Abstract
Tourism activities occurring on communal lands such as Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) are increasing in Tanzania. This is the result of natural resources governance reforms aimed to empower communities to manage and benefit directly from resources found in their jurisdictions. This article explores the impacts of taxes imposed on tourism activities occurring on communal lands and the emerging politics of resource and revenue sharing among WMA member villages. In the process, we use empirical data gathered from two WMAs in northern Tanzania between 2006 and 2016. We find that while the current high tax rates on tourism businesses occurring at the grassroots level reduce revenue earned by communities, the main challenge facing the studied WMAs is the model of revenue sharing among WMA member villages. Currently, as the result of WMA regulations, villages which had prior arrangement with tour operators in their land have suffered revenue losses as they have to share revenue equally with other members of the WMA. We argue that the current tax regime coupled with the contested cost and benefit sharing model not only lower returns to grassroots communities--which in turn discourage their much needed participation in conservation-tourism initiatives--but also generate new forms of struggles over resource control.
Highlights
Following the natural resources governance reforms aimed to empower communities to manage and benefit directly from resources found in their jurisdictions (URT 1998; Nelson et al 2006; Snyder and Sulle 2011), tourism activities occurring in communal lands such ‘Wildlife Management Areas’ (WMA) are on the increase in Tanzania
We revealed that while in general, the WMAs in the north have generated significant income to-date compared to their inception stage, not much of such benefits are reaching local communities
Villages that have not allocated much of their land to the WMA, and have never had a tourism arrangement before the WMA are slightly happier than those who have allocated much of their land to the WMA with the latter losing out substantial income they used to earn from their previous arrangements with investors before the establishment of the WMA
Summary
Following the natural resources governance reforms aimed to empower communities to manage and benefit directly from resources found in their jurisdictions (URT 1998; Nelson et al 2006; Snyder and Sulle 2011), tourism activities occurring in communal lands such ‘Wildlife Management Areas’ (WMA) are on the increase in Tanzania. In Tanzania in contrast, as we elaborate below, communities retain only about 60 percent of total revenue from both hunting and photographic tourism revenues (Nelson et al 2016), due to high levels of taxes on tourism occurring in communal lands coupled with low investments This impedes local conservation and development outcomes (Sulle et al 2011; Nelson et al 2016). If the government did not charge a 35 percent tax on the gross income, each village would have earned approximately USD 12,000 in 2010 (Sulle and Nelson 2012) Based on this formula, in 2014/2015 each member village netted a total of USD 22,466 as its share of revenue from the WMA. It is likely that this situation will in turn disincentivise villagers who were starting to enjoy tangible benefits from their conservation efforts
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