Page 39 - Local Voices, Local Choices Excerpt

The cycles of old and new 37
Citing another positive result, Japhet says, “If you are traveling from Kigoma going to the border of Burundi from Gombe, you can see in the villages there’s a lot of forest cover behind the village. But in the village itself, there is a lot of the tree species Senna siamea. Although they’re there now, in the past it was bare. Now, when you look at the satellite images, you can see the differences between the historical landscape and how it looks today.” Using Village Land Use Plans (VLUPs), the TACARE pro- gram has been able to facilitate local communities in establishing these village forests and using joint Land Use Plans to connect multiple village forests into an elongated corridor, creating a buffer outside the Gombe National Park. This, in turn, has allowed the local migration of different chimpanzee individuals.
“Through each phase, we were able to come up with some key lesson learned,” he explains. “Sometimes you’d introduce an approach to test if it would work, and if so, what time frame can be expected. Or maybe you’d try something else, which could be the same intervention but maybe a dif- ferent approach. That’s why the issue of capacity-building of the village government was such a focal point. It has never been a one-way approach. It has been a dynamic approach, taking the lessons from one phase, then building these into the other phases. I’m actually glad that I was also part of those Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs) to understand what people value, but also what they understand, and what they want. Conducting a PRA is important before introducing any intervention. The participatory planning helps to integrate indigenous knowledge within the planning process, to nominate the priorities.”
For Japhet, traditional knowledge of the ecosystem is a key consid- eration. “It’s important because in Tanzania, the people are living in the villages according to the law, and they’re using the law of the Local Gov- ernment Act of 1983. According to that act, people are the custodians of their heritage land in those villages, so the land is theirs. We can coordi- nate a land use plan, but it is the villagers who are responsible for develop- ing and designing land-use bylaws—it becomes their responsibility. Here,