ABSTRACT
Over the past 30 years, a wide range of conservation approaches have been implemented in Madagascar, including anti-fire policies and protected area gazetting (see Chapter 7 by Kull and Chapter 10 by Virah-Sawmy et al.); Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) in the early 1990s; decentralization and community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) and conservation through the transfer of resource management rights to local communities since the late 1990s; and marketbased approaches during the last decade (see Chapter 13 by Brimont and Bidaud). CBNRM through management transfers is still seen as playing an important role in forest management, underpinning most of the new protected areas gazetted since 2003 (see Chapter 10 by Virah-Sawmy et al.). This chapter tells the story of resource management transfers in Madagascar. It reviews the ideals behind the policies and shows that these ideals were quickly perverted by the agencies in charge of their implementation. Looking at the social, environmental and economic impact of management transfers, we reveal conflicting agendas that might now require renegotiation if community conservation is to work in Madagascar. We show that the Malagasy case is consistent with a general pattern observed worldwide in the implementation of decentralized natural resource management policies, and question the feasibility of such policies within the current global environmental regime. The chapter reviews a series of case studies and builds on the field experience of the authors, who have all been involved in the design, implementation and/or evaluation of management transfers in Madagascar. We use a series of snapshots, taken in various locations in Madagascar from various angles by authors belonging to diverse academic disciplines (geography, anthropology, economics, agronomy, natural resources, law), to tell the story of management transfers as they happen on the ground and in a holistic way.
