High hopes are pinned on tourism and its catalytic potential to foster growth in remote rural areas. In the Zambezi region of northeastern Namibia, tourism plays a key role in the design of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes for nature conservation. Local communities form conservancies, small village-based entities of bottom-up nature conservation activities. These conservancies are granted rights for the use of natural resources, which are then transferred to tourism investors and trophy-hunting companies. Thus, conservancies partly determine tourism's developmental outcomes on a local level. By applying a global production network (GPN) approach, the objective is, first, to assess how much of the turnover generated in the Zambezi region remains in the region and, second, to examine the extent to which conservancies, as newly formed local institutions, enable communities to capture value from tourism. A mixed-methods approach is applied, using a business survey, qualitative interview data and financial reports which allow a calculation of value capture. Roughly 20% of the value generated by the tourism industry in the Zambezi region is captured locally. In addition, conservancies play a key role in the GPN, acting as hinges between the local and the global: conservancies are involved in the production of the resource, mediate in strategic coupling processes and use regulatory and bargaining power to capture value. Conservancies therefore have the potential to increase local gains from tourism. On the one hand, these results underline the importance of local institutions for value capture in GPN analysis. On the other hand, as local linkages are limited and the level of local ownership is low, policies are needed that ensure the participation of local residents beyond direct transfer payments from private enterprises to communities.

The article, thereby, aims to contribute to the burgeoning research strand on new path creation by bringing the debate a step closer to the major point of concern, regional economic development.We demonstrate the use of the framework to understand how new path creation may affect existing economic activities and how this relates to the overall goal of promoting regional economic development in an illustrative case study of the Zambezi region in northeastern Namibia. The Zambezi region, as we will show, is a suitable example to study the effects of new path creation on existing economic structures. Historically, the region relied on agriculture as the main livelihood activity. Since the 1990s, different resource formation processes have contributed to the creation of a tourism path. We analyze this formation process of the tourism path and its influence on the existing agricultural path. The findings highlight that new path development cannot be interpreted as a growth path for the entire region. The formation of the tourism path has generated variegated outcomes within the region, with benefits and losses unevenly distributed among firms and people.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted global production networks and challenged the resilience of regional economies to external shocks. The tourism sector was severely affected by the travel bans imposed, as were regions characterised by tourism development, such as Zambezi in northern Namibia. Nonetheless, with the support of the national government, conservancies, as local governance institutions, partly maintained the distribution of value from tourism throughout the pandemic and strengthened agriculture-tourism linkages to achieve long-term transformation. These findings suggest that local institutions are able to create regional resilience through their capacity to drive adaptation and adaptability in a diversified regional economy.

There are high aspirations to foster growth in Namibia’s Zambezi region via the development of tourism. The Zambezi region is a core element of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), a mosaic of areas with varying degrees of protection, which is designed to combine nature conservation and rural development. These conservation areas serve as a resource base for wildlife tourism, and growth corridor policy aims to integrate the region into tourism global production networks (GPNs) by means of infrastructure development. Despite the increasing popularity of growth corridors, little is known about the effectiveness of this development strategy at local level. The mixed-methods approach suggests a link between a tandem of infrastructure development and tourism-oriented policies on the one hand, and increased value creation from tourism in the region on the other hand. Yet, the promises of tourism-driven development reach only a very limited number of rural residents.

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