Catrina A. Mackenzie

Spatial patterns of illegal resource extraction in Kibale National Park, Uganda

SUMMARY Conservation policy typically excludes people from national parks and manages encroachment by law enforcement. However, local people continue to extract resources from protected areas by boundary encroachment and poaching. This paper quantifies the patterns of illegal resource extraction from Kibale National Park in Uganda, the demand for Park resources by communities bordering the Park, and examines whether designated resource access agreements reduce illegal extraction. Sections of the Park boundary were examined and human entry trails, wood extraction, livestock grazing, and animal poaching signs were quantified. Levels of illegal extraction were compared with the demand for and admitted illegal access to resources inside the Park, collected in a survey of households located near the Park. Extraction was also compared between villages with and without negotiated resources access agreements. The most wanted and extracted resource from the Park was wood for fuel and construction. Implementation of resource access agreements with local community associations was found to be an effective means of reducing illegal extraction, but only if the association members profited from the agreement.

Dear Diary: Early Career Geographers Collectively Reflect on Their Qualitative Field Research Experiences

After completing a qualitative methods course in geography, we moved classroom discussions into practice. While undertaking graduate fieldwork in sites across the globe, we participated in critical, reflexive journaling. Whereas journal writing is often private, we shared our entries, aiming to facilitate rigour while concurrently exploring similarities and differences. We became conscious of common themes including ethical dilemmas, power relations and researcher fatigue. In this paper, we critically analyse these experiences, examining the strategies implemented to resolve such predicaments. We argue that reflexive group journaling during fieldwork is a valuable learning tool which could be introduced into many research-active curricula.

Demand and proximity: drivers of illegal forest resource extraction.

Illegal extraction from protected areas is often shaped by the surrounding socio-economic landscape. We coupled village-scale socio-economic parameters collected using household surveys with measured levels of illegal resource extraction proximate to study villages to investigate the socio-economic drivers of illegal extraction from Kibale National Park, Uganda. The level of illegal tree harvesting and the number of illegal entry trails into the Park were driven by subsistence demand from villages adjacent to the Park and by for-profit extraction to supply local urban markets, whereas grazing in the Park was linked to high livestock ownership. Capital asset wealth, excluding livestock, was found to mitigate illegal resource extraction from the Park. We also found high human population density to coincide spatially with park-based tourism, research and carbon sequestration employment opportunities. Conservation strategies should be integrated with national policy to meet the needs of local communities and to manage urban demand to reduce illegal extraction from protected areas.

Spatially Explicit Data: Stewardship and Ethical Challenges in Science

Sharing spatially specific data, which includes the characteristics and behaviors of individuals, households, or communities in geographical space, raises distinct technical and ethical challenges.

Advocating beyond the academy: dilemmas of communicating relevant research results

Drawing from experiences in Northern Indigenous Canada, Uganda, and Vietnam, we discuss the challenges encountered while trying to communicate relevant results to local communities with whom we work. Wavering between participatory and advocacy research, we explore how we grapple with finding the right audience with whom to share results, our attempts to craft communication to be relevant within specific contexts, and dilemmas over self-censorship. We also document our struggles to manage our own expectations and those of the communities with whom we work regarding the ability of our research to broker change. This article emerged from our frustration at wanting to be accountable to our interviewee communities, but finding few academic articles that go beyond ideals to examine how researchers often struggle to meet these expectations. While participatory approaches are increasingly mainstreamed in social science work, we argue that advocacy research can be a more appropriate response to community needs in certain cases.

Filtered meaning: appreciating linguistic skill, social position and subjectivity of interpreters in cross-language research

Arriving in a foreign country with little knowledge of local languages presents the researcher with significant linguistic challenges. Our in-country contacts may suggest potential interpreters for us to hire, but how do we know if these interpreters can fluently speak the languages of our participants? Can we, lacking fluency in local languages, understand when the social position and lived experiences of our interpreter modify the discourses we seek to analyse? Drawing from my human geography research experience in Uganda, this article aims to share strategies to assess the linguistic skills of the interpreter and to understand his or her social position and subjectivity. Uniquely, this paper highlights differences in interpretation and links these differences to the assistants’ social position and subjectivity, highlighting the need to acknowledge that meaning can be filtered by interpretation and requiring that critical reflection be broadened to encompass interpreters in cross-language research.

Chasing baboons or attending class: protected areas and childhood education in Uganda

The influence of protected areas on childhood education is often assumed to be positive, and integrated conservation and development programmes (ICDPs) typically support childhood education by building schools, providing scholarships and improving education quality, which in turn helps build conservation attitudes. In this paper, the impact of a protected area on childhood education is examined within the broader socioeconomic context of villages bordering Kibale National Park (Uganda). Survey data from households and primary schools indicated ICDPs improved primary school enrolment and education for girls. However, crop raiding by Park-protected animals reduced the probability of boys completing four years of primary education because they were preferentially held back from school to guard crops. Since population growth around protected areas is a threat to conservation, and since extending education for both boys and girls helps reduce birth rates and improve future employment opportunities, helping children attain primary school completion supports both conservation and development objectives. The findings highlight the need to continue supporting childhood education near protected areas; however, additional focus should be placed on boys’ educational attainment, and the need for wildlife authorities, governments and conservation organizations to invest in crop-raiding defences to mitigate crop-raiding losses.

Park isolation in anthropogenic landscapes: land change and livelihoods at park boundaries in the African Albertine Rift

Landscapes are changing rapidly in regions where rural people live adjacent to protected parks and reserves. This is the case in highland East Africa, where many parks are increasingly isolated in a matrix of small farms and settlements. In this review, we synthesize published findings and extant data sources to assess the processes and outcomes of park isolation, with a regional focus on people’s livelihoods at park boundaries in the Ugandan Albertine Rift. The region maintains exceptionally high rural population density and growth and is classified as a global biodiversity hotspot. In addition to the impacts of increasing numbers of people, our synthesis highlights compounding factors—changing climate, increasing land value and variable tenure, and declining farm yields—that accelerate effects of population growth on park isolation and widespread landscape change. Unpacking these processes at the regional scale identifies outcomes of isolation in the unprotected landscape—high frequency of human-wildlife conflict, potential for zoonotic disease transmission, land and resource competition, and declining wildlife populations in forest fragments. We recommend a strategy for the management of isolated parks that includes augmenting outreach by park authorities and supporting community needs in the human landscape, for example through healthcare services, while also maintaining hard park boundaries through traditional protectionism. Even in cases where conservation refers to biodiversity in isolated parks, landscape strategies must include an understanding of the local livelihood context in order to ensure long-term sustainable biodiversity protection.

Spatial and temporal patterns in primary school enrolment and exam achievement in Rural Uganda

ABSTRACT Using a mixed-methods approach, including qualitative, quantitative and Geographic Information Science methods, we assessed the primary school landscape around a protected area in Western Uganda. Data from a household survey, interviews and standardized school examinations were mapped to visualize spatial patterns in enrolment and academic achievement. We found children on average were starting school at age nine, but started to dropout as early as age 14; especially orphaned boys. Twenty of 36 schools demonstrated improving examination results from 2004 to 2013, although in one district improvements were lacking. Girls traditionally perform poorer than boys on exams in Uganda, but we found girls’ exam scores were catching-up. Support from one non-governmental organization with a long-term local presence was improving academic achievement. The use of Geographic Information Science provided spatially explicit recommendations to guide local policy actions for primary school education.

“Dear Diary” revisited: reflecting on collaborative journaling

The genesis of this article was a request from the Journal of Geography in Higher Education to provide a reflection piece about our article ‘Dear Diary: Early Career Geographers Collectively Reflect on their Qualitative Field Research Experiences’ (2011) that won the journals biennial award for 2009–2011. This request has afforded us the opportunity to reconnect as a team and, through self-directed interviews, to reflect upon how writing ‘Dear Diary’ continues to influences our current perceptions of journaling in qualitative research. More specifically, we focus here on the relationships between journaling and our approach to research, team-based collaboration, and our current teaching and mentoring practices. We all continue to keep fieldwork journals and perceive reflexive journaling as a crucial tool for qualitative methods and other collaborative ventures.