Jakomijn van Wijk

Implementing Tourism-Conservation Enterprises: A Comparison of Three Lodges in Kenya

Since the early 1990s, nature conservation organizations in Eastern and Southern Africa have increasingly attempted to integrate their objectives with those of international development organizations, the land-use objectives of local communities and the commercial objectives of tourism businesses, leading to diverse institutional arrangements for the protection of nature and wildlife outside state-protected areas. The African Wildlife Foundation, an international nature conservation organization, has contributed to this trend of market-based institutional arrangements by developing the tourism-conservation enterprise (TCE) model. However, the implementation of TCEs highly depends on the context in which they are established. In this chapter we analyze and compare the implementation of three TCEs in Kenya. Based on a content analysis of data from individual semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews, site visits, as well as document and literature review, 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.

Novel Institutional Arrangements for Tourism, Conservation and Development in Eastern and Southern Africa

Over the last two decades across eastern and southern Africa a range of novel institutional arrangements for tourism, conservation and development have emerged. In this chapter we clarify how we attempt to understand these innovative institutional arrangements and explain the key questions that run through the chapters of this book as well as their relevance. We further elaborate on how different contemporary institutional arrangements are framed from instrumentally and critically oriented views and clarify the middle position that we take by providing a stage for reflection on these different views. The chapter closes with a concise outline of the contribution each chapter makes to this book.

Social Innovation: Integrating Micro, Meso, and Macro Level Insights From Institutional Theory

Social innovations are urgently needed as we confront complex social problems. As these social problems feature substantial interdependencies among multiple systems and actors, developing and implementing innovative solutions involve the re-negotiating of settled institutions or the building of new ones. In this introductory article, we introduce a stylized three-cycle model highlighting the institutional nature of social innovation efforts. The model conceptualizes social innovation processes as the product of agentic, relational, and situated dynamics in three interrelated cycles that operate at the micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. The five papers included in this special issue address one or more of these cycles. We draw on these papers and the model to stimulate and offer guidance to future conversations on social innovations from an institutional theory perspective.

Institutional Arrangements for Conservation, Development and Tourism in Eastern and Southern Africa

This book describes and analyzes six novel conservation arrangements in eastern and southern Africa, illustrating how tourism is increasingly used and promoted as a key mechanism for achieving conservation and development objectives outside state-protected areas.

Promoting Conservation Tourism: The Case of the African Wildlife Foundation’s Tourism Conservation Enterprises in Kenya

This chapter examines the organizational form of tourism conservation enterprises, which has been developed and promoted by the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) since the late 1990s. By deploying commercial tourism as a mechanism to attain conservation and livelihood goals, tourism conservation enterprises are interesting cases to illuminate the market-based approach to conservation. This chapter describes the development of this organizational form, its main features and the main challenges in implementing and managing these ventures. The chapter concludes with an outlook on this market-based approach to conservation. It suggests that tourism conservation enterprises need to be marketed as being distinct from mainstream safari lodges, if they are to become a separate market category in the wildlife tourism industry. Only when tourists and their service providers, such as tour operators and tourist boards, understand the added value of these conservation ventures, sufficient benefits can be generated to achieve the ventures’ social mission.

A Dynamic Perspective on Institutional Arrangements for Tourism, Conservation and Development in Eastern and Southern Africa

This book set out to present an overview of different institutional arrangements for tourism, conservation and development in eastern and southern Africa. These approaches range from conservancies in Namibia to community-based organizations in Botswana, private game reserves in South Africa and tourism conservation enterprises in Kenya, as well as transfrontier conservation areas. This chapter presents a comparative analysis of these arrangements. We highlight that most arrangements emerged in the 1990s, aiming to address some of the challenges of ‘fortress’ 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 charting their growth in numbers and discussing how these arrangements take various forms. We furthermore highlight that although these arrangements have secured large amounts of land for conservation, they have also generated governance challenges and disputes on tourism benefit-sharing, affecting the stability of these arrangements as producers of socioeconomic and conservation benefits. We conclude this chapter by exploring how climate change, developments in tourism and trophy hunting, governance challenges and the emergence of new forms of conservation finance are likely to instigate change in institutional arrangements for tourism, conservation and development, as well as open up new directions for research.