Political ecology survey of human-chimpanzee coexistence within postwar Mabi-Yaya Nature Reserve, Côte d’Ivoire

Abstract

Côte d'Ivoire’s commercial agriculture policy, coupled with military and civil unrest since the late 1990s, has induced very high tensions with conservation agendas, outside of protected areas as well as within them. This situation has made human-chimpanzee coexistence in shared landscapes nearly impossible, except, paradoxically and unsustainably, within protected areas. The Mabi-Yaya Nature Reserve, which was gazetted in 2019 by merging and upgrading two classified forests, is emblematic in this regard. This article examines the recent history of human and chimpanzee presence within the reserve in relation to the country’s political turmoil, based on printed sources and oral accounts as well as a chimpanzee survey. It also questions the motivations for the inhabitants’ unexpected level of support for the reserve reported by a conservation NGO, as well as the reasons for the possibly related absence of large-scale deforestation within it. Given the Ivorian political context, this local support and the persistence of high canopy forest appear to be more related to a local understanding of the protected area as a land-securing device against “outsiders” in a context of strong political and identity crises than to any agreement with conservation policies. This has implications for the conservation of Mabi-Yaya’s remaining chimpanzees and other postwar Ivorian protected areas. It also questions the governance of such a reserve in a political situation still prone to high-level conflicts among neighboring communities.

Keywords

• protected areas
• chimpanzee
• Mabi-Yaya Nature Reserve (Côte d’Ivoire)
• land-use rights
• war