Edwin Muchapondwa

Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and its land claimants: a pre- and post-land claim conservation and development history

Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park is located in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and neighbouring Botswana. The local communities on the South African side, the Khomani San (Bushmen) and Mier living adjacent to the park have land rights inside and outside the park. The path from a history of land dispossession to being land owners has created conservation challenges manifested through heightened inter- and intra-community conflicts. The contestations for land and tourism development opportunities in and outside the park have drawn in powerful institutions such as the governments, South African National Parks, private safari companies, local interest groups and NGOs against relatively powerless local communities. This has consequently attracted national and international interest since it may result in further marginalization of the communities who lack the power to negotiate resource access. Moreover, the social and political system of the San is romanticized while little is reported about the Mier, who are an integral part of the park management system. To make these issues more accessible to a growing audience of interested parties and to better understand present conservation and development challenges and opportunities, this paper synthesizes information on the pre- and post-land restitution history of the park and the adjacent communities.

Can the restrictive harvest period policy conserve mopane worms in southern Africa? A bioeconomic modelling approach

Imbrasia Belina also known as the mopane worm, like other edible insects and caterpillars, is a vital source of protein to Southern African countries. The worms live and graze on mopane trees, which occupy agricultural land. With increasing commercialization of the worm, the management of the worm, which was hitherto organized as a common property resource, has degraded to a near open access. In this paper, a simple bio-economic modeling approach has been taken to show that, for some optimal land allocation, the restrictive period harvest season policy that is advocated by community leaders may not lead to sustainable harvesting of the worm.

.Ground-truthing. Chinese development finance in Africa: Field evidence from South Africa and Uganda

ABSTRACT A new methodology, Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF), leverages open-source information on development finance by non-transparent, non-Western donors. If such open-source methods prove to be valid and reliable, they can enhance our understanding of the causes and consequences of development finance from non-transparent donors including, but not limited to, China. But open-source methods face charges of inaccuracy. In this study we create and field-test a replicable ‘ground-truthing’ methodology to verify, update, and improve open-source data with in-person interviews and site visits in Uganda and South Africa. Ground-truthing generally reveals close agreement between open-source data and answers to protocol questions from informants with official roles in the Chinese-funded projects. Our findings suggest that open-source data collection, while limited in knowable ways, can provide a stronger empirical foundation for research on development finance.

Agricultural-risk management through community-based wildlife conservation in Zimbabwe

This paper investigates whether the risk faced by rural farmers in Zimbabwe could potentially be managed by using community-based wildlife conservation. Community-based wildlife conservation could be an additional asset in the rural farmers. investment portfolio thereby potentially diversifying and consequently reducing the risk they face. Such investment could also help efforts to conserve wildlife. By making use of national historical data and statistical analysis, this paper finds that community-based wildlife conservation is a feasible hedge asset for agricultural production in rural Zimbabwe. The benefits of diversification into community-based wildlife conservation are likely to be high only in those rural areas that can sustain wildlife populations sufficient to generate adequate returns from wildlife activities such as tourism, trophy hunting, live animal sales and meat cropping

The economic valuation of nature-based tourism in the South African Kgalagadi area and implications for the Khomani San ‘bushmen’ community

The economic importance of the various attributes of dryland nature-based tourism in the Kgalagadi area is generally unknown, as is the distribution of benefits from such tourism. This study seeks to value selected attributes of nature-based tourism in the Kgalagadi area by applying the choice experiment technique and then assessing the potential for nature-based tourism to contribute to the Khomani San ‘bushmen’ livelihoods through a payment for ecosystem services scheme. The values placed on the attributes by park visitors are estimated using the conditional logit and random parameter logit models. The visitors prefer more pristine recreational opportunities, increased chances of seeing predators and disapprove of granting the local Khomani San communities access to grazing opportunities inside the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. Notably, the marginal willingness to pay for pristine recreational opportunities across all models ranging from R76.96 (US

Abalone conservation in the presence of drug use and corruption: implications for its management in South Africa

9.08) to R177.08 (US

An analysis of factors affecting household willingness to participate in the REDD+ programme in Tanzania

20.88) per trip depending on the type of restrictions imposed. Given that previous studies report that the Khomani San are willing to accept reasonable compensation for relevant resource-use restrictions, there is scope for a payment for ecosystem services scheme where visitors could be charged additional park entry fees sufficient to compensate the local communities to accept a restriction of natural resource use in the Kgalagadi area.

The determination of park fees in support of benefit sharing in Southern Africa

The illegal exploitation of wild abalone in South Africa has been escalating since 1994, despite increased enforcement, leading to collapse in some sections of its range. South Africa banned all wild abalone fishing in 2008 but controversially reopened the fishery in 2010. This paper formulates a poachers model, taking into account the realities of the abalone terrain in South Africa - the high-value of abalone, use of recreational drugs, the prevalence of bribery, and corruption - to explore why poaching has not subsided. The paper suggests two additional measures that might help ameliorate the situation: eliminating the demand side through targeted enforcement on organised crime, and ceding the resource to the local coastal communities. However, local communities need to be empowered to deal with organised crime groups. Complementary measures to bring back community patriotism will also be needed given the tattered social fabric of the local coastal communities.

Whereto with institutions and governance challenges in African wildlife conservation

Tanzania has high rates of deforestation and forest degradation. Reducing deforestation and forest degradation is an important strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, asking households to reduce deforestation means asking them to sacrifice direct benefits from forests, such as energy resources. The REDD+ programme provides a way to compensate households. This study estimates households’ willingness to accept forest-use restrictions governing participation in the REDD+ programme and its determinants. The results show that households would participate in REDD+ if the programme were to compensate them with an average of USD 2072 per year. The determinants of willingness to participate are analysed using the Heckman sample selection model. The results reveal that awareness about REDD+ economic incentives, and that deforestation and forest degradation is not good for the environment, and the increased time spent collecting the most important forest products increased probability of household participation. Households that earned more from forest products demanded greater compensation to participate. The results further revealed that, once a household is aware of the programme and its incentives and decides to participate, it tended to demand less compensation. The Government of Tanzania is advised to (i) collect baseline data in order to differentiate incentives for households depending on their forest reliance, (ii) educate people about the relationship between REDD+ and climate change to increase the cooperation of the communities.

Lessons from Applying Market-Based Incentives in Watershed Management

Sharing conservation revenue with communities surrounding parks could demonstrate the link between ecotourism and local communities’ economic development, promote a positive view of land restitution involving parks, help address skewed distribution of income in the vicinity of parks and act as an incentive for local communities to participate in conservation even more. This article estimates the visitation demand function for Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (KTP) in order to determine the appropriate conservation fee to charge visitors to maximize park revenue. The data were generated from contingent behaviour experiments on South African residents at KTP and three other parks deemed as either substitutes or complements for visitors to KTP. Our results suggest that there is sheer underselling of the recreational opportunity at KTP, which implies that there is room for generating extra revenue to support benefit sharing arrangements with the local communities. The conservation fees at KTP can increase by as much as 115%, thereby almost doubling current revenue after accounting for the drop in visitation which will be triggered by the increase.