Abstract
This article tests the hypothesis on whether tourism is an important institutional factor in reconciling the conflicting goals of conservation and development. The study entails data from field surveys across protected areas including the Serengeti National Park and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in northern Tanzania, and the Corbett National Park in northern India. With human development defined in terms of 'stages of progress' (SOP) delineated by the respondents themselves, the study finds indicative evidences of the validity of the posed hypothesis in the two nations, in varying proportions. Factors not related to tourism, like incomes from livestock, have affected development in Tanzania, though not in India.
Highlights
The apparent conflict between conservation and development in and around the protected areas of the developing world arises as the poor in those areas are reliant on forest resources (Dewi et al 2005; Chan et al 2007; Torri and Herrmann 2010)
While local communities have been actively involved in providing tourism services, there has been a recent plan to establish Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) in the buffer zones surrounding Serengeti National Park, out of which numerous benefits for the local communities can be envisaged in the form of tourism incomes and conservation (Kideghesho 2010: 240)
In Tanzania, an identical regression was run with stages of progress’ (SOP) as the dependent variable, with the same explanatory variables as shown in equation 1 for the Indian case
Summary
The apparent conflict between conservation and development in and around the protected areas of the developing world arises as the poor in those areas are reliant on forest resources (Dewi et al 2005; Chan et al 2007; Torri and Herrmann 2010). An important aspect is the methodological issue, where we define development from a local well-being perspective, following Krishna (2004a, b), and conservation on the basis of a composite sighting index Such a methodology has not been adopted so far in order to test this hypothesis—this is an important contribution of this article to the literature base. Since development and poverty have been defined by the respondent community, this speaks a lot about the existing culture, tradition, and social norms of the community under consideration It is in this context that we would like to declare that no gender-based distinction has been made in this article, and the information has been reported as obtained from the field.
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