Keywords

1.1 Introduction

In eastern and southern Africa, problems of biodiversity loss, rural poverty and unsustainable land-use practices are interdependent and linked to institutional deficits in land-tenure and property rights systems, as well as to the values attached to land and natural resources by various actors (e.g. Adams 2004; German et al. 2012; Nelson 2010). These interconnected problems form one of the world’s greatest challenges of the twenty-first century, calling into question how the balance between nature conservation and human development in Africa is changing. Particularly outside state-protected areas, governmental and non-governmental organizations have been confronted with human-wildlife conflicts and disputes over access to and ownership of land.

The troublesome relation between local communities, land use and nature conservation in eastern and southern Africa has existed for many decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, during which many African states became independent from colonial powers, nature conservation was dominated by state dominated approaches characterized by ‘fortresses, fines and fences’. These approaches sealed off land and natural resources from the rest of society by attributing land as national parks and reserves. Local communities were predominantly seen as a threat to wildlife both inside and outside these national parks, and their rights for consumptive use were limited by means of strict enforcement (e.g. Peluso 1993).

Around the 1970s, ecological studies showed that the fortress conservation model alone is insufficient to combat biodiversity loss, because national parks are too small and fragmented to prevent species from going extinct (e.g. Western 2002; Adams 2004). The areas adjacent to national parks and nature parks became thus critical for conservation. Yet, for local communities whose livelihoods depend on agriculture and livestock, wildlife presents a threat. Elephants are notorious for raiding agricultural crops and lions for killing livestock. Therefore, to be able to conserve wildlife beyond the boundaries of national parks, wildlife has to become of value for the communities and land-owners on whose land it lives (Western 2002). This led to the realization that human development and livelihood issues should be included in the conservation agenda (e.g. Colchester 2002; Western 2002).

An alternative perspective emerged, in which the involvement of communities, also through the establishment of tourism projects, was seen as a key development to warrant nature conservation. In the decades that followed, alternative forms of tourism were promoted and funded by international nature conservation organizations (e.g. World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, African Wildlife Foundation) as well as development organizations (e.g. SNV Netherlands Development Organisation, see Hummel and Van der Duim 2012). These alternative tourism projects focused on the development of small-scale businesses and involved local communities in their management (e.g. Barrow and Murphree 2001; Scheyvens 2002, 2007). The key argument behind these initiatives was that local communities could be enticed to start conserving wildlife, or other natural resources, if these resources represented greater value to them and if they played a greater role in decision-making processes on their use and management (Hughes and Flintan 2001; Scheyvens 2002, 2007). This development became evident in the rise of community-based tourism (CBT) and more broadly community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) projects.

CBT and CBNRM have undoubtedly resulted in a range of community benefits, such as increased levels of relevant skills, education, awareness, responsibility and empowerment in conserving nature (e.g. Spenceley 2008). However, critics have argued that achieving sustained success in CBT projects has proven to be challenging due to the long-term dependency on external donor funding (e.g. Kiss 2004) and the tendency of projects to collapse when donor funding stops (e.g. Mitchell and Muckosy 2008), the insufficiency and unequal distribution of benefits among individual community members (e.g. Manyara and Jones 2007), and the internal conflicts and power struggles within local communities (e.g. Ahebwa et al. 2012a; Lamers et al. 2014; Southgate 2006). Consequently, the effectiveness of CBNRM and CBT initiatives for both conservation and development has been under constant debate (Adams et al. 2004; Leach et al. 1999; Mbaiwa and Kolawole 2013; Sebele 2010).

To address these challenges, in the 1990s a more market-based approach emerged in which partnerships between public, private and civic actors were actively promoted (Adams 2004; Van der Duim 2011). In these neoliberal institutional arrangements it was argued that communities often lack business skills and access to the transnational tourism market to run a tourism business profitably. Joint ventures or partnerships between communities and private entrepreneurs were seen as a way to face these challenges (Spenceley and Snyman 2012).

Over the years, this market-based shift in the tourism, conservation and development nexus has led to a wide variety of novel institutional arrangements in eastern and southern Africa, in which actors take on different roles in generating and sharing the economic value of nature conservation. We define institutional arrangements as a set of organizational forms, policies, rules, practices and cultural norms designed and deployed to govern a group of actors towards the attainment of a particular objective. In most of the arrangements under study in this book, wildlife conservation and tourism are promoted and managed as an alternative form of land use, replacing or complementing agricultural practices, but without changing land tenure or ownership. These arrangements can be initiated and driven by international donors, but also by state agencies, private sector, social movements or local communities. In these arrangements, the value of nature for tourism has increasingly become a means to derive a livelihood from private or communally-owned land, a development that progressively is reflected in scientific literature (Brockington et al. 2008; Hottola 2009; Saarinen et al. 2009; Spenceley 2008; Suich et al. 2009). As such, many of the institutional arrangements in this book focus on attaining a tripartite goal: (a) developing an economically viable (tourism) business in order to generate sufficient benefit streams to (b) improve people’s livelihoods and (c) create a net positive contribution to conservation.

In the remainder of this chapter we will clarify how this book attempts to understand these innovative institutional arrangements for tourism, conservation and development in eastern and southern Africa. The next section explains the key questions that run through the different chapters of this book, as well as the relevance of these questions. Section 1.2 also provides a primer on how different contemporary institutional arrangements are framed in the literature and by the authors of this book. It is argued that in the midst of instrumentally and critically oriented views, our book aims to take a middle position by providing a stage for reflecting on these different views. In Sect. 1.3 we will introduce each chapter of this book, followed by concluding remarks in Sect. 1.4.

1.2 Understanding Innovative Institutional Arrangements

The transition towards sustainability in tourism, conservation and development in Africa requires innovations in extant institutional arrangements. Hjalager (2010: 3) defines such institutional innovations as “a new, embracing collaborative/organizational structure or legal framework that efficiently redirects or enhances the business in certain fields”. Innovations in institutional arrangements may refer to bringing together a set of organizational actors that did not interact and communicate before (e.g. Selin 1999); launching social enterprises whose business model is geared towards attaining social and environmental goals, making them distinctive to mainstream businesses (e.g. Von der Weppen and Cochrane 2012); and introducing new legislation and standards to govern social behavior (e.g. Chan and Wong 2006; Font 2002).

Over the last 25 years, the sub-Saharan African landscape has been transformed by a wide variety of ‘new’ conservation institutional arrangements. The ‘old’ challenge of reconciling development and nature conservation is now tackled not only by CBT projects and enterprises, but also by private game reserves (e.g. Barnes and Jones 2009; Bothma et al. 2009; Child 2009; see also Chap. 6), conservancies (e.g. Novelli and Gebhardt 2007; Ashley 2000; see also Chaps. 2 and 3) and tourism-conservation enterprises (e.g. Elliott and Sumba 2010; Nthiga et al. 2011; see also Chaps. 11 and 12). While ‘new solutions for old problems’ are thus widespread, the emergence, characteristics, and effects of such novel institutional arrangements are neither well understood, nor thoroughly examined. It is here where this book aims to make its main contribution. More specifically, it will examine how in the history of the conservation and development nexus the role of tourism has become paramount and has led to variegated institutional arrangements.

The book will particularly focus on the institutional arrangements of conservancies in Namibia (Chaps. 2 and 3), community-based natural resource management in Botswana (Chaps. 4 and 5), private and public game reserves in South Africa (Chaps. 6 and 7), the reintroduction of sports hunting in Uganda (Chap. 8), transfrontier conservation areas (TFCA) between southern African states (Chaps. 9 and 10) and tourism conservation enterprises (TCE) in Kenya (Chaps. 11 and 12). In all these institutional arrangements tourism gradually has become an integral part aimed at reconciling the challenges of conservation and development.

While a good number of case studies have been conducted on each of these institutional arrangements, a systematic, comparative analysis is lacking. Addressing this knowledge gap is relevant in order to advance our understanding of how innovative institutional arrangements come about and contribute to addressing two major issues facing humankind: the fast depletion of natural resources and the persistence of rural poverty. Accordingly, this book aims to present a systematic overview of the main innovative institutional arrangements at the tourism-conservation-development nexus by inviting the authors of the subsequent chapters to address the following questions:

  1. 1.

    What are the main features of the institutional arrangement?

  2. 2.

    Who were the initiators in launching and developing the institutional arrangement?

  3. 3.

    Why did these organizational actors engage in such innovative behaviour?

  4. 4.

    How did they proceed in launching and developing the institutional arrangement?

  5. 5.

    What are the effects of the arrangement on nature conservation and development?

This book clearly illustrates that all of these institutional arrangements, with the exception of trophy hunting, are relatively new and set off in the 1990s, are securing large pieces of land for conservation outside national parks and reserves, have varying development impacts, and increasingly stretch throughout sub-Saharan Africa. For example, although trophy hunting has existed for long, it now occurs in 23 countries in Africa, primarily in southern Africa where the industry is expanding. According to Lindsey et al. (2007) a minimum of 140 million hectares is now used for trophy hunting in sub-Saharan Africa, which exceeds the land area encompassed by national parks. Trophy hunting is considered of major importance to conservation in Africa by creating economic incentives for conservation over vast areas, including areas which may be unsuitable for alternative forms of wildlife-based land use, such as photographic ecotourism (Lindsey et al. 2007).

Trophy hunting also underlies the expansion of private game reserves in South Africa and conservancies in Namibia. According to Van Hoven (Chap. 6), the number of private game reserves in South Africa increased from a mere 10 in the 1960s to 11,600 today, covering 22 million hectares or 18 % of the land surface. Trophy hunting also plays an important role in the development of conservancies in Namibia. According to the Namibian Association of Community Based Natural Resource Management Support Organisation (NACSO), the first four communal conservancies were registered in 1998. In 2012, 79 registered conservancies contributed to the livelihood of one of every four rural Namibians and covered 16 million hectares. Over 55 joint-venture lodges and community campsites provide employment, training and social services, as well as generate economic spin-off activities for people living in the conservancies.

The national Namibian CBNRM program, of which the conservancies are part, bear a resemblance to Botswana’s CBNRM program (see Chaps. 4 and 5). Here, 45 out of a total of 105 community-based organizations support 123 villages and a total population of over 283,000 people. A total of 6.7 million hectares of land (11.35 % of Botswana’s land surface) is set aside for wildlife management areas (WMAs) (Mbaiwa 2013). A further 6.3 million hectares (10.8 %) of Botswana’s surface area is proposed for WMAs or community uses.

The CBNRM experiences in southern Africa also inspired the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) to develop conservation enterprises in the domains of tourism, fisheries, livestock and agriculture (see Chaps. 11 and 12). Over the past 15 years, AWF has launched 60 conservation enterprises across the continent of which 35 % relates to agriculture and animal husbandry and 65 % to tourism. Together, these enterprises have generated more than USD 2 million per year for communities around these enterprises (AWF 2014). Reportedly, the 2009 AWF enterprise portfolio comprised of 31 enterprises. It was worth USD 11 million investments, providing benefits of about USD 1.9 million per year to communities, who also benefitted through direct employment, capacity building programs and social projects and shared in net benefit flows. Collectively, these enterprises have set aside over 75,000 ha of private and communal land for conservation (Elliott and Sumba 2010).

Next to the need to expand and manage natural areas beyond national parks, the need for development beyond national borders has favored the development of transboundary initiatives, involving various states as well as non-state actors (see Chaps. 9 and 10). Rationales advanced for transboundary conservation include the securing of ecological integrity and biodiversity conservation, socio-economic empowerment of marginalized communities by considering them as partners in established multi-stakeholder ventures, cultural harmonization of divided ethnic groups and encouragement of peace and security, and good political relations among governments by giving them an agenda for mutual action on issues of common concern such as disputed borderlands and competed resources (Wolmer 2003). There are now 10 TFCAs with a signed treaty or Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). Again, investments in tourism are considered a key opportunity for cross-border collaboration and for favoring ecological conservation and social economic development. For example, transnational initiatives led to the establishment of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in 2001, covering an area of nearly 10 million hectares, including the Kruger National Park in South Africa, the Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe, the Zinave and Banhine National Parks and the Coutada 16 Wildlife Utilisation Area in Mozambique, as well as several private game reserves and community conservancies (Büscher and Dietz 2005).

Obviously our overview of ‘new’ solutions is by no means complete. Sub-Saharan Africa is confronted with a much wider variety of institutional arrangements in conservation than presented in this book. The institutional arrangements presented in this book are influential, but not all-encompassing. For example, tourism-revenue schemes as practiced in Tanzania or Uganda (Ahebwa et al. 2012b), single community-based projects, like the Buhoma-Mukona Lodge at the gate of Bwindi National Park (Ahebwa and Van der Duim 2013), the community projects initiated by tourism companies, like Wilderness Safaris in southern Africa (Snyman 2013) or Cheli and Peacock in eastern Africa (Cheli and Peacock 2012), non-governmental organisations of conservancies, like the Northern Rangelands Trust in Kenya, or the work of the African Parks Network, fall outside the scope of this book. Given that the African Parks Network provides an illustrative example of the novel institutional arrangements we are talking about in this book (i.e. tourism inclusive conservation), Box 1.1 presents more details on this example.

As many of the chapters in this book illustrate, typically the authors provide a judgment regarding the winners and losers of the arrangements under discussion that closely links to scientific, institutional or even ideological perspectives. The conceptual frameworks that the authors use to analyze the arrangements lead to mixed outcomes. For example, in Chap. 6 Van Hoven arrives at a much more optimistic conclusion about conservation practices in South Africa than Bologna and Spierenburg in Chap. 7. Whereas nature conservation organizations, like AWF or African Parks, normally celebrate the successes on their websites and yearly reports to donors, they are at the same time confronted with harsh critiques. For example, Blonk (2008) documents how African Parks, despite a 25 year contract, gave up the management of Nech Sar and Omo National Parks in the south of Ethiopia after being under fire for some time for their handling of indigenous people living within the park borders. Similarly a documentary titled ‘Conservation’s Dirty Secrets’ confronted the AWF with an aggressive campaign against some of their conservation practices. Despite their ‘successes’, as highlighted by Hanks and Meyburg in this Volume (see Chap. 9), TFCAs are also increasingly becoming the subject of ‘critical’ research by the work of political economists and ecologists (e.g. Büscher 2010; Büscher and Dietz 2005; Draper and Wels 2002; Duffy 2001, 2006; Ramutsindela 2007). According to Büscher (2009), TFCAs are to be seen as contemporary manifestations of the neoliberal governance of conservation and development, constituted by three modes of political conduct, i.e. a consensus rhetoric, a political strategy of anti-politics and a marketing strategy that entails the “manipulation of abstraction in order to gain competitive advantage in the conservation/development market-place” (Büscher 2009: 308).

These debates on successes and failures demonstrate two opposing views on tourism, conservation and development policies and practices (Mosse 2004). On the one hand there is an ‘instrumental’ view of policy as rational problem solving. On the other hand there is a ‘critical’ view that sees policy as a rationalizing discourse concealing hidden purposes of bureaucratic or neoliberal powers. From an ‘instrumental’ view the main concern of conservation organizations, their donors, as well as their analysts, is how to realize program designs in practice. Despite the fact that international conservation organizations and their allies in recent years moved away from single and narrowly defined projects towards larger integrated and consistent programs, as illustrated by the Heartlands approach of the AWF (see Nthiga et al. 2011 and Chap. 11), the conservancy approach in Namibia (see Chaps. 2 and 3) and the CBNRM program in Botswana (Chap. 4), they are not less concerned with bringing institutional reality and results in line with policy discourses and prescriptions (Mosse 2004). For example, to support their managerial approach, the AWF has invested heavily in developing an impact assessment procedure to ensure experience is fed back into projects and programs. Their Program Impact and Assessment (PIMA) system, incorporates many species and habitats, as well as livelihood impact indicators, and provides a clear example of the instrumental view (see also Elliott and Sumba 2010).

The second ‘critical’ view regards the failures of conservation and development interventions as self-evident. As Mosse (2004) argues, for critics there is no surprise that ‘management’ models, such as transfrontier conservation areas, national parks, conservancies or conservation enterprises, which isolate interventions from the history and social and political realities of developing countries, and bend these realities into the discipline-bound logics of diagnosis and prescription (whether in conservation, development, agriculture or tourism), do not achieve their desired ends. For critics, tourism, conservation and development “and its various discourses (understood as policies and practices) have both institutional (maintaining relations of power) and ideological effects (depoliticization)” (Mosse 2004: 643).

The critical view is particularly fuelled by the work of political economists and ecologists examining conservation practices in Africa and elsewhere. Büscher and Davidov (2014) provide a recent example of this approach by conceptualizing and empirically analyzing the ‘ecotourism-extraction’ nexus. Their central premise is that these apparently contradictory activities are conceptually and empirically more alike than often envisioned, and that they share common grounds in living experiences of people in rural settings and broader economic structures of power and control. From this point of view the changing balance between state, market and civil society and the rise of neoliberal governance arrangements have been questioned. Authors like Brockington et al. (2008) argue that:

conservation and capitalism are shaping nature and society, and often in partnership. In the name of conservation, rural communities will organize themselves, and change their use and management of wildlife and landscapes. They ally with safari hunters and tourist companies to sell the experience of new tourist products on the international markets (….). [A]s these types of interventions spread and become more sophisticated, it becomes increasingly different to determine if we are describing conservation with capitalism or capitalism with conservation as its instrument. The lines between conservation and capitalism blur. While it is debatable whether this alliance of conservation and capitalism is capable of saving the world, there is no doubt that it is most capable of remaking and recreating it. (pp. 5–6)

In their view, geopolitical developments, changing conservation and development debates, the ‘neoliberalisation’ of nature and biodiversity conservation (see Büscher 2010) and the ever increasing role and importance of tourism in Sub-Saharan Africa have transformed the political economy of conservation from a predominantly state-led conservation model to one in which corporate interests increasingly play a dominant role. Apparently there has been a paradigm shift in which “economic growth and big businesses increasingly are presented as essential to successful biodiversity conservation and a sustainable future for our planet” (Igoe et al. 2009: 4). Tourism has become an integral part of this new neoliberal conservation-development nexus, which exemplifies a shift of focus from “how nature is used in and through the expansion of capitalism, to how nature is conserved in and through the expansion of capitalism” (Büscher 2012: 4).

Although we belief that these ‘critical’ views are important, also in terms of ‘where’ and ‘what to look at’ when studying these novel institutional arrangements, we shall take a more unpresumptuous point of departure and greet the idea of a ‘modest’ approach. Following Mosse (2004), we believe these contrasted instrumental and critical views have blocked the way for a more insightful analysis focusing not on ‘if’, but rather on ‘how’, novel institutional arrangements addressing the tourism-conservation-development nexus work. This book therefore takes a more nuanced stance in this scientific and societal debate on ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ by giving voice to proponents as well as opponents of some of the more neoliberal solutions towards tourism, conservation and development and by particularly focusing on how innovative institutional arrangements unfold and materialize. This book therefore is not an evaluation in terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, neither are we interested in passing final judgments.

Box 1.1: The African Parks Network

The African Parks Network operates at a transnational level and currently manages seven parks in six African countries, i.e. Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Zambia. It explicitly uses markets for conservation and its tagline reads, as so many other conservation organizations, as “a business approach to conservation” (see also Holmes 2012). The total area under management covers 4.1 million hectares. Its principal strategy is to enter in agreements with national governments about protected area management, whereby responsibility for funding and managing the protected area is devolved to African Parks, while the area and its wildlife remain the legal property of the state (Holmes 2012). The objective of African Parks is to become the leading player in protected area management on the African continent. By 2020 they aim to have responsibility for a portfolio of 15 parks covering an area of five to seven million hectares. African Parks claims that due to the geographic spread and representation of different ecosystems, this will be one of the most ecologically diverse portfolios of parks in the world (African Parks 2013). The funding of activities of African Parks depends on a combination of donors, the Dutch and Swedish Postcode Lottery and philanthropy. For example the Dutch Postcode Lottery has contributed USD 6.2 million of funding for the period 2010–2014 for African Parks’ portfolio. Other important donors include the European Union, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the Adessium Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. In 2012 the total income was over USD 13 million (KPMG 2013; African Parks 2013).

The Stichting African Parks Foundation (SAPF) is the proprietary funding body of African Parks. It is a charitable foundation established in the Netherlands, with the primary objective of ensuring the long term integrity of some of Africa’s national parks. The bulk of funds available from SAPF were made available by Paul Fentener van Vlissingen, a Dutch international businessman, philanthropist and one of the founders of African Parks. The African Parks Endowment Fund has a number of sub-accounts, each dedicated to a specific cause. Paul Fentener van Vlissingen posthumously donated about USD 35 million towards the fund, which generates approximately USD 718,000 for the annual overhead costs of African Parks (2013).

From the outset African Parks recognized that tourism is the key to making their parks financially sustainable. Attracting tourism investors however has been more difficult than anticipated. In the long term, African Parks expects their parks to generate various income streams, such as entrance fees, concession fees, game sales, filming fees, carbon sales and responsible hunting, with the parks categorized according to their potential to be self-financing. In 2012 African Parks generated over USD one million in gross commercial revenue. The number of visitors has sharply increased from 4,436 in 2009 to 30,737 in 2012 (African Parks 2013).

1.3 Outline of the Book

This book includes 11 chapters on six different novel institutional arrangements in eastern and southern Africa. The first two chapters analyze the emergence of conservancies in Namibia. In 1996 the Namibian government introduced legislation that gave communal area residents rights over wildlife and tourism on their land if they formed common property resource management institutions called conservancies. In Chap. 2, Jones, Diggle and Thouless reflect on the evolution of the institutional arrangement of conservancies and compare different models of community involvement in tourism in relation to issues of community ownership, exposure to business risk and maximizing income. In Chap. 3, Lapeyre zooms in on the conservancy approach in practice. Drawing on the illustrative example of the Tsiseb Conservancy, Lapeyre highlights how practically the institutional arrangement of conservancies came about, is organized and functions. Despite substantial livelihood benefits, the emergence of strong institutions and increase of wildlife numbers, including endangered species, his analysis also uncovered a situation where a lack of members’ participation in decision-making processes and a capture of conservancy affairs by a small well-connected group have jeopardized institutional stability and biodiversity conservation. He therefore warns that countries as Kenya, Uganda and Mongolia, which recently have shown interest in reproducing the Namibian approach to biodiversity conservation, should carefully think of maintenance mechanisms in order to sustain tourism governance over time and avoid institutional failure after some years.

Just as Namibia, in the last two decades also Botswana has extensively experimented with community based natural resource management (CBNRM). According to Mbaiwa in Chap. 4, similarly to Namibia, CBNRM in Botswana has generated mixed results. According to Mbaiwa, some projects have relatively succeeded in achieving either biodiversity conservation or improved rural livelihoods (e.g. employment creation, generation of income, provision of social services) while other projects have collapsed. Availability of skilled personnel or lack of capacity building, reinvestment of CBNRM revenue or misappropriation of funds, strong community cohesion or the lack of it, are some of the factors that explain success or failure. Drawing on a case study of the Chobe Enclave Conservation Trust in Botswana, in Chap. 5 Stone further details the findings of Mbaiwa by demonstrating that the adoption of CBT under the rubric of CBNRM may not always bring the desired outcomes. More specifically, the study demonstrates that operational, structural and cultural limits impede community participation in CBT development projects. Overall, Stone concludes that empowerment through CBT is not uniformly perceived and varies widely within communities. What is perceived as community empowerment is a function of how CBT affects people’s livelihoods. In this respect, the recent ban on safari hunting in Botswana will have important effects on the future of CBNRM in this country and may result in significant socio-economic and ecological impacts which include the loss of several socio-economic benefits.

The importance of sport hunting is well illustrated in Chap. 6, where Van Hoven discusses the emergence of private game reserves in South Africa, which now number about 11,600. According to Van Hoven this has resulted in a 40-fold increase in the number of wildlife from the early 1960s to today with South Africa now having more wildlife than at any point in time during the past 200 years. Van Hoven uses lions and rhinoceros as examples of how the placing of a commercial value on wildlife species can be an important means to conserve wildlife. A more critical perspective on wildlife conservation in South Africa is voiced by Bologna and Spierenburg in Chap. 7. Using the example of Madikwe Game Reserve, in South Africa’s North West Province—where a proposed ‘Heritage Park’ initiative aims to create a conservation corridor connecting Madikwe and Pilanesberg game reserves, and eventually to extend the park across the border into Botswana—they explore influences and pressures that fuel and justify what they denominate as an expansionist trend, and discuss the complex repercussions arising from such policies. Although in the Madikwe story ecotourism is featured as the route to “making conservation pay”, in reality, according to Bologna and Spierenburg, it excludes a local and impoverished majority while securing access for a privileged minority.

The question to what extent communities are empowered by innovations in extant institutional arrangements is well-illustrated in Chap. 8. Here Ochieng, Ahebwa and Visseren-Hamakers describe the regulative changes to re-introduce sports hunting in Uganda. They discuss the development and effectiveness of this arrangement over the last 12 years. Their analysis indicates that the sport hunting policy has considerably changed over time and is highly contested. The policy is implemented with rather varying rules across Uganda, on both public and privately owned land. While the Ugandan government is of the opinion that the policy contributes to sustainable development, other actors, such as NGOs, question the policy’s impacts and ethics. The extent to which the policy is meant to contribute to conservation goals, and its impacts on conservation on the ground, therefore remains unclear.

Chapters 9 and 10 discuss the development of TFCAs in sub-Saharan Africa. In Chap. 9 Hanks and Myburgh examine how and when TFCAs evolved from the conservation concept of a ‘Peace Park’ and were subsequently developed in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), with particular reference to the origin of the Peace Parks Foundation (PPF) and its role in their establishment. They also review the objectives of TFCA establishment, and describe the development and institutional processes followed by SADC in their establishment. Their chapter continues with a discussion on the benefits and challenges of TFCA development and conclude that with a genuine commitment by all parties to develop, implement and manage each TFCA according to its specific needs and geographical, economic and political constraints, the future looks encouraging. In Chap. 10, Noe focuses on the process that creates TFCAs and how that process generates conditions for economic empowerment or disempowerment. She uses the experience of the Selous-Niassa TFCA to examine how evolution and promotion of tourism has differentiated impacts on different actors. Her main argument is that most of the communities on the edges of TFCAs are struggling with the loss of basic rights to land, which is their main source of livelihoods. Tourism as an economic activity has mainly remained in few powerful hands as benefits are hampered by the capital tendency of the industry to which TFCAs are not immune. Noe therefore concludes that transfrontier conservation may be a flagship project for the southern African region but mainly for what conservation is called to serve; nature protection.

Conservation is also the main objective of AWFs tourism conservation enterprises (TCEs). Chapters 11 and 12 give a detailed overview of their emergence and current functioning. Van Wijk, Lamers and Van der Duim describe in Chap. 11 the development of this organizational form, its main features and the main challenges in implementing and managing these ventures. Their detailed study of AWF suggests that the adoption of market-based approaches to conservation was an emergent and reactive process that aligned with the global macro-cultural discourse on CBNRM and business partnerships. It mirrors the neoliberal approach to nature conservation more broadly. Chapter 12 details how this works in practice. Here, Lamers, Van der Duim, Nthiga, Van Wijk and Waterreus analyze and compare the implementation of three TCEs in Kenya (Koija Starbeds, Sanctuary at Ol Lentille, Satao Elerai). This chapter demonstrates the commonalities and differences in the institutional arrangements and the performance of the three lodges at the local level. It also identifies a range of longer term governance challenges, such as the need to address local political struggles, the relations between partners, and transparency and accountability in the arrangement.

In our final Chap. 13 we present a comparative analysis of all the arrangements discussed in this book. We highlight that most arrangements emerged in the 1990s, aiming to address some of the challenges of the ‘fortress’ types of conservation by combining principles of community-based natural resource management with a neoliberal approach to conservation. This is evident in the use of tourism as the main mechanism for accruing benefits from wildlife. We also illustrate the empirical relevance of these novel arrangements by presenting their growth in numbers and discuss how these arrangements differ in their form. We furthermore highlight that these arrangements have secured large amounts of land for conservation, but also generated governance challenges and disputes on tourism benefit sharing, affecting the stability of these arrangements to produce socioeconomic and conservation benefits. We concluding our comparative analysis by exploring what developments may prompt transformations in these arrangements in the next decades.

1.4 In Conclusion

This chapter commenced by describing how across eastern and southern Africa during the last two decades a range of novel institutional arrangements in the conservation-development nexus has emerged. In these novel institutional arrangements the emphasis has shifted from government to communities and from communities to all kinds of partnerships. Moreover, these arrangements increasingly foreground tourism as a mechanism to derive economic value from wildlife on communal and private land.

Drawing on several examples of such novel arrangements, ranging from conservancies in Namibia, private game reserves in South Africa, tourism-conservation enterprises in Kenya and transfrontier conservation models like African Parks, we then highlighted that the transformation towards more market-based approaches to conservation is empirically significant for the land surface these arrangements cover, the amount of investments involved, the potential conservation and livelihoods benefits generated and the diversity of actors involved.

In arguing that more research into these arrangements is warranted, we presented the core questions that run through the chapters of this book. We furthermore pointed out that the authors of the book chapters hold different positions in answering these questions and explained our own position among instrumentally and critically oriented views towards the working and effects of institutional arrangements.

This chapter has thus set the scene for an edited volume that aims to contribute to the growing literature on the conservation-development-tourism nexus by examining how a selection of novel innovative institutional arrangements have emerged, how they contribute to conserving nature and generating livelihood results, and how they are governed. As Barrett et al. (2005: 196) rightly point out: “[m]eeting the challenge of reconciling rural poverty reduction and renewable resource conservation will require careful investigation and rethinking of the institutional arrangements on which such efforts so fundamentally depend”.