Theatre and the Law with the Borana Community

Natural Justice has been working with its Kenyan partner, Kivulini Trust, to support the Borana Pastoralist community assert their traditional land and resource rights. Through this process the Borana have been developing a bio-cultural community protocol (BCP) to highlight their community vision, traditional land and resource use based on their customary laws. During the week of the 19th of August, members of the Borana community, including elders, women and youth met in Isiolo town, Kenyato continue their BCP development through the use of theatre techniques. These interactive techniques facilitated discussion on issues facing the community and proposed positive solutions for change.

The visioning experience included setting out where the community is now, where it plans to be in the future and concrete steps on how it wishes to get there. The process was facilitated by community theater expert, Hjalmar Joffre-Eichhorn, who has also been working with Natural Justice and the National Khoi-San Council in South Africa.

This group of the Borana community then travelled to Marsabit County to attend the Kalacha Festival, a gathering of over 600 pastoralists from northern Kenya. During the festival the group performed a short play they had written during the week of training, which highlighted real issues affecting the Borana and other pastoralist communities. The audience included approximately 400 pastoralists and members of the Marsabit County Government, including the Governor. Using forum theatre techniques, the audience was invited to participate by proposing solutions to address the issues they had just witnessed in the play.

During the festival, Gino Cocchiaro (Natural Justice) and Hassan Roba (Kivulini Trust) also held a panel session on pastoralism in Kenya, focusing on community land rights.


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Protocols for Sustainable Harvesting in Protected Areas Workshop

Gino Cocchiaro and Cath Traynor of Natural Justice, and partners Kruger to Canyons Management Committee and Kukula Traditional Health Practitioners Association (KTHPA) attended the Protocols for Sustainable Harvesting in Protected Areas Workshop hosted by Wits University Rural Facility on 13th July 2013. The workshop was the first of a series to start a conversation to achieve a common understanding concerning the possibility for traditional healers to access protected areas in order to harvest medicinal plants. A variety of stakeholders including protected area managers - both national, provincial and private, traditional healers, civil society organisations, and academics attended.

Twenty-seven million (72%) South Africans use traditional medicines and the industry has an annual turnover of more than 3.2 billion Rands. Over 2,000 plant species (10%) of the South African flora is utilised in traditional medicines, and many of these species are declining. Gino Cocchiaro presented on biocultural community protocols (BCP), including the BCP of the Kukula Traditional Health Practitioners Association and Rodney Sibuyi (KTHPA) presented on the history of the Kukula Traditional Health Practitioners Association and discussed some challenges regarding accessing traditional medicinal plant species and their management. South African National Parks highlighted parks-based protocols for non-commercial harvesting, and park objectives concerning plant harvesting which includes promoting sustainable use, alternatives, reducing illegal harvesting and monitoring. Difficulties managing traditional medicinal harvesting was illustrated by the case of Warburgia salitaris (Pepperbark tree), the bark is a popular traditional medicine. Kruger National Park has two of the largest surviving populations of this endangered tree, and recent increases in commercial harvesting pressures have resulted in collection methods changing form the sustainable harvest of small strips of bark to ringbarking trees which results in their death. Issues raised included defining ‘communities’, identifying benefits, who has rights to them and their equitable sharing, costs of access, unity and consensus among beneficiary groups. Important sustainability issues included determining what is ecologically sustainable, adaptative strategies, and addressing situations where demand is greater than supply. The outputs of the workshop will feed into further workshops which will aim to include a greater diversity of stakeholder groups.

Kukula Traditional Healers Practitioners Management Committee Meeting

Gino Cocchiaro and CathTraynor (Natural Justice) attended the Kukula Traditional Health Practitioners Association Management Committee Meeting on 15th July in Bushbuckridge, South Africa. During the meeting with the healers, Biocultural Community Protocol was revisited, and current concerns of the group discussed. Key concerns centred around recognition, access to plants, loss of knowledge, and livelihoods issues. Participants summarised the groups main activities since the formation of the Kukula Traditional Healers group which included discussions with government departments, local private nature reserves, training on prior, informed consent, and development of the traditional knowledge commons pool – a platform to share knowledge among themselves. Participants discussed the future workplan and various ideas and activities to address their priority concerns.

ABS and BCP Workshop in Zeerust, South Africa

A workshop on the international legislative framework and the South African domestic laws relating to access and benefit sharing was held in Zeerust, South Africa on 9 and 10 April 2013. This workshop was the second of three workshops in a pilot project funded by the Department of Science and Technology and the National Research Institute, and organised by the Indigenous Knowledge Systems unit of the Medical Research Council of South Africa. Laureen Manuel and Stephanie Booker of Natural Justice conducted the workshop, which included presentations and training on biocultural community protocols (BCPs).

The participants of the workshop included committee members and youth from the Mokgola community in Zeerust. The topics covered the international and domestic law on Access and Benefit Sharing, specifically the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol, and the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act and Bioprospecting, Access and Benefit Sharing Regulations of South Africa.

The presentation and group discussions on BCPs revealed some community tensions which ended in concurrence that there needs to be more discussion within the community to reach agreement on certain issues.

Major Publication on Multi-Stakeholder Processes

Natural Justice’s co-facilitator of the African BCP Initiative, ETC COMPAS, has released a significant new publication, “Power Dynamics in Multi-Stakeholder Processes: A Balancing Act,” together with six other Dutch development NGOs. The publication, which has been released together with a web portal with relevant resources, summarises lessons learned from 12 multi-stakeholder process case studies in eight nations across Africa, Asia and Central America. The report includes documentation from two biocultural community protocol processes in Ghana and Kenya that Natural Justice supported. The web portal includes country case reports, videos and evaluation reports from the research programme. 

From the report, “this publication is a result of the Thematic Learning Programme (TLP) ‘Strategically dealing with power dynamics in multistakeholder processes’ (2011-2012) in which seven Dutch development NGOs investigated how they could address and incorporate a deeper understanding of these power dynamics in their work. This topic is important, because MSPs involve issues in complex contexts: land conflicts, natural resource conflicts or farmers at the bottom of the value chain. MSPs are not always harmonious; the stakes are generally higher for some than for others and the various actors may not necessarily have the same level of representation at the table. This TLP aimed to draw lessons for the different organizations involved and to enable them to deal better with power dynamics in MSPs.” 

The portal can be accessed here. The entire report can be downloaded here.