Protected Areas; Armed conflicts; Management systems; Governance structure; West Africa
Abstract :
[en] The sudden incursion of armed groups in 2017 into the W and Arly parks, located respectively in Niger and Burkina Faso, poses a severe threat to conservation efforts in one of West Africa's largest transboundary natural World Heritage sites the W-Arly-Pendjari Complex (WAP). Responding to such a conflict requires quick adaptive management for conservation managers, who are often unprepared and have no clear strategies for such threats. The question is, therefore, how conservation managers respond to such situations in practice. Using the Delphi technique as an analytical framework, this paper aims to describe how conservation managers have dealt with these issues to assess their performance in tackling them. Our results show that conservation responses to the security crisis have been multi-faceted, depending on the WAP countries. It ranges from a withdrawal of conservation actors from the parks (Niger and Burkina Faso) to continued active management in the Benin component. Benin's resistance can be, to some extent, associated with solid foundations being put in place before the crisis. Focusing on a community strategy that meets the needs of forest-dependent communities to reduce their vulnerability is a key factor in building a local alliance in the face of such a disaster. The main challenge for conservation managers is their limited capacity to tackle the new problem, but careful attention needs to be paid to the false perception of addressing the crisis solely from a military point of view. The emergency response is often weak as it depends on what external support can or is willing to offer. Such an approach easily falls into symbolic gestures far from eliminating the issues.
