This dissertation focuses on understanding the socioeconomic impacts of Community Based Conservation (CBC) initiatives on rural livelihoods. CBC initiatives promise to abate the negative impacts of top down or centralised fortress conservation approaches that have for many decades, hindered rural people from accessing and benefiting from natural resources, and incited land-use conflicts. Yet, despite these promises, the inherently political nature of natural resource governance brings challenges to the implementation of the scientifically designed conservation interventions. It was in the interest of this dissertation, therefore, to compare and contrast the policy premises and the reality on the ground by analysing the socioeconomic impacts of CBC initiatives on rural livelihoods. The research explored Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs), a community based wildlife management initiatives in Tanzania, where the policy promises participating communities improved access to resources and better benefits retentions.
Through political ecology lenses, the research collected and analysed both quantitative but largely qualitative data. Results show that WMAs foster a very limited ownership, participation and collective action at the community level. WMA governance continues to follow a logic of central government control over natural resources and the associated benefits. The WMAs are rife with conflicts and contestations over grievances that remained unsettled since its establishment a decade back. The grievances are accentuated by growing land pressure resulting from an increase in human, livestock and elephant populations, in combination with infrastructure improvements and support for agriculture-led development. Besides WMA governance offers very little or nothing to residents and village leaders in the participating communities who appear hostages in a situation where interests in human development and conservation are pitted against each other. Residents are not compensated for crops and livestock losses and/or human injuries and death caused by wildlife, while very little WMA resources and revenues are directed toward the protection of crops and livestock against wildlife. The current situation, therefore, not only makes a mockery of the notions of community-based conservation but also pinpoint to the tendency of global and national actors promoting conservation in Tanzania and elsewhere to misrepresent or ignore the local realities that defy official policy promises.
Further, the results reveal that WMAs concentrate licit benefits to few elites and criminalises rural peoples’ customary livelihoods and claims of rights to natural resources. This leaves the majority of rural people who endure the cost of conservation in forgone individual livelihoods interests, such as farmland and pasture for livestock, and wildlife damages on crops, livestock, and people, to rely on illicit access mechanisms. This has, in turn, led to violent confrontations between game scouts and people, and protests and struggles to re-gain legal access. But at a more general level, the conflicts created/exacerbated by the WMA regimes erode rural peoples’ trust and willingness to support conservation.
It is difficult, therefore, to argue that WMAs are community-owned conservation initiatives until a genuinely devolved and more flexible conservation model is implemented to give space for popular participation in rule-making and resource allocation. This means, in order to advance conservation-development agenda, conservation policies need to understand rural peoples’ needs and address them not only as ‘add on’ but at their very core. CBC interventions must also recognise customary claims to land and use of natural resources, and make sure that benefits accrue from conservation activities trickle down to the household level.
Thus, throughout the analysis of WMAs as a CBC interventions on human-dominated landscapes, this dissertation unveils the following key issues: i) property rights and rule enforcement agency, a persistence challenge in CBC interventions, and ii) governance rationality and limit to governance, a novelty field in policy sciences, focusing on the need to contemplate and synthesise in a more acute and systematic way of understanding the policy promise and human limits to govern ourselves out of environmental problems. To conclude, this dissertation proposes a logical framework for the analysis of CBC intervention through a landscape approach lenses and offer recommendations for development and research.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:32751 |
| Date | 19 January 2019 |
| Creators | Moyo, Francis |
| Contributors | Pertzsch, Jürgen, Lund, Jens Friis, Müller, Bernhard, Technische Universität Dresden |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion, doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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