Wildlife is the backbone of tourism in Kenya, one of the leading foreign exchange earners for the country. Although wildlife is declining, poverty among communities hosting this wildlife remains endemic. Using field data and secondary literature, this article examines the extent to which the existing wildlife conservation regime must be considered responsible for the associated issues of wildlife decline and community poverty. The author contends that the interests of landowners (both community and private) must be meaningfully incorporated into wildlife conservation planning in order for both impacted communities and wildlife management to be sustainable. The article proposes a rethinking of the wildlife governance philosophy in this respect and sets out pragmatic policy suggestions on how to reform wildlife management for conservation in Kenya built on securing more benefits for the communities that shoulder the burden of conservation.
One of the next major challenges for research and policy on sustainability is setting the post-2015 Development Agenda. This challenge arises as a direct result of the formal ending of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015 and as an outcome of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20). The post-2015 Development Agenda is expected to include two agendas: one on human well-being to advance the MDG targets and the other on planetary well-being, which requires a safe-operating space‖ within the Earth's life-support system. In contrast to the MDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are meant to apply to both developing and developed countries and create a space for development within the stable functioning of the Earth's systems. However, what might this all look like? For answers, this paper reviews the achievements and reflections of the MDGs to date and identifies new challenges entailed in the shift of development goals from-millennium‖ to-sustainable‖. While most of the existing studies look at these two sets of issues separately, combining the two reveals two important features of the SDGs. First, SDGs need to integrate both human and planetary well-being in a goal, and second, goals, or sub-goals, need to be formulated at multiple levels, from global to local levels. While the MDGs represented no integrated goals, some of the existing proposals on SDGs include integrated goals. However, our analysis has shown that they do not present the vertical diffusion of goals. Considering both integration and diffusion in the architecture of SDGs is a remaining task.
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