Conservation practitioners realize they must deal with conflict but often lack the training to do so, says Dr. Andrew Plumptre, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Albertine Rift Program. Moreover, they don’t realize their conservation efforts—by restricting access to resources or creating new burdens, costs, and risks for communities—are at times directly responsible for spawning new conflicts where none existed before.

In a recent presentation—Healing the Rift: Mitigating Conflict Over Natural Resources in the Albertine Rift, sponsored by WCS and the Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group—Plumptre used his work with WCS in the Albertine Rift as a launch pad to discuss how conservation practitioners can work to mitigate conflict.

Achieving “Conflict-Sensitive Conservation”

“Conflict-sensitive conservation,” as outlined in an International Institute for Sustainable Development‘s practitioners’ manual developed in conjunction with WCS, is a multi-step process:

1. Identify—What are the area’s current or potential conflicts?
2. Prioritize—Which conflicts are the most serious?
3. Target—Which high-risk conflict does my organization possess the capacity to address?
4. Analyze—What are the causes and effects of conflict? Who are the stakeholders, what are the relationships between them, and which should we seek to engage?
5. Design & implement solutions—With what strategy should the conflict be approached? At which point in the conflict cycle should we seek to intervene?
6. Monitor—Continue to watch the area for new developments.

Conflict in the Albertine Rift

Plumptre’s fieldwork on the DRC’s Virunga National Park is one of the case studies in Renewable Natural Resources: Practical Lessons for Conflict-Sensitive Development, recently published by the World Bank. Conflict in the park began in 1996, when an influx of internally displaced persons from the war in the DRC poured into the area, placing severe strains on the park’s fish, wildlife, timber, and agricultural resources.

In 2006, Plumptre and his WCS colleagues entered Virunga and identified four challenges they could best address:

• Overfishing on Lake Edward
• Military poaching
• Park encroachment
• Conflict with displaced Ugandan pastoralists

WCS tackled the conflicts with an array of strategies:

• To combat overfishing, WCS helped villages establish sustainable targets and implement internal policing mechanisms
• To curtail encroachment and poaching by the military and those living in the greater Virunga National Park area, WCS trained Congolese Park Authority (ICCN) staff in enforcement and monitoring techniques, established channels of communication with military commanders, and engaged in general and targeted environmental educational campaigns.
• To relieve resource pressures from the presence of Ugandan pastoralists, WCS worked with the Congolese and Ugandan governments to ensure pastoralists could safely and freely return to Uganda to settle elsewhere.

All of WCS’ work was carried out in conjunction with local ICCN members. WCS also regularly convened meetings of elected stakeholder representatives, where disputes, accusations, and interests could be openly aired and mediated. The meetings also fostered collaboration between the stakeholders and created an enabling environment for conflict resolution.

Beyond Virunga National Park

Since completing their project in 2007, Plumptre and his team have established similar projects in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, the Itombwe Massif, and Misotshi-Kabogo. Now, however, they are working to prevent conflicts before they take root. WCS has guided communities in the Misotshi-Kabogo area to work together to petition the Congolese government to turn their territory into the DRC’s 8th national park.

Climate change is predicted to spur local, often intra-state or regional, migrations in response to droughts and flooding. Could these migrations lead to similar resource conflicts in the future? The rate of migration, governance and carrying capacities of the absorbing communities, and economic status of the migrants will all come in to play. In cases where conflict might result, Plumptre’s work successfully demonstrates that “conflict-sensitive conservation” should have a place in the peacebuilders’ toolkit.