Pastoralist livelihoods and wildlife revenues in East Africa: a case for coexistence?

Abstract

East African arid and semi-arid lands are home to many of the world's pastoralists and most spectacular savanna wildlife populations, attracting substantial conservation and tourism revenues. Yet these peoples are among the poorest (and most affected by extreme climatic events), and the wildlife is in unsustainable decline. National governments, international donors and conservation agencies favour win-win solutions through conservation with development. Maasailand is a hotspot of conservation, poverty and new initiatives to redistribute tourist income. We outline pastoralist livelihoods and how these are changing, then summarise status and trends of wildlife populations, tourism revenues, and conservation and development initiatives in East Africa and Maasailand. We ask to what extent wildlife revenues contribute to pastoralist livelihoods and whether this translates into a robust basis for coexistence. To put in context the role and importance of wildlife-and tourism-based activities, we outline findings from a multi-site study of Maasai livelihoods. Livestock contribute half or more of the mean annual income in all sites, with off-farm work and farming ranking second and third, respectively, except in Mara, where wildlife-based income contributes around 20% income across all wealth categories. In most sites, significant areas have been set aside for conservation and tourism, but wildlife contributes <5% income to a small proportion of households at most. Few wildlife-derived benefits flow to pastoralists, while conservation restrictions constrain production and coping strategies, undermining potential for coexistence. In exceptional circumstances, significant wildlife revenue may reach households, but full social and ecological implications of associated conservancy agreements remain unclear.

Households and food security: lessons from food secure households in East Africa

“…The majority of food insecure households largely dependent on livestock income are found in Wote, the driest of the three sites analysed, characterised by uncertainty of rainfall [54] and low nutrient levels, and low water-holding capacity [55]. These results confirm findings of other studies that show the significant contribution of livestock-related earnings for households' income and livelihoods in areas where rainfall levels are low [52,56,57]. In fact, where cropping is very risky due to low and unpredictable rainfall, the role of livestock as a livelihood option is likely to become even more important in the face of a changing climate [4].…”

Trade-offs for climate-resilient pastoral livelihoods in wildlife conservancies in the Mara ecosystem, Kenya

“…Conservancies are not fully integrative, and like other schemes in Maasailand (Homewood et al 2012), they aim to replace livestock, rather than to fully integrate with livestock within the same landscape. Livestock support livelihoods and can contribute to protecting biodiversity; livestock landscapes thus need to be part of the conservation agenda.…”

“…Various attempts to distribute tourism revenues to local communities have been beset by problems of mismanagement, unaccountability and inequality (Thompson and Homewood 2002;Thompson et al 2009). A multi-site study in Maasailand ) shows that, although households in the Mara do receive the most from wildlife (approximately 20% of total annual household income) compared with similar sites in Kenya and Tanzania, even here, it is the wealthiest households that capture the greatest portion of revenues (Homewood et al 2012;Thompson et al 2009). …”

Characterizing the Intensity and Dynamics of Land-Use Change in the Mara River Basin, East Africa

“…In this new arrangement, the private land owners adjacent to the MMNR pooled their land together to create a big game viewing area viable as a conservancy and then broker lease agreements with tour operators under Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) model [65]. In the conservancies, the landowner who join the PES schemes agree to move out and are not allowed to sell or cultivate their land [66]. Therefore, these wildlife conservation efforts in the Mara may have seen the shift of mechanized cultivation from targeting rangelands to the areas that were already under small-scale cultivation in the rangeland (Figure 4).…”