Environmental Justice and Human Well-being Bundles in Protected Areas: An assessment in Campo Ma’an Landscape, Cameroon
Ahmad Dhiaulhaq, Catherine Hepp, Laetitia M. Adjoffoin, Corine Ehowe
Equity and well-being have been increasingly used as key considerations in assessing the impacts and trade-offs of protected-area conservation on local populations. In this paper we incorporate human well-being bundles to the environmental justice (EJ) framework to get a more holistic understanding of the justice impacts of conservation beyond the usual EJ’s tripartite dimensions. We ask: how does the creation of protected areas affect well-being bundles and perception of justice of local and indigenous communities? We draw our conclusions based on household surveys, FGDs and in-depth interviews across three sites adjacent to the Campo Ma’an National Park (CMNP) in Cameroon. Our (preliminary) results suggest that while provisions of some basic material (e.g. water quality, physical health) and social relationships domains are relatively high, justice domains (e.g. recognition, participation and distribution of benefits) and life satisfaction are perceived to be low. This lack of sense of justice was associated with the decrease of freedom in terms of ability to access common resources, ability to fulfill food needs, ability to perform traditional/cultural practices, and the lack of compensation and unresolved human-wildlife conflicts. Our comparative analysis reveals the variations in the well-being bundles in each of the three villages, influenced by various factors such as demography, cultural traditions, ethnicity, and other political-economic contexts. These findings highlight the need for a more integrated consideration of justice and human well-being when co-constructing and re-imagining future actions to improve the quality of life of local inhabitants alongside sustainability goals in Cameroon and beyond.
XIX Biennial IASC Conference
Nairobi, Kenya
23 June 2023
Panel 9.2 – Conservation, Environmental Justice to Re-Imagine the Commons in Africa
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