Crumbling Forests and the Baka: An Anthropological Insight into Forest Conservation in Cameroon’s South Eastern Region

Abstract

Over the last decade or so, international conventions on climate change, biodiversity have increasingly dominated the international sustainable development agenda. The global policy shift from the Millennium Development Goals (MDG‘s) at the end of its tenure in 2015 to the adoption of Sustainable Development Goals (as set by the United Nations following consultations on the Post 2015 Development Agenda), clearly established the need for renewed thinking and alternative paradigms in development cooperation to ensure environmental stability and sustainability. The term ―green conditionality‖ has become the driving force for so called ―green institutions‖ towards ensuring sustainable development, as states rush to meet up with environmental protection measures. However, the spectacle of conservation to guarantee human well being and safe guard natural habitats relied on the premise that man and his environment are one in a whole. The fundamental thinking underlying the discourse propagated by international environment agencies and organizations is axed on the argument that it is in man‘s own interest to diminish and or placate actions that seemingly contribute towards global environmental deterioration 1 . Regrettably, this had been impaired by the controversies surrounding discourses on environmental sustainability, the major point of contention being the destructive influence of man‘s actions on the ecosystem. As exhaustively argued in The Lie of the Land (Leach & Mearns, 1996), the foundations of science and policy discourse regarding environmental sustainability and protection has operationalized environmental sustainability actions as ―received wisdom‖, justifying the need for the West and environmental conservation agencies to take concerted actions to save the planet from man‘s destructive influence.