Abstract
Nature-based tourism is well recognised as a tool that can be used for neoliberal conservation. Proponents argue that such tourism can provide revenue for conservation activities, and income generating opportunities and other benefits for local people living at the destination. Private-Community Partnerships (PCPs) are a particular form of hybrid intervention in which local benefits are claimed to be guaranteed through shared ownership of the tourism venture. In this paper, we evaluate one such partnership involving a high-end tourist eco-lodge at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda. We examine the introduction, development, and implementation of this partnership using the policy arrangement approach. This is done through analysing the actors involved and excluded in the process, the emergence of coalitions and forces, power relations, the governing rules, and the role of framing discourses. The analysis reveals that the technical conceptualisation of the partnership arrangement failed to take proper account of political and contextual factors, resulting in escalating conflict up to the national level. The paper concludes that while more time is needed to evaluate the full impact of hybrid neoliberal approaches such as PCP, the unbalanced power relations they imply can create fertile conditions for political conflict that ultimately undermines their 'win-win' goals.
Highlights
Reflecting wider trends in political economy, many recent conservation strategies designed to protect biodiversity have adopted the rhetoric of neoliberalism, seeking to commodify nature and develop market-based mechanisms for its conservation (Büscher 2008)
Nature-based tourism has been one of the most widely adopted mechanisms for neoliberal conservation, in highly biodiverse developing countries with limited alternative economic activities (Brockington et al 2008; Spenceley 2008, 2010; Van der Duim et al 2011). Advocates of this approach suggest it can provide ‘win-win’ outcomes for conservation and development by generating tangible benefits that compensate for costs and create incentives to conserve
The positive discourse as expressed by IGCP and Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) is couched in ‘win-win’ language, and reflects a wider and increasingly pervasive global discourse which stresses the need for hybrid neoliberal partnerships to address the conservation-development nexus
Summary
Reflecting wider trends in political economy, many recent conservation strategies designed to protect biodiversity have adopted the rhetoric of neoliberalism, seeking to commodify nature and develop market-based mechanisms for its conservation (Büscher 2008). IGCP and UWA argued that giving exclusive rights to NCDF was intended to create an assurance of the market for the joint venture This was an inducement to attract the interest of a private developer: Investment in Nkuringo area was risky since it is so remote, located near Congo and trekking the gorilla group is tough...an assurance of the market by tagging the permits was necessary to attract a private sector partner (IGCP and UWA Official, Research Interview 2009). It emerged in the same period that IGCP had initiated talks with the conservation authorities in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo to increase the number of tourists per trekking from six to eight per day, partly to address the high demand for gorilla permits in the region This idea was accepted and became applicable in the whole region and for the Nkuringo area; the extra two permits became available to be competed for by other tour operators (UWA Official, Research Interview 2010).
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