Gorongosa National Park (Mozambique)

The Gorongosa case study was carried out in the context of reestablishment of the Gorongosa National Park (GNP) in central Mozambique. Formerly a flagship park in terms of size, biological resources and numbers of visitors, the GNP suffered a complete breakdown of management and infrastructure during the civil war of 1982–1992, together with severe depletion of large mammal populations and an influx of settlers into the park. By 2002 the park authorities were in the process of developing a new management plan, including new policies and procedures for working with local communities. This approach required a better understanding of communities within and adjacent to the park, their livelihoods, and their use of and impacts on natural resources.

This setting provided a good opportunity for testing and extending the MLA methodologies in a new ecological context of savannah, at the same time yielding results relevant to the ongoing process of rebuilding the GNP. The research was carried out as a partnership between CIFOR, the University of Zimbabwe and the GNP management authorities. The principal objective was to develop a spatial model of landscape importance to local communities, and through overlaying this with a map of conservation importance based on vegetation types and constituent woody plant species, to identify areas of greatest potential conflict between local communities and park managers.

Work was carried out in two villages, Muaredzi and Nhanchururu, differing in terms of location (central versus peripheral), ecological setting (valley floor versus escarpment slopes) and livelihood activities (family farming, supplemented by fishing in Muaredzi). Both villages are relatively small (40 and 107 households respectively), although each study area comprised a 20 km by 20 km box around the village, based on information that residents seldom travel more than 10 km to harvest any resources.

Data were collected over about three weeks in each village. Each community selected a team of informants (22 members in Muaredzi, 18 in Nhanchururu), comprising a balance of ages, gender and practitioners of different livelihood activities. Vegetation types were defined and described using stratified vegetation sampling. The university research team subsequently overlaid community landscape values with plant biodiversity values.

From a research perspective, the study enabled a considerable extension of the MLA methodology through:
1. the incorporation of Bayesian modelling techniques and spatial analyses in order to develop spatial models of community landscape values,
2. seeking to overlay community valuations with those based on plant biodiversity results.
These methodological developments were sufficiently interesting to stimulate further development of spatial models of importance values, notably in CIFOR's research area in East Kalimantan (Lynam et al., 2007).

For local communities the study provided a good opportunity to communicate their desires to park managers. In particular, the people of Muaredzi, who were under threat of forced relocation, were able to communicate their wish to be allowed to stay and, to date, they are still in place. The approach was too complex, however, to enable the largely illiterate community members to use the results in discussions with management and, in any case, there were no structures in place for such ongoing negotiations.

Park managers had previously paid relatively little attention to local perspectives. Through continued involvement with other research projects within the GNP, in particular the Gorongosa-Marromeu component of the Southern African Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (SAfMA-GM) project, the research team were able to feed the results into on-going park planning and management processes. For example, the project highlighted the need to develop a comprehensive vegetation and landscape map for the park, and efforts have subsequently been made to put this in place, as well as to further improve understanding of local livelihoods (Cunliffe, 2003). Similarly, the participation of senior government and NGO representatives in a user advisory group for the SAfMA-GM project and thus their exposure to project results is likely to influence understanding and policy development at the provincial and national levels.

More formal utilisation of the results has been constrained by two factors. First, this was an exploratory study carried out as a discrete undertaking, rather than being embedded into an ongoing research effort or within an agreed management process. Second, practical application of project results has been strongly constrained by ongoing institutional developments, particularly the lengthy and much delayed process whereby the Mozambican government has subsequently developed a formal management agreement with an external private sector partner. Another practical limitation is the need for good-quality base maps, without which it would be difficult to achieve useful results.