Institutions and illusions : community based wildlife management in Kilosa District, Tanzania

Abstract

In the colonial era, the colonial powers exercised territorialized control-strategies of nature conservation by setting aside large tracts of land for Protected Areas (PAs) such as National Parks and Game Reserves in the colonies. These types of protected areas have been the mainstay of biodiversity and species conservation in Sub-Saharan Africa since then, and have been prominent in the country which is the focus of this thesis, Tanzania. However, due to the increasing documentation of the adverse social impacts of these exclusionary protected areas, and the perceived “threat” local people posed to these areas (i.e. poaching, encroachment within protected area boundaries by agriculture or livestock in want of other alternatives), an alternative type of conservation paradigm surged in the 1980s, whose basic idea was that conservation should be done more in cooperation with local communities living around the PAs, and in a way that would benefit these people more. In Tanzania, and in East Africa generally, these types of initiatives have largely taken the form of “protected area outreach” programmes, but another form of community based conservation emerged in Tanzania with the introduction of Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) in the late 1990s. These areas are envisaged to provide both wildlife conservation and community development through the sustainable use of wildlife on village lands, where the village council(s) make management decisions regarding the use of wildlife on their own land, according to the hunting quotas set for that particular area (by central government). This study seeks to explain why community based conservation has not been significantly successful in neither of its two stated goals (conservation and development), in Tanzania generally, and in the case-study specifically. By using a case study of one Pilot Wildlife Management Area in Kilosa District, this study connects the experiences of local people to the wider institutional and policy frameworks of the Tanzanian state, and to discourses surrounding conservation and development on a global level. It uses a political ecology conceptual framework to explain the politics behind community based conservation in Tanzania, and thereby offers an explanation of why community based conservation has largely not been successful by concluding that a rights-based approach which takes into consideration the lack of power local people have over their resources will be more successful in identifying the problems, rather than blaming the failures on technical or managerial issues on a local level.