ISPI - Institute for International Political Studies

Master in International Cooperation 2006/2007

Development

DEVELOPMENT, HUMAN RIGHTS

AND PARTICIPATION

BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE IN THE UGANDAN CASE

Supervisor: Javier Schunk

Davide Piga
 “Natives are still not receiving the due attention. Listen to them.
It’s what they desire, because they preserved many values going against the trend.
In your countries there are still university institutes dedicated to study natives.
We are not and we don’t want to be "a protected species" as the Brazilian delegate
affirmed, convinced he was making a humanitarian statement.
We are not butterflies, we are thinking human beings. Why you don't accept the idea that
native people could teach something to today's world?”

Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Geneva, UN summit on Human Rights

2
Presentation....................................................................................................................4
Introduction....................................................................................................................5
The theory: indigenous people in juridical context........................................................7
The practice: indigenous people in Ugandan facts........................................................9
From top-down to participatory approach....................................................................11
Conclusions..................................................................................................................14
References....................................................................................................................16

3
Presentation

The aim of this work is to present some remarks on the tight correlation existing between
the concepts of development, human rights and democratic participation, through the
analysis of a reforestation project activated in Uganda in 1994.
In that occasion, a Dutch organization called “FACE Foundation” concluded an agreement
with Uganda authorities, to reforest the foot hills of Mount Elgon. This area constitutes a
national park on which boundary there are several indigenous settlements.
This work aims to analyse that project and its implications on indigenous peoples’ rights,
with a focus on the role and potential of participatory approach in situations where talking
about development means dealing with both global and local needs, sometimes conflicting.

The main parts of this work are: a synthesis of juridical basis concerning indigenous
peoples’ rights; a description of the project and its implications on the concrete situation of
indigenous peoples involved and, finally, some observations about participatory approach
applied to the examined case.

4
Introduction

The Charter of the United Nations does not mention the term “development”, but in its first
article it assigns to international cooperation the duty of “promoting and encouraging
respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms”, as one of the purposes of the
Organization.1
The Universal Declaration on Human Rights of 1948 underlines the importance of
promoting social progress, non-discrimination, participation in public life and the right to
an adequate standard of life.
The 1993 World Conference on Human Rights reaffirmed the interdependence between
development, human rights and fundamental freedoms, democracy and full participation.
The 1994 Agenda for Development, presented by the UN Secretary General Boutros-
Ghali, states that development is implicitly connected to democracy:
“They are linked - paraphrasing the document - because democracy is a fundamental
human right, the advancement of which is in itself an important measure of development.
They are linked because people's participation in the decision-making processes which
affect their lives is a basic tenet of development.”2

This brief historical survey shows that the term “development” assumed, in the years, its
own conceptual framework, right-based, in which there is, and there must be, a close
correlation between development and human rights, and between human rights and the full
democratic participation in decision-making processes.

Uganda is just one of numerous occasions in which this framework hasn’t been respected.
I have chosen to analyse this particular case because of its peculiar, delicate nature of a
project which contains two components as absolute and fundamental as hard to conciliate:
the global problem of climate changes and the local need to safeguard the rights of
indigenous people.

1
Charter of the United Nations, Chapter I, Article 1
2
“An Agenda for Development - Report of the Secretary General”, 6 May 1994, Chapter E, Article 120

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The theory: indigenous people in juridical context

One of the most important documents concerning the rights of indigenous people is the
ILO Convention No. 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal peoples in Independent
Countries, adopted by the General Conference of the International Labour Organization,
in 1989. This document places a particular emphasis on the distinctive contributions of
indigenous and tribal peoples to the cultural diversity and social and ecological harmony of
humankind and to international cooperation and understanding. To protect and to bring out
this potential, the Article 7 of the Convention states that “the peoples concerned […] shall
participate in the formulation, implementation and evaluation of plans and programmes for
national and regional development which affect them directly”, while the Article 6
specifies that it’s up to governments to take measures in order to secure the participation of
indigenous peoples in matters that affect them.
Similar statements are also contained in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples, draft by the Working Group of the Commission on Human Rights, and adopted in
June 2006 by the Human Rights Council.
Another important step toward the acknowledgement of the rights and the potentialities of
indigenous people is contained in a principle affirmed by the Rio Declaration on
Environment and Development, adopted by the Rio Conference on Environment and
Development in 1992: the Principle 22. It says: “Indigenous people and their communities
and other local communities have a vital role in environmental management and
development because of their knowledge and traditional practices. States should recognize
and duly support their identity, culture and interests and enable their effective participation
in the achievement of sustainable development.”
Lastly, two more documents are worth to be mentioned: the former is the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which in the Article 27 suggests the possibility
to adopt positive legal measures of protection and measures to ensure the effective
participation of members of minority communities in decisions that affect them, although
without specifying which measures could be adopted and how could minority communities
participate “effectively” in such decisions.
The latter document is the 1992 UN Declaration on the rights of Persons Belonging to
National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. The Article 2 expresses again

6
and gives further relevance to those concepts which we already observed in all the
documents mentioned above:

“2.2 Persons belonging to minorities have the right to participate effectively in cultural,
religious, social, economic and public life.

2.3 Persons belonging to minorities have the right to participate effectively in decisions on
the national, and where appropriate, regional level concerning the minority to which they
belong or the regions in which they live, in a manner not incompatible with national
legislation”.3

This is just a brief synthesis of the juridical context concerning the rights of indigenous
peoples. There are many other documents drawing upon the ones mentioned above, and all
of them assert the centrality of the right to participation, both in local politics and in
development programs.
Therefore, the juridical frame concerning the rights of indigenous peoples benefits of a
widespread consent and an absolute coherence.
On the contrary, coherence is absent in the effective approach that many local governments
and even the international community adopt in their relations with indigenous peoples.

3
“UN Declaration on the rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic
Minorities”, 1992, Article 2, par 2,3

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The practice: indigenous people in Ugandan facts.

The FACE Foundation, or “Forest Absorbing Carbon Dioxide Emissions”, is a Dutch

organization set up in 1990 by the Board of Management of the Dutch Electricity
Generating Companies.
The aim of this foundation was to plant 150,000 hectares of trees to absorb and store
carbon to offset emissions from a new 600MW coal-fired power station, to be built in the
Netherlands. For this purpose, FACE has five projects worldwide: in Malaysia, in the
Netherlands, in the Czech Republic, in Ecuador and in Uganda.4
In Uganda, FACE signed an agreement in 1994 with the Ugandan authorities to plant trees
on 25,000 hectares inside Mount Elgon National Park, while another Dutch company,
GreenSeat, is currently selling carbon credits from Mount Elgon to people wanting to
offset emissions caused by flying. Between the customers of this company we find Amnesty
International, the British Council and the Body Shop.
The local partner of FACE is the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), the agency
responsible for managing Uganda’s national parks.5 Mount Elgon has been gazetted
national park in 1993, this meant that use rights within the Park were restricted to ‘…
biodiversity conservation; recreation, scenic viewing, scientific research; and any other
[approved] economic activity…’6.
As a consequence, when the government decided to change the status of Mount Elgon to a
national park, the people living within its boundaries completely lost their land rights.
Even so, none of the communities living on Mount Elgon has been consulted when the
decision was taken.
UWA has developed in 2000 the “Mount Elgon General Management Plan”, which
employs two main management strategies: community conservation and law enforcement.
By the first point of view, the plan makes several references to the importance of working
with communities surrounding the park (“Since 1993 Uganda Wildlife Authority has
increased its emphasis on working more closely with communities rather than taking a

4
“A funny place to store carbon: UWA-FACE Foundation’s tree planting project in Mount Elgon National
Park, Uganda”, Lang C. and Byakola T., December 2006, p. 9
5
Ibidem, p.10
6
“Uganda Wildlife Statute No. 14”, Kampala, Uganda Wildlife Authority, 1996

8
strictly law enforcement approach to Park management”7) while, on the other side, it shows
clearly the limit of a plan which is based on the presupposition of “reducing and ultimately
eliminating agricultural encroachment.”8
In this context emerges the second component of the plan: “law enforcement”.
UWA’spark rangers receive paramilitary training and, in order to keep villagers out of the
national park, these rangers use to maintain a brutal regime at Mount Elgon.
In 1993 and 2002, for example, villagers were violently evicted from the national park.9
Furthermore, the UWA-FACE project has not been the only occasion in which there have
been evictions: between 1990 and 1993, more than 130,000 people were evicted from their
homes in forest areas in Uganda, as part of the European Commission’s Natural Forest
Management and Conservation project.
Patricia Feeney, in a 1998 report for Oxfam observes that “Local people were not
considered as participants, stakeholders, or beneficiaries, and the subsequent
implementation of the project did not take account of their immediate needs and interests.
… The EC cannot evade the charge that it agreed to finance this project, knowing that it
would result in massive population displacement, and that it failed to make any provision
either to compensate or resettle the affected communities”10.
In the context of the UWA-FACE project, this approach has resulted in conflicts in which
communities have deliberately destroyed the trees planted around the boundary, with a
considerable impact on project sustainability, regarding which, besides, it is worth to be
considered that the project is based on the assumption that the carbon would be stored for
99 years in Mount Elgon National Park. Now, how could FACE guarantee that its trees will
survive for 99 years, especially in an area day by day contended, where trees have become
the symbol itself of indigenous peoples’ exclusion from a land that was once theirs?

7
“Mt. Elgon National Park General Management Plan”, Executive Summary, Uganda Wildlife Authority,
December 2000
8
“Mt. Elgon National Park General Management Plan”, Executive Summary, Uganda Wildlife Authority,
December 2000
9
“A funny place to store carbon: UWA-FACE Foundation’s tree planting project in Mount Elgon National
Park, Uganda”, Lang C. and Byakola T., December 2006, p. 11
10
“Accountable Aid. Local Participation in Major Projects”, Feeney P., Oxfam, 1998
Publications.

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While on one hand, as we previously observed, the project presents a high level of
criticality concerning the impact on the rights of indigenous peoples, on the other hand it
appears weak also in terms of effectiveness.
It’s interesting to observe that both the problems have their roots in the absent or
inadequate involvement of local communities. In other words, participation appears to be
the key issue for the solution of both the problems with indigenous peoples’ rights and the
functionality of the project itself.

From top-down to participatory approach

State management of national parks through law enforcement strategies is often

characterized by conflicts due to the incompatibility of the development aspirations of
local populations and the preservationist objectives of park authorities.
This is exactly what happened in Uganda: law enforcement strategies have been the main
mechanism for ensuring the conservation of the park, but such strategies are based on the
Western preservationist philosophy that have led to the coining of terms such as ‘fences
and fines’, ‘coercive conservation’ and ‘fortress conservation’11.
UWA adopted a rigorous, preservationist approach to conservation and sought to evict
cultivators and grazers from the Park and stop local residents from entering. This led to
explicit violations of indigenous peoples’ human rights and to the emerging of peculiar
forms of resistance ascribable to the category of the “weapons of weaks” 12, consisting in a
variety of covert and overt weapons that, in this case, park neighbours have developed to
pursue their livelihood goals and resist the conservation agenda promoted by UWA-FACE
project.
The situation is well-synthesised by Cernea and Soltau: “Summing up decades of
experiences with the population displacement approach we argue that this strategy has
exhausted its potential and its credibility, produced much damage, did not fulfil the

11
“Confronting conservation at Mount Elgon, Uganda”, Norgrove L. and Hulme D., Institute for
Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester, 2005
12
“Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance”, Scott, J.C., New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1985

1
expectations placed on it, and compromised the very cause of biodiversity and park/forest
conservation by inflicting aggravated poverty on countless people.”13

How could participation help to solve this situation? First of all, as we can clearly deduce
from juridical context summarized above, when we talk about development and human
rights, participation is a value and an object in itself, therefore it constitutes the
precondition of whatever development project or domestic policy involving local
communities.
Furthermore, policies of inclusion could have constituted a valid mean to tackle the
conflicts with indigenous peoples, and to improve the quality and the sustainability of
strategies for the conservation of the park, nevertheless considering the potential of their
knowledge and traditional practices.
An assumption often disregarded concerning participation is that policies of inclusions
should be authentic, in the sense that they should contemplate the possibility to manage the
decision-making processes from their very beginning.
In the context analyzed above, this would have meant to give indigenous peoples the
opportunity to renegotiate the “conservation agenda”, allowing them to effectively
influence the decision-making processes concerning the strategies for the park
conservation, instead of involving them only in the accomplishment of decisions already
taken, such as the gazetting of the area as a national park and the whole UWA-FACE
project.
A partial participation is hazardous, because it lays itself open to manipulations by who
holds the effective power to decide. In our context, on one hand, this approach may
represent an attempt by park management to impose their conservation ideology on local
communities, but on the other hand, if we extend our vision, a fictitious participation
constitutes a mean that First World conservationists (in this case the FACE Foundation)
could use to continue determining whether locally preferred land uses are compatible with
conservation or not, possibly basing their decisions on their own interests.

13
“National Parks and Poverty Risks: Is Population Resettlement the Solution?”, Cernea Michael M. and
Schmidt-Soltau K., paper presented at the World Parks Congress, Durban, South Africa, 8-17 September
2003.

1
As a result, participatory park management strategies would be unable to change the
relationship existing between managers and neighbours from conflict, to one characterised
by acceptance, negotiation and compromise.
In short, conservation will not be accepted if it is not perceived as being in the best
interests of park neighbours. Like a research team from the Universities of Aberdeen and
Dundee sustain: “It is essential for local people to be involved in management decisions
regarding the National Park. The majority of people acknowledge the value of the forest,
but when the forest is perceived to be owned externally by the National Park, there is no
incentive for people living adjacent to the forest to monitor or intervene in illegal or
destructive activities being carried out in the park.”14
And as a result we will observe, with every probability, hostile attitudes from authorities,
with massive human rights violations and policies, anyhow, bound to fail.

14
“Land use and population pressure within and adjacent to Mount Elgon National Park: Implications and
potential management strategies”, Ingram A. and Reed M., Project Elgon, Leeds University.

1
Conclusions

The first consideration we can draw from this brief paper is that, regarding development,
the importance of participation cannot be neglected without falling into serious
contradictions, first of all about human rights, but also regarding the effectiveness of
whatever development project involving local communities.
For this reason, as Lang and Byakola suggest in their report, a way forward for Ugandan
case should be “addressing the land rights of the people living in and around the park. The
first step towards achieving this is to acknowledge that the boundary of the national park
(as well as much of the park itself) is a highly contested zone. Any top-down solution to
the park boundary will result in further conflicts between park management and local
people. The FACE Foundation is contributing to the tension because the carbon stored in
its trees must be protected from damage from local communities. … There is an urgent
need to start from the perspective of the rights of the people living in and around Mount
Elgon National Park.”15

A final, less immediate observation concerns the nature of the UWA-FACE project: as we
said in the beginning of this paper, the UWA-FACE project is born to compensate the
emissions derived from the construction of a new coal-fired power station to be built in the
Netherlands. More in general, the project originate from the “carbon credit” system,
established by Kyoto Protocol.
According to the Protocol, every state can emit a fixed amount of CO2, which if different
from country to country. This amount is called “carbon credit”. States which emit less CO2
than they are allowed to, can sell their amounts to other less efficient states, through a
market system called “Carbon Trading”.
Therefore, if we cannot reduce the emissions in our country, we can compensate our
negative amount by buying carbon credits from abroad.
For many in the North this is a dream come true: we can continue our massively polluting
lifestyles with a clean conscience. But, as George Monbiot points out, “Any scheme that
persuades us we can carry on polluting delays the point at which we grasp the nettle of

15
“A funny place to store carbon: UWA-FACE Foundation’s tree planting project in Mount Elgon National
Park, Uganda”, Lang C. and Byakola T., December 2006, p. 19

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climate change and accept that our lives have to change. But we cannot afford to delay.
The big cuts have to be made right now, and the longer we leave it, the harder it will be to
prevent runaway climate change from taking place. By selling us a clean conscience, the
offset companies are undermining the necessary political battle to tackle climate change at
home.”16

16
“Selling Indulgences. The trade in carbon offsets is an excuse for business as usual”, Monbiot G., The
Guardian, 18 October 2006.

1
References

CERNEA M., SCHMIDT-SOLTAU K.,“National Parks and Poverty Risks: Is Population

Resettlement the Solution?”, paper presented at the World Parks Congress, Durban, South Africa,
8-17 September 2003.
http://www.iucn.org/themes/wcpa/wpc2003/pdfs/Programme/workshops/newways/cerneasoltaupre
s.pdf

FEENEY P., “Accountable Aid. Local Participation in Major Projects”, Oxfam Publications, 1998.

HULME D., NORGROVE L., “Confronting conservation at Mount Elgon, Uganda”, Institute for
Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester, 2005.
http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/staff/documents/ParkingResistanceandresistingtheparknove
mber2005.pdf

INGRAM A., REED M., “Land use and population pressure within and adjacent to Mount Elgon
National Park: Implications and potential management strategies”, Project Elgon, Leeds
University, no date.
http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/misc/elgon/land_use.html

LANG C., BYAKOLA T.,“A funny place to store carbon: UWA-FACE Foundation’s tree planting
project in Mount Elgon National Park, Uganda”, 2006
http://www.sinkswatch.org/pubs/Place_Store_Carbon.pdf

MENCHU TUM R., “Rigoberta, i maya e il mondo”, con la collaborazione di Dante Liano e
Gianni Minà, Giunti Ed., 1997.

MONBIOT G., “Selling Indulgences. The trade in carbon offsets is an excuse for business as
usual” in The Guardian, 18 October 2006.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/10/19/selling-indulgences

SCOTT J.C., “Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance”, Yale University Press,
New Haven, 1985.

“International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights”, Art. 27, 1966.

http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm

“ILO Convention No. 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal peoples in Independent Countries”,
adopted on 27 June 1989 by the General Conference of the International Labour Organisation at its
seventy-sixth session entry into force 5 September 1991.
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/62.htm

“Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”, draft by the Working group of the Commission
on Human Rights, adopted in June 2006 by the Human Rights Council.
http://www.usask.ca/nativelaw/ddir.html

“Rio Declaration on Environment and Development”, adopted by the Rio Conference on

Environment and Development, 1992.
http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163

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“Declaration on the rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic
Minorities”, adopted by UN General Assembly resolution 47/135 of 18 December 1992.
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/d_minori.htm

“Uganda Wildlife Statute No. 14”, Uganda Wildlife Authority, Kampala,1996.

“Mt. Elgon National Park General Management Plan - Executive Summary”, Uganda Wildlife
Authority, December 2000.

“Carbon trading: a critical conversation on climate change, privatisation and power”,

Development Dialogue No. 48, September 2006.
http://www.dhf.uu.se/pdffiler/DD2006_48_carbon_trading/carbon_trading_web.pdf

“BEP Indigenous Development Report - The right of indigenous people participation in

development – An overview of international human rights instruments, Institute for human rights”,
Kristian Myntti, Abo Akademy University, Abo/Turku, Finland, 2002.
http://www.abo.fi/instut/imr/norfa/kristian_bep.pdf

“Supplemental Report on the First Periodic Report of Uganda to the African Commission on
Human and Peoples’ Rights State Party report”, 30 May 2006.
http://www.forestpeoples.org/documents/africa/uganda_af_com_supp_rep_oct06_eng.pdf