Household livelihoods and conflict with wildlife in community-based conservation areas across northern Tanzania

Abstract

Conservation strategies to protect biodiversity and support household livelihoods face numerous challenges. Across the tropics, efforts focus on balancing trade-offs in local communities near the borders of protected areas. Devolving rights and control over certain resources to communities is increasingly considered necessary, but decades of attempts have yielded limited success and few lessons on how such interventions could be successful in improving livelihoods. We investigated a key feature of household well-being, the experience of food insecurity, in villages across Tanzania's northern wildlife tourist circuit. Using a sample of 2,499 primarily livestock-keeping households we compared food insecurity in villages participating in the country's principal community-based conservation strategy with nearby control areas. We tested whether community-based projects could offset the central costs experienced by households near strictly protected areas (i.e. frequent human–wildlife conflict and restricted access to resources). We found substantial heterogeneity in outcomes associated with the presence of community-based conservation projects across multiple project sites. Although households in project villages experienced more frequent conflict with wildlife and received few provisioned benefits, there is evidence that these households may have been buffered to some degree against negative effects of wildlife conflict. We interpret our results in light of qualitative institutional factors that may explain various project outcomes. Tanzania, like many areas of conservation importance, contains threatened biodiversity alongside areas of extreme poverty. Our analyses highlight the need to examine more precisely the complex and locally specific mechanisms by which interventions do or do not benefit wildlife and local communities.

Evaluating conservation effectiveness in a Tanzanian community wildlife management area

“…The success record of CBNRM in general is highly variable (Kellert et al , Tallis et al , Brooks et al , Brooks ), and the socio‐economic performance of WMAs has been criticized (Benjaminsen et al , Bamford et al , Bluwstein et al , Moyo et al ). However, evidence is beginning to indicate that positive social and ecological outcomes can result from WMA projects (Tetra Tech and Maliasili Initiatives , Pailler et al , Salerno et al , Lee and Bond ). My data have demonstrated that WMA establishment and management in Tanzania as practiced in Burunge WMA had positive outcomes for wildlife species densities and demographic rates.…”

“…I used data I collected from 2012 to 2017. Details of WMA history and management structure are given elsewhere (Benjaminsen et al , Tetra Tech and Maliasili Initiatives , Moyo et al , Salerno et al ).…”

“…There have been several social and economic analyses of WMAs (Benjaminsen et al , Tetra Tech and Maliasili Initiatives , Bluwstein et al , Moyo et al , Salerno et al ), but data are scarce on the ecological effectiveness of WMAs for wildlife conservation (Lee and Bond ). Quantifying ecological effectiveness is important for evaluating specific projects and the general concept of CBNRM (Ferraro and Pressey ).…”

Community‐based wildlife management area supports similar mammal species richness and densities compared to a national park

“…Community-based natural resource management models have been advocated as a dual strategy to alleviate poverty and to halt overall biodiversity decline (Berkes, 2004(Berkes, , 2007Kiss, 1990Kiss, , 2004. In East Africa, where wildlife populations have been declining (Craigie et al, 2010;Stoner et al, 2007;Western, Russell, & Cuthil, 2009) and people in rural areas often lack basic commodities (Ellis & Freeman, 2004;Reardon & Vosti, 1995;Salerno, Borgerhoff Mulder, Grote, Ghiselli, & Packer, 2016), community-based wildlife conservation models have been considered and implemented as a strategy to balance the trade-off between wildlife conservation and development (Borgerhoff Mulder & Coppolillo, 2005;Kiwango, Komakech, Tarimo, & Martz, 2015;Naidoo et al, 2016). In East Africa and elsewhere, such community-based conservation models have been subject to considerable criticism, specifically in regard to their socio-economic contributions and poor governance (Benjaminsen, Goldman, Minwary, & Maganga, 2013;Bluwstein, Moyo, & Kicheleri, 2016;Brehony, Bluwstein, Lund, & Tyrrell, 2018;Goldman, 2003;Moyo, Ijumba, & Lund, 2016;Wright, 1995).…”

Participatory wetland conservation in Yok Don National Park, Vietnam

“…Furthermore, Lamsal et al (2015) suggested that better-off households who had less dependence on wetland resources were more involved with conservation organisations. A similar contribution of linkages between less direct benefits of wildlife management areas and more direct engagement with policy process was found in northern Tanzania by Salerno et al (2015).…”