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Abstract:
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"A failed carbon project implemented in Mt Elgon PA from 1993 to 2004 instigated political economy analyses of the prevalent conflicts between the managers of the PA and the society. The analyses debunked the argument that the conflicts were reflections of weakness in performance to implement the community based natural resources management approaches which were developed to address the conflicts and the degradation of the environment that seemed to exacerbate despite the PAs. The main argument they posited was that conflicts were effects of the legacies of colonial agrarian systems that prioritized the market and their continuity under neo-liberalism. Cavanagh and Himmelfarb (2015) further advanced the argument to highlight the political dimension internal to the Uganda state-society relations that explains the violence as directly instituted as a tool that the colonial government used to control the society. In this paper I extend the political argument to show that what seems as continuity of the violence has discontinuities that represent the extent to which the power of the society is able to shape the states’ management strategies that benefit the society and nature. Indeed, I show in this paper that the violence that the Cavanagh and Himmelfarb (2015) study was based, was stabilized by the second decade of colonial rule, from 1920s to 1962. Stability had been achieved because the societal politics in relation to the state had managed to re-shape the management strategies in ways that were mutually beneficial to the state, society and the ecology. However, the National Resistance Movement, which is the government that has ruled Uganda since 1986, was forced to adopt neo-liberal policies in the late 1980s and 1990s, which undermined most of this societal power. The persistent conflicts represent the weaknesses of the societal power that have been unable to reshape government politics and natural resources management that is mutually beneficial that was possible during colonial rule. This dimension reveals the limitations of the peasant agency in Mt Elgon that has been celebrated. The study shows that the ability to achieve justice, equity and rights, in conservation in Uganda that is advocated for in the growing global conservation discourse, will depend on the benevolence of the state whose power is hegemonic. However, because enhancing these social values directly empowers the society that the state has deliberately undermined, its ability to implement them comes into question. In this case, the paper argues that a sustainable conservation framework based on inclusion, equity and justice has to be demanded from below by re-creating the political power of the society through the strengthening their agency and structures that they engage through."
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