Can national parks deliver in a modern world? : cases from Mikumi National Park in Tanzania and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda

Tanzania and Uganda are two countries in Africa with an outstanding abundance of\nbiodiversity. This biodiversity is usually conserved in Protected Areas such as national parks.\nMikumi National Park (MINAPA) and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (BINP) are of\ngreat international importance because of their ecological qualities. MINAPA and Selous\nGame Reserve form a unique eco-system and together, they hold one of the largest\npopulations of wild elephants. BINP has exceptional biodiversity but its international\nconservation value mostly emanates from being home to the endangered mountain gorillas.\nThe park as an organisation has increasingly become responsible for delivering biodiversity\nconservation, tourist products and economic development, and also contributes to poverty\nalleviation around the park. This study looks at, if the park as an organisation and institution is\nequipped to deliver in all these areas. We have analysed MINAPA and BINP and also looked\nat how practical cases of major problems faced by the two parks are handled by the\nmanagement. The parks are semi-autonomous, but still they have quite strict chains of\ncommand throughout their management system. They are guided by formal rules and\nprocedures according to management plans such as the General Management Plan. The\ndivision of labour is composed of diverse expertise and the parks‟ physical structures are\nmostly underdeveloped and underfunded. This leads to both parks delivering more in areas of\nbiodiversity conservation and control of poaching, than in tourism and community\nconservation. Furthermore, policies for these areas are present in the parks, but their\nimplementation is ineffective, leading to institutional failure.\nBoth national parks are surrounded by human settlements, whose integration in management\nhas had both positive and negative consequences. During our fieldwork, we discovered that\nMINAPA and BINP employees hold strong conservation values and follow strict norms\nrelating to conservation. In addition to biodiversity conservation, TANAPA and UWA have\nimproved and increased community conservation and participation as one of their main\nvalues. However, employees in the parks do not share the latter core value with their park\nauthorities. Further, our results also indicate that local people‟s values are linked to the\nutilisation of park resources, which conflict with park management and its internal\nstakeholders‟ values. This creates major challenges for both parties.\nLocal people surrounding MINAPA and BINP express that park authorities do not carry out\nenough actions to address their concerns, whereas park staff claim that they are incapable of\nresponding to all local people‟s demands. Furthermore, local people are to a certain extent\ninvolved in some of the parks‟ management programmes, particularly, revenue sharing,\nproblem animal and poaching control measures and multiple resource use, but park authorities\nstill dominate and control decision-making. The local people‟s attitudes have possibilities of\nchanging if they are involved more in park management and if issues such as problem\nanimals, poaching and their gains from the parks are addressed. As a result, aspects of\nempowerment, responsibility and rights sharing could be improved. There is a need for an\norganisational and institutional change of the park as an instrument in the direction of\nimproving the collaborative resource use management, particularly including local people\nmore in decision-making.