The impact of development interventions on community based natural resource management: Cases from Kenya and Namibia

Abstract

Two key variables, space and gender, are used to examine the hypothesis that development interventions change who has access to, and control over, natural resources in the locality of the intervention.

The impacts of development interventions on the natural resource management systems that exist among the local community prior to the intervention are examined. Development interventions enter a space within which certain resources are controlled by specific interest groups, and these interventions cause changes in the space. Rural women and men, individually and as communities, develop strategies based on the resources they have access to and control over. Therefor any change in those resources will have an impact on their opportunities to control development in their own community.

The concept of Specific Interest Space (SIS) has been developed to identify the space an individual or a community perceives itself to have control over and within. The analysis is informed by two case studies; Bura Fuelwood Plantation Project, Kenya, and Water Supply and Sanitation Project in Ohangwena Region, Namibia.