Abstract
An evaluation of the relationships between communities around Addo Elephant National Park, Mountain Zebra National Park, Karoo National Park, Golden Gate Highlands National Park and Vaalbos National Park shows that these communities have limited ecological knowledge and understanding of resources occurring within the parks. People within these communities rate relationships with their neighbouring parks as relatively poor. Despite this, these communities are keen to support conservation and management of biodiversity through national parks. The study further revealed that two types of communities occur around the national parks of South Africa. These are neighbouring and the distant communities. The distant communities are more urban in character than the neighbouring communities. These communities are heterogeneous with people from a variety of cultures. The varying lifestyle, age groups, cultural backgrounds and income levels lead to differences in expectations from the national parks by these communities. This, which is critical in determining the level of appreciation of conservation of biodiversity by communities around conservation areas, requires the attention of the park managers. They need to ensure that when distributing the benefits or opportunities linked to conservation, cultural, income and education differences among communities are considered and used as the basis for development and implementation of community development projects.
Highlights
In the past ten years, there has been a major shift in the approach of managing natural resources, land and environment in South Africa (Kerley et al 1999; Nauta 2001)
A questionnaire survey was conducted among local communities around Addo Elephant National Park (AENP), Mountain Zebra National Park (MZNP), Golden Gate Highlands National Park (GGHNP), Karoo National Park (KRNP) and Vaalbos National Park (VNP)
For MZNP, the distant community was in Cradock, while for GGHNP, the distant community was in Qwaqwa (Table 1)
Summary
In the past ten years, there has been a major shift in the approach of managing natural resources, land and environment in South Africa (Kerley et al 1999; Nauta 2001). The call for land redistribution saw an influx of land claim applications from traditional societies, some of which threatened the very existence of well-known conservation areas such as the Kruger National Park, St Lucia Wetland Park and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park Faced with these threats, conservation in South Africa has been assumed to be under siege (Ledger 1998). Conservation agencies like the South African National Parks (SANParks) needed to adapt and respond swiftly by providing strategies that would assure the support of national parks by the local communities (Hanekom & Liebenberg 1994) In dealing with this challenge, SANParks adopted a proactive strategy of conservationbased human development and natural resource management (SANParks 1995, 1997).
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