This is the case of Sunungukai Camp, an ecotourism project managed by a small community of some 250 households in five rural villages (Kapandoro, Hodzi, Munando, Chidiramumba and Mapini). Situated 120km north-east of Harare, Sunungukai Camp lies on the banks of Mazowe River overlooking the Umfurudzi Safari Area—a National Parks Protected Area—in the Uzumba-Maramba-Pfungwe (UMP) District. The camp is set up as part of the Communal Areas Management Program for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE). The following natural resources are found in the Sunungukai area:

• Lush green mountains covered with trees and grass
• Serene and picturesque Mazowe River
• Variety of fish species
• Small and large game
• Beautiful bird species in the riparian habitat

While the above natural resources are key to the development of ecotourism in the area, the local community has access to firewood, broom and thatch grass, construction poles, basket and hat weaving reeds and fish. Access to natural resources by local communities is paramount due to land pressure. In 1992, the total population of Zimbabwe was 10,412,548. Excluding 110,500 persons in collective households for whom the data are not available, of the remaining 10.2 million people, 69% (7.1 million) were in farming with nearly half (3.3 million) on communal farms. With 70% of the rural population residing on land mostly of poor to marginal potential (70 to 75% of Zimbabwe’s smallholder areas are located in Natural Regions IV and V—areas receiving less than 600 mm of rainfall per annum), population densities have long exceeded the land’s carrying capacity. This has resulted in serious degradation of land and land-based resources due to deforestation, soil erosion and overgrazing.

The authors, Kenneth K. Odero and Prisca Huchu, have been working with Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) in the Eastern and Southern Africa region for the past decade. K. Odero is a Consultant with ProPerArt Associates—a Planning and Development Consortium. P. Huchu is the Monitoring, Evaluation and Gender Officer for the CAMPFIRE Association—the organization which oversees the Sunungukai Natural Resource Management Project. As an umbrella organization, CAMPFIRE Association facilitates the formation of CBOs for the purpose of natural resource management. Through the CAMPFIRE principles of decentralization and devolution, CBOs are formed and structures developed linking them to local authorities, i.e. the Rural District Councils (RDCs). This institutional arrangement ensures CBOs of logistical support, natural resource policy interpretation and representation at national fora. CAMPFIRE Association has been the lead institution promoting the Sunungukai ecotourism project.

Sunungukai Camp is a community managed CAMPFIRE ecotourism project which aims to provide income to the surrounding communities and to promote the conservation of natural resources. The camp was officially opened on March 29, 1993. Prior to the start of the project, access to and use of natural resources in the Communal Lands of the Mazowe River Basin was unrestricted. This led to a serious degradation of the natural environment. For example, demand for fuelwood led to the destruction of forests; poor agricultural practices led to serious soil erosion; and gold panning activities exacerbated the problem of river siltation. Simply, there was no incentive for sustainable consumptive utilization of resources. Access to resources in Protected Areas was however restricted and the benefits deriving from authorized use of forest or game was expropriated by the state. This created tension between local needs, on the one hand, and national policy on the other.

Given that local communities were not compensated for non-use of natural resources and/or the fact that the state had limited capacity to enforce its own rules based on the principle of ‘exclusion’ expressly designed to control use of natural resources, the environment was compromised. At the micro-level, inadequate farming practices, deforestation and overgrazing resulted in land degradation. These ‘causal’ factors, driven by social, economic and political forces, manifested themselves at the macro-level in market, policy and institutional failures, inappropriate technologies and practices. The problem of environmental degradation was by no means confined to the Mazowe River Basin. On the contrary, it is a national problem in Zimbabwe where over 70% of the population is rural and depends on land resources for its livelihood.

If the clearing of woodland for agricultural production and harvesting of these forests for fuelwood and poles had continued unabated, the forest resources would have been depleted and the river would have silted. With the silting of the river, the fish population would have declined. This could have triggered game poaching as a source of protein. In general, mounting environmental degradation had a direct and negative impact on economic development in the Sunungukai area. In the long-term, the community stood to suffer as the ecosphere’s capacity to provide essential environmental services that support the socio-economic subsystem was endangered (Munasinghe, 1995). In the perspective of the community, "it is now true to say that the majority of our people have an increasing realization of what the environment means to them and the future generations".

The reform came through a redefinition of ownership of the resources in the Sunungukai area and how they were to be managed. There were four institutions involved in this process: the Local Community, CAMPFIRE Association, Zimbabwe Trust and the Uzumba-Maramba-Pfungwe Rural District Council (UMPRDC). CAMPFIRE Association served as the lead institution promoting the project; Zimbabwe Trust provided funding and management training; and UMPRDC served as the link organization.

In Sunungukai, community-based management of natural resources through ecotourism venture was introduced by the CAMPFIRE Association. The principle behind ecotourism is that providing compensation and substitution can lead to change of attitude and practice of resource management by local communities. As a consequence, a number of awareness raising workshops were organized prior to 1993 to sensitize the community on the benefits of ecotourism. Findings from studies carried out in Kenya, Thailand, Mexico and Nepal showed that least results in terms of conserving resources can be achieved if the benefits of ecotourism go to the state.

To solve the threat of unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, local people should reap economic benefits of non-consumptive tourism. This was the philosophical underpinning of the ecotourism ventures initiated by the CAMPFIRE Association in partnership with the Sunungukai community and the Uzumba-Maramba-Pfungwe RDC. In the words of the Sunungukai Camp Management Committee, "we developed this camp as we wanted to promote our natural resources in an environmentally sensitive way so that we could all benefit from them".

At the behest of the CAMPFIRE Association, state devolved to the Sunungukai community through the Uzumba-Maramba-Pfungwe Rural District Council (UMPRDC) the right to manage and use their natural resources. Now empowered, the community formed the Sunungukai Management Committee—a community-based natural resource management committee which enforces locally developed rules and regulations. It also manages the ecotourism camp project.

Having set up the Sunungukai Management Committee, the community constituted rules and regulations for conserving their environment through sustainable use of resources. These rules include: forbidding any form of fishing other than using a single hook fishing line and the restriction of fishing to local people and camp visitors. Outsiders have to pay a levy to community funds if they want to fish in their stretch of the river; restriction on gold panning on the river front, this had been causing severe damage to the river banks; and the forbidding of wanton destruction of forests and cultivation of crops on hillslopes and the river banks. The management committee was mandated to enforce these rule and regulations. Other activities undertaken by the community are proactive. The management committee encourage villagers to plant trees in deforested areas while farmers are motivated to construct ridges to guard against soil erosion. In a participatory gesture, the community also pledged to monitor and implement the regulations they had drawn. Sanctions against offences and offenders were specified in the "peoples’ constitution".

Determined to bring change to the their community, the villagers decided to establish an income-generating project. They agreed to build a camp. A suitable site was identified in Kapandaro Village. The construction and management of the camp was vested on an elected committee. All employees of the camp are members of the local community. Sunungukai Camp is built on an hectare of land. The owner of the land is entitled to 10% of the camp proceeds. The UMPRDC which on the one hand serves as the link between the project and the central government and provides technical support on project implementation, on the other, gets 5-10% in levy. Decisions on how to use the rest of the funds is made by the management committee.

The camp consists of four roundavel lodges (each with its own braai site), a reception/information building, communal kitchen, and a caretakers’ room. The layout of the camp reminiscences traditional Shona architecture. The camp was constructed using locally-sourced materials. Labor was also provided by the community. All the bricks were made by local people and they provided thatching grass and poles for roofing. Cement, window and door frames were bought with cash provided by Zimbabwe Trust. Material for perimeter fencing of the camp site was bought with funds donated by the New Zealand High Commission in Zimbabwe.

It is almost six years since these reform processes started. The most remarkable change has been the involvement of the community in monitoring natural resource use. This has led to controlled gold panning and better use of other resources. Members of the community have received training from the CAMPFIRE Association and other community conservation groups on natural resource management. However, the ecotourism camp project faces a number of problems. Lack of management experience is one of the key problems confronting Sunungukai Camp. This is reflected, for example, in the low profits made by the camp over the years. Most of the money generated goes to paying staff and carrying out renovations. As a result the community is not deriving as much benefit from the camp as was anticipated.

The impact of the institutional reforms has also been limited because links between the community and the outside world remains undeveloped. Institutions that are supposed to support the Sunungukai community-based resource management project, i.e. the CAMPFIRE Association, the UMPRDC, Zimbabwe Trust, among others, have been ad hoc at best in their approach. As one visitor observed, "the camp is an excellent idea and has enormous potential as an ecotourism facility. Unfortunately, it appears as though the project is lacking in initiative and requires an approach that will lead to a more profitable operation". As a result, the beautiful Sunungukai Camp is not well marketed and remains underutilized. Data on visitors for the period July 1996 to February 1997 shows a very low occupancy rate with the highest being 31% (July 1996). The average occupancy rate for August 1996-February 1997 is below 10%.

A number of lessons emerge from the case presented here. The principal ones are:

1. The people who depend directly on a given set of resources for their livelihood are the ones with the greatest interest in conserving those resources or using them as sustainably as possible. To create conditions that will permit this to happen, strong social and economic incentives must be created for those people to make decisions that will maintain and improve the quality of natural resources.
2. Self-governing community-based institutions, through which members have a voice in natural resource management decision-making are perhaps the most viable vehicles for sustainable development. The success of such community-based natural resource management institutions requires enabling local populations to take informed initiatives in managing these resources for which a full and active exchange of information at the local, regional, national and international levels is critical. This involves gathering information at the local level regarding the state of the resources and factors affecting the capacity of the local people and institutions to manage it. It also requires effective dissemination and sharing of information among stakeholders.
3. Community-based management of natural resources presupposes that local capacity will be mobilized to effectively assume management responsibility. Serious human resource constraints, inadequate financing arrangements, inefficient management structures and weak management systems variously contribute to CBOs inability to effectively and sustainably manage natural resources. Accordingly, the decentralization and devolution process would be incomplete without investment in human capital, institutions and practices.

The above lessons are applicable in other situations so long as state is committed to a policy of decentralization and devolution of natural resources management to the local level. Also critical is the local history of a particular area or region. Even with the best of intentions, a community-based natural resource management program is not likely to succeed without appropriate incentives and/or guarantees among the national and regional polices and institutions addressing land ownership, tenure, and use rights. In Zimbabwe, the government has been pursuing the policy of decentralization and devolution for some time now. This has been instrumental in facilitating the establishment of independent CBOs. The existence of strong non-governmental organizations such as the CAMPFIRE Association with a proven track record in promoting community-based natural resource management is also part of the enabling environment which could guarantee success if replicated in other situations.

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