Multiple Realities in Abijata Shalla Lakes National Park

Abijata Shalla Lakes National Park (ASLNP) shares many of the common conservation issues facing protected areas in Ethiopia: contested land use and resource ownership rights, human settlement in and around protected areas, as... [ view full abstract ]

Abijata Shalla Lakes National Park (ASLNP) shares many of the common conservation issues facing protected areas in Ethiopia: contested land use and resource ownership rights, human settlement in and around protected areas, as well as lack of congruity between conservation priorities and pressing livelihood demands. Since its establishment in 1971, the park's management and conservation endeavors have been haunted by complex and seemingly irresolvable problems stemming from the multiplicity of the actors and their diverse resource claims and practices. The approach taken in this study calls for a re-conceptualization of natural resources and how they are to be managed. To this end we set off our analysis of the complexity of the conflict in ASLNP by loosening the seemingly established ground of how the problems are defined. We employed the Actor Network Theory (ANT) inspired insight of ‘multiple enactments’ (Mol, 1999) which indicates that natural resources themselves are multiple objects depending on who, how and what methods are used in defining and performing them. We examined three enactments of natural resources: 'Livelihood', 'Industry' and 'Conservation'. Within each of these realities, there were diverse set of actors, practices and discourses that interrelated in diverse ways, leading to a series of conflicting and collating relationships within and between different enactments. The ongoing contentions between the ‘Livelihood’ and ‘Conservation’ networks brought about new actors forging ‘tourism’ as a new enactment. The conceptualization of natural resources as having multiple versions sheds new light in the existing conflict at ASLNP with important implications for natural resources management endeavors. It also unravels broader context of the issues and contingencies at stake including land administration system, the role of the government, economic and industrial development policies and their relationships with conservation endeavors and priorities.