Yankey's dilemma: conservation versus the people of Ghana

The past 20 years have seen a shift in conservation approaches to realize the importance of people in conservation and wildlife management (CWM). To this extent, in most conservation circles the concept of community involvement is no longer debated. The following factors have influenced the growth of CWM, especially in Africa: (i) recent developments in postcolonial governments have made them unable to manage and control the use of natural resources in the restrictive manner mandated by the legislation of the colonial past still in place; (ii) successes, particularly in southern Africa, of approaches that involved devolution of greater access rights and responsibilities to communities have led to these approaches being used by other countries; (iii) donor agencies, encouraged by the success of these approaches, have allocated more of their resources to community-based projects; and (iv) changes in international perceptions have been heavily influenced by the growing voice of the "South" in international fora. While there has been some success, there have also been failures. In Ghana, there has been considerable effort to develop programs that incorporate community aspirations into specific objectives; one inherent problem with these programs-not exclusive to Ghana-is the tendency for conservation programs to try to fit community aspirations into conservation objectives as opposed to finding ways of using conservation to help fulfill community aspirations. When community-based programs fail to recognize this, they are generally unable to deliver on their expected outputs. Some critics have used this to dismiss the community approach, which poses a dangerous reversion to a paradigm that has significantly failed in Africa, and much of the developing world, especially in regard to wildlife outside of protected areas.