imposed on their homeland. Focusing on ways of effectively brokering resource regimes, he seeks to demonstrate that local employments and assistance must effect sustainable alternatives to pre-existing and customary livelihoods. His research is supported throughout by a database of wildlife counts—an original and statistically viable record designed in conjunction with local resident hunters—which offers an independent perspective, differing from those intermittently collected by safaris and scouts. THE AUTHOR: Beyond his academic careers in ecology and anthropology, STUART MARKS has worked as an independent scholar, crafting and assessing development projects for governments and for international conservation NGOs. This book represents a synthesis of his experiences and insights from a long-term case study.

Table of content

Figures and tables 

Abbreviations and glossary 

Foreword by Harry Wels 

Preface and acknowledgements 

1 The place, methodology, and chapter overviews 

2 Brief history of the central Luangwa Valley 

3 Munyamadzi Game Management Area and its residents 

4 The changing nature of rural community lives 

5 Human welfare and resource status at Nabwalya Central, 1966–2006 

6 Community Resources Board and community participation 

7 Perspectives from the Munyamadzi Game Management Area communities 

8 A conclusion to the 2006 exercise 

9 A perspective covering eight decades 

10 Conjuring the Munyamadzi Game Management Area as a frontier 

Appendix A: Revised questionnaire, 2006 

Appendix B: Major characteristics of village area groups within the Munyamadzi Game Management Area communities, 2006 and 2011

Appendix C: Respondents’ comments on ‘fairness’ of Zambia’s wildlife exchange 

Notes 

Bibliography 

Index 

Reviews