SULEDO Forest: Cattle, Conservation & Co-existence
An exploration of the relationship between pastoralism and conservation in SULEDO ‘village land forest reserve’ (village owned and managed). Some of the specific questions we wanted to answer were: how are pastoralism and conservation governed together in SULEDO? What factors do stakeholders perceive to be important for the apparent success of this governance? Who benefits and who loses out under these governance arrangements and how? What land use conflicts emerge and how are they (un)resolved?
With the screenings of the film, we wanted to understand how the film would be interpreted by audiences in a distant district of Tanzania, in which land use conflicts between pastoralists, farmers and forest managers are prevalent. We encountered various challenges throughout the planning, production and post-production. Perhaps the main one was trying to present a coherent narrative, presenting SULEDO as a relatively successful case study of pastoralism-conservation co-existence, without concealing the inevitable challenges that exist within a complex and highly political social and ecological system. This was complicated by our decision to only use words of the interviewees without adding text or overdubs written by us, to increase the accessibility to audiences with low literacy levels and less familiarity with on screen text. I’m unconvinced that this tension is satisfactorily resolved in the final version, particularly in this shorter cut, but we stand by our decision to include the interviews from those who feel marginalised by current arrangements. The expansion of Tanzania’s protected conservation area estate has resulted in the exclusion of pastoralists and other smallholders from land that is essential to their livelihoods. In opposition to these injustices, this film provides a counterpoint to dominant discourses used to support the exclusion of pastoralists from forested landscapes (i.e. ‘fortress conservation’).