This research explores influences affecting livelihood decision-making of community members in rural Tanzania, especially the relationship between the decision-making process and conservation related actions and behaviours. The Theory of Planned Behaviour provides a framework to investigate such linkages. The selection of three villages within a study area which includes a formal conservation mechanism, Saadani National Park, provides a context for conservation policy, documented impacts on typical resource based rural livelihood activities and opportunities for livelihood diversification. The research documents the range of contextual and internal influences and their importance to people through reflection on both recent and potential future livelihood decisions. This research study employs a phenomenological qualitative research approach applied to a case study. Key informant interviews were conducted with two community leaders from each village, twelve senior tourism industry representatives from the three major local lodge operations and two representatives from the national park senior management team. Focus group discussions were also held in each village with a total of 82 participants. The groups were segregated by gender and age. Semi-structured interviews were held with thirty household representatives in each of the three study villages. Field data were supplemented with document analysis of materials related to local and regional community development and conservation initiatives. Results showed that in this resource based livelihood context, attitudes and perceived behavioural control emerged as the dominant influences on intended behaviour in part due to the importance of past experience on livelihood decisions. Participants expressed a lack of perceived behavioural control resulting from few livelihood options and changes in the environment resulting from external forces. Such perceptions of control, reinforced by past experience, led to attitudes that tended to be pessimistic or fatalistic. Secondary influences were a range of social norms including livelihood activities as hereditary occupations, notions of individual versus collective approaches to livelihood endeavours, and impacts of, and adaptations to, cultural and social change. Conservation had little direct influence on livelihood decision-making. The dominant attitude was one seeking to maximize returns from resource harvesting reflecting a priority on short-term necessity rather than long term sustainability. Relative to other external influences, people generally did not feel that their own use of resources played a significant role in the capacity of the resource to yield livelihood benefits. However, people did recognize environmental change and adapted their livelihood activities to maintain or maximize benefits. Such adaptations provide the basis for improving conservation behaviour through greater understanding and broadening livelihood options. Livelihood decision-making was also found to be highly constrained by the nature and scale of the local village economies. Scale restricts potential growth and limitations on land, and resources constrain outside private sector investment thus limiting expansion of wage employment. Significant influences from cultural and social norms were also found, especially with respect to the pursuit of hereditary occupations, the preference for individual versus cooperative enterprises and adaptations reflective of societal change. Information systems and flow were found to be relatively insignificant in the livelihood decision-making process of local villagers. / Graduate / 0366 / 0700 / 0768

In what can be characterized as a period of rapid ecological change, the global community has now reached an agreement on the importance of protecting what remains of the world’s biological diversity. In 2011, world governments pledged to extend protected areas (PAs) to 17% of the earth’s surface. Although, accumulated research documents the role PAs areas play in coping with environmental change, much of conservation practice remains at odds with the actual purpose of conservation: to enable natural and human systems to adapt and sustain life. Challenges in PA planning and management, and their connections (or lack thereof) to wider socio-economic and institutional frameworks have made environmental governance a leading concern in the study of PAs. This research examined the nature and dimensions of environmental governance affecting adaptive capacity and the sustainability of protected landscapes, particularly for PAs deemed to have been established and/or operating through ‘participatory’ governance. These issues are explored through comparative research based on case studies of two coastal PAs: Pacific Rim National Park Reserve in Canada, and Saadani National Park in Tanzania. Methods utilized included gathering qualitative and spatial data through interactions with decision-making bodies and representatives of agencies at the village/First Nations and park levels, interviews with state authorities at district and higher levels and document research. The research findings on the two PAs and adjacent communities unravel the nature and dynamics of steering institutions, institutional interplay and spatial interconnectedness as they relate to cooperation, agency and adaptability within and around protected landscapes. An examination of spatial and institutional arrangements within national frameworks, and an examination of governance and management practice at the level of individual parks reveal significant mismatches between policy discourses on multi-level cooperation and actual practice in state-based conservation. This research also reveals ways in which sustainability can be conceived and addressed through institutions and institutional interplay among park and community actors. The research analyzed ways in which encompassing frameworks shaped institutions, relationships and activities on the ground, and spatial interconnectedness and interdependence shaped the actions and agency of grassroots actors. The findings also demonstrate that there are critical differences between participation and the exercising of agency. While it is important to achieve a fair distribution of burdens and benefits across levels, it is shared jurisdiction and fair institutional interplay, rather than economic benefits, which can better enable all levels of social organizations to contribute to sustainability. In this regard, enhancing agency is essential to enabling adaptability and goes beyond addressing disruptive power relations; it also entails redefining perceptions of human nature and of spatial interconnectedness among communities and natural landscapes in the design of environmental institutions. It is through institutionally-driven processes, such as giving full political and financial support to states fixed on gaining spatial control of culturally diverse landscapes through restrictive conservation approaches, that conservation has become an instrument of oppression, and it is only through institutionally-driven means that acknowledge the importance and role of indigenous approaches to preserve ecological diversity that PAs can be made to serve their purpose: to preserve nature and cultural heritage for present and future generations. / Graduate / 0534 / 0366 / aleja@uvic.ca