A Dynamic Perspective on Institutional Arrangements for Tourism, Conservation and Development in Eastern and Southern Africa

Abstract

This book set out to present an overview of different institutional arrangements for tourism, conservation and development in eastern and southern Africa. These approaches range from conservancies in Namibia to community-based organizations in Botswana, private game reserves in South Africa and tourism conservation enterprises in Kenya, as well as transfrontier conservation areas. This chapter presents a comparative analysis of these arrangements. We highlight that most arrangements emerged in the 1990s, aiming to address some of the challenges of ‘fortress’ conservation by combining principles of community-based natural resource management with a neoliberal approach to conservation. This is evident in the use of tourism as the main mechanism for accruing benefits from wildlife. We also illustrate the empirical relevance of these novel arrangements by charting their growth in numbers and discussing how these arrangements take various forms. We furthermore highlight that although these arrangements have secured large amounts of land for conservation, they have also generated governance challenges and disputes on tourism benefit-sharing, affecting the stability of these arrangements as producers of socioeconomic and conservation benefits. We conclude this chapter by exploring how climate change, developments in tourism and trophy hunting, governance challenges and the emergence of new forms of conservation finance are likely to instigate change in institutional arrangements for tourism, conservation and development, as well as open up new directions for research.