Abstract: Over the past few decades, environmental practitioners and activists have increasingly recognized the importance of a strong communication mechanism with lay communities as a way of educating them on the necessity to protect the environment and win their support and participation. However, in some areas, such efforts have done little efforts to change the behaviors of local communities. In the areas around Rwanda’s fourth and latest National Park – The Gishwati-Mukura – the situation is no different. Ongoing human encroachment in the form of grazing, tree cutting, illegal mining and hunting, among others, meant that the Park’s biodiversity was for long threatened with extinction despite the efforts led by several organizations and institutions to educate local people on the necessity to preserve this natural mountain forest. Efforts from environmental practitioners to solve this negative trend have mostly focused on addressing the complicated forces they perceive to be the main drivers behind the degrading environment: lack of proper education, severe poverty, lack of farmland and economic hardships, among others. The adoption of participatory communication approaches is the latest of the strategies used to encourage communities to adopt environmental-friendly practices. However, there have been few studies on the role of participatory communication in environment conservation. Therefore, this study seeks to understand how participatory communication approaches are used to stimulate environment conservation actions, investigate the existing challenges that are blocking environmentally positive behavior changes and how participatory communication can be better applied to address them within communities around the Gishwati-Mukura National Park. The study used a descriptive research design and stratified random sampling to determine the sample size. Questionnaires were administered to respondents to generate primary data necessary to draw conclusions on the topic of this research. Data generated was analyzed using the Statistical Package for social Sciences (SPSS) software and the results were presented in form of tables and graphs. The results show that the most frequently used communication methods were interest groups (85%; mean = 3.55), face-to-face (84%; mean = 3.47), council for ethnic relations office (86%; mean = 3.46), letters (79%; mean = 3.23), telephone (73%; mean = 3,21), organized groups (66%; mean = 2,91), and citizen information office (62%; mean =2.76). Adjusted R squared is called the coefficient of determination which indicates how the environmental conservation with variation in Areas of local communities’ participation, Modes of community participation, challenges of community participation. From table above, the value of adjusted R squared is 0.632. This implies that, there was a variation of 63.2% of environmental conservation varied with variation at a confidence level of 95%. The ANOVA results for regression coefficients showed that the significance of the F statistics is 0.000 which is less than 0.05. This implied that there was a significant relationship between Areas of local communities’ participation, Modes of community participation, challenges of community participation affecting the dependent variable the Environmental conservation. The study concludes that most of the residents of Gishwati-Mukura National Park have not been adequately involved in significant areas that local communities ought to be involved in. Thus, majority are only left to participate in the programme during the budget speech by being spectators as the budget is read. The only other significant area in which the residents were involved was in the monitoring of service delivery where about half of the residents had participated.
Keywords: Participatory management, Environment conservation, Gishwati-Mukura National Park.
Title: EXAMINING THE IMPACT OF PARTICIPATORY COMMUNICATION ON ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION IN RWANDA: A CASE STUDY OF THE GISHWATI-MUKURA NATIONAL PARK
Author: Jean Pierre BUCYENSENGE, Dr. CAROLINE NABUZALE, Dr. PATRICK MULYUNGI
International Journal of Management and Commerce Innovations
ISSN 2348-7585 (Online)
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