Disambiguating Praxis from Practice in Natural Resource Management: A Practical Space for Enhancing Experiential Learning in the Eastern Coast of Tanzania

Abstract

Abstract It is evident that practice and praxis have significantly contributed to knowledge generation in the Tanzanian coastal belt, especially where Integrated Coastal Management (ICM) programmes have been adopted and practiced such as Tanga, Dar es Salaam, Mtwara, Lindi, and the Coastal region (KICAMP, 2001; NICEMS, 2003). In spite of such learning evidences, users of generated natural resource data in the coastal area tend to employ practice and praxis interchangeably, conflating the two concepts together; leading to a situation where one may hardly ascribe generated knowledge appropriately to contexts that favour occurrence of each of the two constructs. The paper adopts ethnographic approach in a defined coastal case study to examine contexts and situations that signals “conflationˮ and it employs examples that may help readers of the article to disambiguate praxis from practice.