COMMUNITY BASED NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT INSTITUTIONS FOR WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT: CASE STUDY OF MAPFUNGAUTSI CATCHMENT IN ZIMBABWE

Abstract

Community Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM) institutions have been adopted worldwide by the governments, NGOs and donors in the management of Common Pool Resources (CPR) of natural resources. The CBNRM institutions are diverse and vary from one place to another and as such no single or standard toolkit can be applied to all of them uniformly. The present study assessed the performance of CBNRM institutions in the management of Mapfungautsi catchment in Zimbabwe using the Ostrom (1990) design principles of common pool regimes in the management of natural resources. Mapfungautsi catchment is located in Gokwe South District in the Midlands Province of Zimbabwe. The catchment lies between latitudes 18˚10’ S and 18˚40’S and longitudes 28˚30’E and 29˚10’E, enclosing a total area of 821 km². The catchment is of conservation importance being a source of 4 rivers namely Ngondoma river, Sengwa river, Mbumbusi river and Lutope river. These rivers are one of the major sources of water to the country’s only hydropower station, at Lake Kariba. There has been an increase in the number of illegal settlers in the catchment and approximately 1630 households (9780 people) are estimated to be living in the catchment areas illegally. This has fuelled environmental degradation with activities such as deforestation, stream bank/bed cultivation, veld fires, timber poaching, over grazing and over harvesting of non-timber forest produce among others. The catchment was gazetted in the year 1954 with the management responsibility vested in the Forestry Commission (FC) of Zimbabwe, which is a government department. In 1995, a co management arrangement, in which the community and other stakeholders were free to partner with the Forestry Commission, was initiated with the funding from by Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). The community participated through the fifteen 7-member Resource management Committees (RMCs) established. The project was later handed over to FC and the community, after CIDA withdrawal of support. Questionnaires, interviews, Landsat remote sensing images, field observations and catchment management documents were used to gather the perceptions of the stakeholders, the changes in land use land cover and the current status of the catchment. SPSS version 16.00 software was used to analyse the quantitative data collected.