Interview with Alex Ebang Mbélé, president of NADA in Gabon

Hello Alex. You are the President of the NADA organisation in Gabon. Can you tell us a bit about NADA, and more specifically about the story behind its creation, which seems to me to be rather atypical?

I’m the president of the Nsombou Abalghe-Dzal association (NADA) and the APAC consortium’s focal point in Gabon. NADA is a community organisation based in Makokou, in the province of Ogooué Ivindo, in the north-east of Gabon.

This is a very special region. Located at the heart of the Congo Basin, it is a lung for the planet and a veritable island of biodiversity. It is home to key areas of biodiversity in Gabon, such as the Belinga, Sassamongo and Mbengoué mountains, and as such is part of the famous TRIDOM Landscape. The area includes two UNESCO World Heritage sites (Lopé and Ivindo national parks), the Mwagna national park and is connected to the Minkébé national park.

This area has long been home to a large number of logging and mining companies, and artisanal gold panning has accelerated in recent years. A number of community forests have been recognised for the benefit of the communities that depend on these areas, and many forest resources such as bushmeat and non-timber forest products (NTFPs) are found within them. The area also contains many important cultural and ancestral sites. In short, this is a very dynamic area in terms of the players and forces involved, where numerous uses of the land and forest are observed, sometimes in conflict with each other.

After two years of implementing projects with Duke University, the communities of para-ecologists involved in the projects were critical of the limitations of the duration of the projects and the fact that they were dealing with only one aspect, despite a diversity of issues, and expressed a strong desire to organise themselves endogenously and independently in order to put forward their traditional ecological knowledge within a broader framework that fully belonged to them. At the time, the region had no local organisation capable of bringing them together and ensuring that their voices were heard in the governance and management of natural resources.

Given that, as their environmental education trainer, and in association with my Canadian colleague who was co-directing the Duke project, we were receptive to these signals and agreed to join forces with the team of para-ecologists to think about creating an organisation that would respond more fully to the aspirations of the communities. After much thought, NADA came into being at its first General Meeting held in December 2019.

At its inception, the NADA team consisted of 21 members and it now has 27. Its vision and missions have evolved considerably in recent years, in line with the dynamic nature of conservation issues around the world.

As with any civil society organisation, your work is part of a context, that of conservation in Central Africa, with its specific characteristics. In this context, can you tell us a little about what you think is special about your approach? How is it potentially different, and does it promote a new, innovative vision of biodiversity conservation?

Our work takes place in a particular context where, in my opinion, state conservation of natural resources is problematic and the legal framework governing forestry needs to be updated. Communities no longer want to be mere spectators in the exploitation and management of their natural resources, and a growing number of technical and financial partners want to see their funding arrive more directly on the ground, within these same communities.

What’s more, community forestry in Gabon is often summed up as just ‘community forests’, but the subject goes far beyond this, and this tool, where the government allocates these portions of forest to communities that request them, is primarily concerned with the exploitation of timber resources, in other words ‘logging’, where many other issues exist within the region’s rural territories.

As far as NADA is concerned, we are trying to bring a number of innovations to bear on the issue of community forestry in Gabon, with a view to inspiring practices at a sub-regional, and ultimately international, level.

With regard to village hunting and the bushmeat crisis in the Congo Basin, we are trying to support communities in their thinking about endogenous resource management. The aim here is to support a process of reflection, to see how the rules for wildlife management and governance can be rethought by and for Gabonese communities.

We are also working to document and recognise Indigenous and Community Heritage Areas and Territories (ICCAs), and to ensure that the legal framework for protected areas in Gabon incorporates and recognises this concept. To this end, NADA, in collaboration with the Water and Forests administration and technical and financial partners, has just carried out an analysis of the legal frameworks in the Congo Basin that take into account APACs, and organised the first national workshop on this issue. A major result of the Gabonese government’s commitment to recognising APACs is that Gabon has just joined the global APAC fund via the UNDP’s SGP microfinance programme.

Finally, we are also working on redefining the methodology for community mapping in Gabon. We are trying to propose innovations in this area, in order to better capture the rural forest estate using a robust method that we define as community-based, rather than participatory, because the areas to be mapped belong to the communities.

In addition to the issue of APACs and participatory mapping, you have also worked on the issue of collective management of village hunting, taking care to conduct research on this subject. Are there any particularly interesting lessons learned on these three aspects that you would like to highlight?

Ultimately, the issues of ICCAs, community-based hunting management, and community mapping are closely intertwined.

Hunting takes place within a well-defined territory, and consequently, recognizing ICCAs helps to legally secure the areas where communities engage in this subsistence activity.

Thus, we support the recognition of community-based protected areas in a broad sense, ensuring that community territories are legally recognized and that all ecosystems, biodiversity, and cultural richness within these territories are sustainably governed and managed by the communities themselves. In this perspective, hunting becomes an activity comparable to the harvesting of non-timber forest products (NTFPs).

Wildlife is indeed an exhaustible resource, sometimes facing significant pressure from Indigenous and local communities themselves. If this resource were to become scarce, these communities would be the first to suffer the consequences.

To find sustainable solutions, we believe it is crucial to support these communities in their reflections, allowing them to contribute endogenously rather than excluding them and imposing solutions that do not align with their daily realities. As a result of this participatory process, each activity will be regulated through a simple management plan that follows sustainability principles for resource use.

Community conservation, therefore, refers to the appropriation of conservation efforts by the communities themselves, enabling them to take action in response to the challenges they face. Our experience has shown that hunting regulations defined and adopted by the communities themselves significantly reduce pressure on bushmeat resources.

To conclude, is there a particular achievement since the creation of NADA that makes you especially proud and that you would like to share with us? In the same vein, what would you like to see accomplished in two years that would make you especially happy?

NADA’s progress in the field of biodiversity conservation and our work on community forestry issues make me particularly proud. One of our major achievements has been contributing to the recognition of the ICCA of the Massaha community, with the support of our various partners (administration, ICCA, PKF, and Rights and Resources Initiative). This represents a true victory for the community, and ultimately, for the country and the global conservation movement.

I am especially proud of our ability to innovate in everything we do. I believe we are pioneers in Gabon—the first to speak about ICCAs and community-conserved areas in a broader sense. Organizations such as PPI, RRI, MULAGO, and OTTERFONDS support us in this mission. We are also innovating by promoting a new approach to community mapping. Additionally, NADA is part of the working group focused on improving the regulatory framework for wildlife management in Gabon, once again pushing forward innovative conservation perspectives.

NADA is benefiting from the Canopée program on leadership for civil society organizations involved in community conservation in the Congo Basin, an initiative developed by WELL GROUNDED and MALIASILI. We are also members of the Global ICCA Consortium and REPALEAC. Our visibility continues to grow. Recently, we co-organized a webinar with PPI on “Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) and Innovation in Participatory Mapping in Gabon: NADA’s Experience.”

NADA is actively collaborating with institutions and organizations such as DGEDD, DGFAP, DCAJ, IRET, UNDP, Maliasili, the University of Lausanne, Panthera, WWF, Ivindo FM, PROGRAM, NGUDU DIMBU, OELO, TrCom, Keva Initiative, Ma Terre Mon Droit, JFC, and many others. I am also very proud that Gabon has recently joined the Global ICCA Fund. These signs of growing recognition bring me deep joy.

In the next two years, I hope that the hard work of the NADA team will be fairly and sustainably rewarded. Achieving financial stability and securing one or more partners to help us finalize the mapping tool currently in development are key challenges for us.

I deeply hope that Gabon’s legal framework for protected areas will officially recognize ICCAs and that we will be able to finalize our model, allowing our work to be scaled up. We aim to invest in training to ensure our team meets our ambitions, as well as to develop a training program for community-conserved area managers.

Finally, we are currently reflecting on the pressing issue of human-elephant conflicts. We believe that forestry and mining operators should be involved in compensating affected communities. We propose integrating this compensation into the contractual obligations of these companies toward communities. There is a clear correlation between resource exploitation in an area and such conflicts. Communities suffer collateral damage, and those responsible for resource extraction should provide compensation. This is a new challenge for our team.

Thank you, PPI, for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts.