“We can’t invent money”

Why did Conservation International leave? In short, the money ran out. “We can’t invent money,” said Leon Rajaobelina, who ran the group’s programs in Madagascar from 1996 to 2015. “If the funders say ‘there’s no money,’ there’s no money.”

CI spokeswoman Jenny Parker McCloskey explained that the main source of funding in Bongolava was a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation that ended in 2012. Asked why an organization as large as CI, which works in more than 1,000 protected areas in 77 countries, was not able to continue funding work in Bongolava by other means, she wrote, “That was not a viable path. We are a non-profit organization and must raise all the funds we spend. Many of our funds are in fact restricted, which therefore limits our ability to redirect funds between countries or sites. While we can always do more if we secure more resources, we had to make tough decisions about where in Madagascar to focus our efforts based on our available resources.”

Bongolava was part of a wave of new protected areas created on the heels of a 2003 pledge by then-president Marc Ravalomanana to triple the extent of Madagascar’s protected areas in five years. Ravalomanana’s commitment, known as the “Durban Vision,” drew strong support from donors and international NGOs despite a widespread and longstanding view that Madagascar lacked the capacity to manage even its existing protected areas effectively. Ongoing reforms of the forestry administration and policies around community environmental management quickly took a backseat to the new initiative. As a representative of one Madagascar NGO told the researcher Catherine Corson in 2005, “All attention is on the Durban Vision.”

But the political winds in Madagascar changed quickly: Ravalomanana was deposed in a coup d’état in March 2009, prompting many donors to curtail existing funds for environmental programs or postpone making additional grants.

Conservation International laid off one-third of its staff in Madagascar and relocated its Antananarivo office from an upscale address in the downtown business district to a far more modest locale. Charles Séméon, CI’s lone full-time employee in the field in Bongolava, had drawn his last paycheck by June 2012, just as commercial corn farming really took off.

It may be unrealistic to expect conservation organizations to weather political crises without consequence. But the fate of orphan sites like Bongolava raises questions about the model that has shaped much of Madagascar’s protected area network, which has often prioritized planning and process-oriented work by technical staff based in Antananarivo over community engagement and a continuous presence in the field.

“To tell you the truth, CI wasn’t present at Port Bergé,” said Miandrimanana. “The problem with CI is simple. There are too many salary costs in Tana and not enough budget that actually made it here. If somebody’s in Tana, for them to come and do work, you’d have to pay for the 4×4 for gas, you have to pay for the per diem, you have to get a room, and those are big costs,” he said.

By the time CI withdrew from Bongolava, the group had been working in the area in various capacities for 15 years. Between 1998 and 2003, CI funded studies in Bongolava (then a forest reserve under the Ministry of the Environment, Ecology and Forests) geared toward “enhancing the development of natural resources,” according to the group’s website. With funding from USAID, CI also supported studies on bush meat, water resources and food security in five communities around Bongolava. There were surveys of flora and fauna before Bongolava’s temporary protected status in 2006, and afterward, in 2009, book-length plans on social safeguards and management of the protected area.

Well over 50 new protected areas were created in rapid succession following the Durban Vision announcement. During this period, big NGOs like Conservation International came to function increasingly as clearinghouses, responsible for distributing donor funds and providing technical support to local partners rather than conducting the bulk of their conservation work directly. Within a $6 million grant from USAID, for example, CI made sub-grants to the National Association for the Management of Protected Areas in Madagascar (since renamed Madagascar National Parks), the international NGOs Wildlife Conservation Society and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), as well as smaller NGOs. In Bongolava, programming that engaged local communities directly was done primarily by a small community group, Fikambanana Bongolava Maitso (“Association for a Green Bongolava,” or FBM). It had 10 bicycles, a single computer, and no prior experience in conservation.

“The truth is that [NGOs] wanted to reach the 6 million [hectares],” about 23,150 square miles, said Gérard Rambeloarisoa, who runs the Madagascar Biodiversity Fund, a national foundation that supports the protected area network, referring to the target for protected area coverage under the Durban Vision. “They didn’t anticipate the crisis. So, they said to themselves, in 2006, 2008, ‘there’s a lot of financing if we want to create protected areas’ … and then, in 2009, everything was cut short.”

The shrinking footprint of conservation groups during the years of Madagascar’s post-coup transitional government, from 2009 to 2014, left a dozen areas created under the Durban Vision with some legal protected status but no funding to manage them. Taken together, these orphan sites cover more than 4,000 square kilometers (1,544 square miles), an area about the size of Glacier National Park in the U.S. and larger than Madagascar’s single largest protected area. In some cases, the areas were left without a sponsoring organization. By default, they came under the aegis of Madagascar’s Ministry of Environment, Ecology and Forests, which was upended by constant changes in leadership and lacked the resources to run programs on the ground.

The number of these orphan sites has since declined to seven, according to Rambeloarisoa, as the Madagascar government and its partners look for funders and organizations to take them in hand. But, he said, it is hard to undo the damage of an interim period with no oversight.

A protected area in Bombetoka Bay, for example, which covers 460 square kilometers (178 square miles) of wetlands in northwestern Madagascar, one of the largest remaining tracts of mangrove forest in the country, was spearheaded by the Madagascar NGO FANAMBY, then abandoned in 2009. “Now, I just learned there’s an aquaculture farm inside the park,” said Rambeloarisoa, adding that Chinese investors had illegally logged mangroves inside the protected area to grow crabs for export. “That doesn’t just fall from the sky! It’s done with local authorities,” he said. But the local NGO currently listed as the protected area’s sponsor has no funding whatsoever, he said, “even the small amount it would take to put someone there to find it.”