Tourism in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park

Abstract

The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) is a transboundary protected area that straddles the borders of Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The park's development was partly motivated by the ecological objective of re-establishing traditional migratory wildlife routes once fences between the three countries are dismantled. Besides biodiversity conservation benefits, the park may also provide a basis to generate revenue for conservation and local economic development through tourism. This paper describes current state and private sector tourism within the GLTP and planning initiatives that may promote responsible tourism, and describes the achievements by community-based tourism enterprises and public–private partnerships in generating economic, social and environmental benefits. The livelihoods of people living in the park are outlined in relation to government policies on land redistribution, resettlement and options for the future, and progress in biodiversity conservation and responsible nature-based tourism development within the GLTP over the past five years is evaluated. 1Research Fellow, Transboundary Protected Areas Research Initiative, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. This research was supported by the BMW Chair for Sustainability, University of the Witwatersrand and the Transboundary Protected Areas Research Initiative (TPARI), an IUCN-SA programme funded through the Centre for the Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, Carnegie Mellon University, by way of a co-operative agreement with the National Science Foundation (SBR-9521914). Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendation expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or Carnegie Mellon. The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who commented on a draft of this paper. This paper is largely drawn from Spenceley (2005); the full paper is available at http://www.anna.spenceley.co.uk/files/Tourism%20InvestmentGLTFCAMar05.pdf