Until the mid-2000s, the annual budget of the NNNP appears to have been roughly US$1 million, although it is now reportedly around US$3 million.[11] According to a 2011 assessment, external sources account for approximately 90 percent of the amount.[12] WCS reports that the public-private partnership arrangement has allowed "a significant increase in the park’s ranger force and their efficacy at protecting the area’s wildlife."[13]

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The park and the people

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No reliable human census data or demographic studies are available for the area (although there is a great deal of detailed census information for several non-human species). The average population density for the region as a whole has historically been around 1–2 persons per square kilometer.[14] Thus, the area now encompassed by the NNNP may have formerly been inhabited or used by some 4,000 people and possibly more. WCS has disputed this figure, claiming that surveys in the earlier 1990s showed the area to be uninhabited, although the literature sources cited by WCS to support the claim do not state this.[15] According to the original grant agreement between WCS and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), "There is currently no permanent human habitation in the proposed reserve area and very limited transient use of the area by humans."[16] It appears that a sociological survey proposed at the time was never undertaken. In 1993, in the project document under which it was to provide financial support for the NNNP, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) further discounted the possible use of the area for temporary hunting and gathering activities and for camps typical of Pygmy usage, claiming that: "There are no permanent human settlements in the area" (emphasis added).[17]

 
The NNNP was established explicitly as a "wilderness" area, modeled on US national parks. In testimony to the US Congress in 2003, Michael Fay—who initiated and led WCS’s work in northern Congo, and was lionized in various National Geographic outputs[18]—said:

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"I believe that Teddy Roosevelt had it right [creating strictly protected areas]. In 1907 … the US was at the stage in its development not dissimilar to the Congo Basin today … My work in the Congo Basin has been basically to try to bring this US model to Africa … The model starts with the identification of large landscapes where land-use management systems can be put in place before the arrival of industrial resource use and human expansion." [19]

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Fay made these comments even though there had been considerable "industrial resource use" on the periphery of what was to become the NNNP, well before its establishment. By the mid-to-late 1990s, however, the park appears to have been totally depopulated. One study estimated that this had involved the expulsion and expropriation of 3,000 people,[20]  principally by forcibly preventing them from entering or remaining in the area. At that time, there was no law requiring compensatory payments—or strategies to secure alternative livelihoods—and no such payments were made. 

Other than expulsion from the park area, the most significant impact of the NNNP on Pygmies has been the suppression of hunting, especially in the buffer zone. As in many other protected areas in the Congo Basin, some or all of the elements of the NNNP management regime extend into the buffer zone, even though its legal status and boundaries are highly unclear. This, and a general lack of awareness of their (limited) rights, means that Pygmies must undertake hunting with only "informal permission"; as a result, they are liable to abuse, manipulation, and extortion by enforcement authorities—especially because the majority of the park's "eco-guards" are of the dominant Bantu ethnicity.[21] Efforts to substitute bushmeat with either imported frozen meat or the rearing of animals and fish in buffer-zone communities have been particularly inappropriate for Pygmies, who have, on the one hand, strong cultural taboos against the consumption of domesticated animals[22] and, on the other, insufficient income with which to purchase meat.

 
A 1993 GEF document stated that, because of the GoC's "suppression of communal land law," the project would have to “reformalize and reinstate the power of local tenure and usufruct rights.”[23] What appears to have happened in the intervening two decades is that, rather, those Pygmies who were physically or economically displaced from the NNNP have gravitated towards Pokola and other logging towns, and to Makao. There, they mostly eke out their existence as day-laborers for Bantu farmers or by providing hunting expertise to satisfy the growing commercial demand for bushmeat among the towns’ burgeoning populations.

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Options for, and attempts at, redress

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Until recently, the prospects for redress in the case of the NNNP have been slim, with the limited legal measures theoretically available beyond the capacity of local organizations. The acephalous nature of Pygmy communities means that individuals willing to act as representatives or spokespeople are extremely rare and culturally highly constrained. As the (apparently unrecorded) act of dispossession of people from the NNNP has receded beyond the memory of most living people, and as the human-wildlife dynamic has become dominated by the expansion of nearby logging and the populations dependent on it, the prospects for redress have become increasingly remote.

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Until recently, the prospects for redress in the case of the NNNP have been slim, with the limited legal measures theoretically available beyond the capacity of local organizations. The acephalous nature of Pygmy communities means that individuals willing to act as representatives or spokespeople are extremely rare and culturally highly constrained. As the (apparently unrecorded) act of dispossession of people from the NNNP has receded beyond the memory of most living people, and as the human-wildlife dynamic has become dominated by the expansion of nearby logging and the populations dependent on it, the prospects for redress have become increasingly remote.

Some practical measures have been attempted in the buffer zone. These include the participatory mapping of forest resources important to Pygmy communities and the exclusion of these from CIB forest management activities, and the establishment of a Pygmy community radio service.[24] WCS employees have apparently made some efforts (possibly in their personal capacities rather than as part of the formal program) to assist Pygmies in obtaining birth certificates and thus national identity papers and to improve the housing available to them.[25] But these measures have not addressed the fundamental problems of the exclusion of Pygmies from the core protected area and the limitations placed on their economic activities in the buffer zone.

The GoC has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which stipulates that: "In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language" (Article 27).[26] It could be argued that the forcible suppression of Pygmies' hunting activities by conservation authorities in the Congo is in breach of the nation's responsibilities under this covenant —but this has not been tested.

Several pieces of law could potentially be applied to seek redress for the NNNP’s former inhabitants. The Congo's Law 5/2011 on the promotion and protection of the rights of indigenous populations offers hope because it recognizes the collective and individual rights of Indigenous Peoples to their traditionally owned lands and resources.[27] The law remains unenforced, however, and is possibly unenforceable because the necessary legal mechanisms (decrees) to apply it are yet to be put in place. The Congo’s Law 37/2008 on wildlife and protected areas acknowledges the principle of usage rights in protected areas, but these are not defined clearly.[28] Under Article 10 of that law, the establishment act of each protected area can define permitted traditional usage rights. Law 37/2008 also mentions the need for spaces to allow communities to carry out socio-economic activities and provides for participation by communities in the management of protected areas—notably through the design, delivery, and implementation of management plans. A 2013 decree setting out the mandate of the ACFAP includes a responsibility "to contribute to sustainable development and well-being of populations living in and at the periphery of protected areas."[29] These laws are yet to be tested in the case of the NNNP; the capacity and resources of civil society organizations that could bring such cases is limited, and the Congolese legal system might prove slow and difficult for them to navigate. 

Stronger redress might be available through the laws and standards pertaining to donors that have funded the NNNP in the past or are still funding it. For example, Section 119 of the US Foreign Assistance Act, 1961, which concerns USAID funding of activities related to the "preservation of biological diversity," states the following: "Local Involvement. To the fullest extent possible, projects supported under this section shall include close consultation with and involvement of local people at all stages of design and implementation."[30]

If the reports of expulsion of Pygmies are accurate, it is difficult to see how the Nouabale-Ndoki project, which USAID funded directly in at least 1991–1997 and 2013–present, could have complied with the letter or spirit of this law.[31] Also unclear is the extent to which the recently funded World Bank/GEF project (see Table 1) has fully complied with the Bank’s safeguard policies concerning Indigenous Peoples.

The legal requirements for the engagement of local people in protected-area management plans in the Congo could be fulfilled without costly and difficult appeal to the law. The NNNP appears to lack a current management plan (contrary to the law), although one is reportedly in preparation. Thus, international donors could insist that any new plan is community-friendly and involves the strong participation of indigenous communities and local people. 

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An alternative approach in northern Congo?

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In many senses, the NNNP has been an exemplar of typical interplays in the Congo Basin between international conservationists, economic interests, and the national government in which all local communities, including Indigenous Peoples, have been totally disempowered and dispossessed. In the case of the NNNP, the interplay and intermingling of interests has created a new "status quo," the changing of which will require radical approaches. 

Although there could be scope to redress past wrongs—in the sense that relevant agencies have not properly fulfilled their responsibilities to local communities—through some of the legal avenues set out above, full redress in terms of the restitution of lands and traditional usage rights, or meaningful compensation, seems a distant prospect. The NNNP is adjoined on most of its boundaries by logging concessions, which have attracted thousands of people to boom towns that are now growing endogenously. The increasingly degraded concessions that notionally comprise the park's buffer zone seem destined to become exhausted of commercial timber and progressively converted to agriculture.[32] Whatever customary tenure and forest usage rights existed in the area before, say, 1980 are unrecorded and are probably becoming progressively less clear among local elders with each passing year. Both the Ba’aka Pygmies and the Bantus are increasingly likely to become wage-laborers in farms, plantations, and timber-processing plants in the degraded buffer zone, and the protection of the NNNP and its fauna will become a more difficult—if not impossible—task requiring increasingly intense patrolling by heavily armed guards.

Thus, the future of the NNNP and its relationship to its former inhabitants is bound up inextricably with the operations of the neighboring logging companies—simultaneously making a strict "guns and guards" protection of the NNNP the only plausible option for preventing wildlife hunting (if that is the objective) and probably dooming it to fail. The NNNP could have a different future if a radically changed regime were to be applied in the buffer zone, such as the dismantling of the adjoining logging concessions and their conversion to, say, community forests. This would require that adequate records of the former customary tenure could be re-established, upon which community control could be built. Significant areas, such as around the logging town of Pokola, would probably need to be allocated as permanent farmland. Elsewhere, forest restoration would have to be undertaken on a major scale, with the closing of logging roads and the repair of wider damage. 

Moreover, innovative arrangements would be needed to permit controlled hunting and other usage rights by the Ba'aka Pygmies throughout the buffer zone. If such measures were to prove successful in halting and reversing degradation in the buffer zone, perhaps the approach could be extended to the park itself. In the meantime, probably the most viable measure is the restoration of some Ba'aka use in the NNNP through the revision of its management plan.