**1. Introduction**

"The rapid growth of human populations living in areas of endemic poverty and the rapid loss of natural habitats and the species within them have drawn international attention to interventions designed to effect positive socio-economic and environmental change" [1]. This is due to the belief that targeting conservation and poverty alleviation together can improve conservation effectiveness [2]. Poverty and environmental deterioration are argued to be among the gravest challenges faced in the developing world today [3]. The relationship between poverty and the environment is complex and highly influenced by the socioeconomic factors of the locality. This warrants the need for multidisciplinary analyses of how interactions among a variety of factors affect outcomes in the socio-ecological system (SES) [4, 5]. This is supported by the argument that negotiating conservation-development actions requires greater emphasis on diverging values and diverging preferences for the scale of operation and action [6]. This study analysed how different actors in the proposed Tofala Hill Wildlife Sanctuary (THWS) understand and narrate wildlife conservation and how these difference narrations influence conservation strategies. Specific questions included (i) What understandings do individuals make of conservation initiatives? (ii) How do these narrations translate to conservation outcomes? (iii) What possible pathways could ensure sustainability in conservation management strategies?

The THWS is an important landscape for the conservation of biodiversity and is under consideration to be name a wildlife sanctuary [7]. It is one of the fragmented forest habitats harbouring the critically Cross River gorilla (*Gorilla gorilla diehli*), which has a population of less than 300, left in the wild [8]. This species is under high conservation priority given it vulnerability to human threat. This adds to the reasons why it is given high conservation preference [9]. On the other hand, the local people living adjacent to the THWS have continuously relied on the forest for livelihoods for several years without conservation interventions until 2004, following the discovery of the cross river gorilla in the forest. This new era of conservation put the local people into doubt, as they feel their forest rights may be taken away as conservation activities intensify in the area [7]. In this line, the local non-profit organisation working in this project area is implementing community-based conservation approaches to reconcile local livelihood needs and conservation. However, the diverse views held by the different actors involved in the project seem to be a main challenge to the success of the project as argued in this study.

The prospect of local people to sustain community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) for livelihood security and conservation needs is centred on how well programmes are embedded in sociocultural relations, politics, resource needs and uses [10]. In this line, establishing sustainable linkages between environmental conservation and local development actions require the consideration of how policies influence and are influenced by actors in CBNRM [11]. It is also argued that most often than not, actors hold diverse interests, motivated by their scale of knowledge, which together with scale politics, lead to conflict in forest resource management [6, 12]. Scale of knowledge as used in this study refers to the temporal and spatial extend and character of knowledge held by individuals and collectives [12]. These diverse framings form the dynamic and complex SES we live in [5, 13].

As environmental conditions are changing rapidly, so too are social systems. Thus, there is a need for a robust conceptualisation of these constant changes if we need to attain sustainability in the SES. The pathway approach to sustainability questions how sustainability can be achieved in a complex and dynamic system and how contestation between alternative approaches and goals played out among actors [13]. This is based on the assumption that development drives social and ecological changes, which affect the SES. Thus, the dynamic SES raises some major policy and development challenges, which requires immediate attention. To cope with some of these challenges, efforts to regulate environment degradation focus on biodiversity (wildlife) conservation [14]. Yet, biodiversity conservation in most developing countries is at crossroad with local livelihoods. This warrant conservation projects to also consider local livelihood issues in their action plant (community-based natural resource management approach—CBNRM) [10]. CBNRMs have the vision to improve the livelihood of the local people by empowering them to manage natural resources in their community for their well-being [15, 16]. However, despite the hopes of the CBNRM approach, implementation is argued to be challenging given that powerful actors still play out CBNRM to marginalise the rights of the underprivileged [13, 17, 18].
