Jevgeniy Bluwstein

Austere Conservation: Understanding Conflicts over Resource Governance in Tanzanian Wildlife Management Areas

We explore how the regime of rules over access to land, natural, and financial resources reflects the degree of community ownership of a Wildlife Management Area (WMA) in Tanzania. Being discursively associated with participatory and decentralised approaches to natural resource management, WMA policies have the ambition to promote the empowerment of communities to decide over rules that govern access to land and resources. Our purpose is to empirically examine the spaces for popular participation in decision-making over rules of management created by WMA policies: that is, in what sense of the word are WMAs actually community-based? We do this by studying conflicts over the regime of rules over access to land and resources. Analytically, we focus on actors, their rights and meaningful powers to exert control over resource management, and on accountability relationships amongst the actors. Our findings suggest that WMAs foster very limited ownership, participation and collective action at the community level, because WMA governance follows an austere logic of centralized control over key resources. Thus, we suggest that it is difficult to argue that WMAs are community-owned conservation initiatives until a genuinely devolved and more flexible conservation model is implemented to give space for popular participation in rule-making.

A quasi-experimental study of impacts of Tanzania’s wildlife management areas on rural livelihoods and wealth

Since the 2000s, Tanzania’s natural resource management policy has emphasised Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs), designed to promote wildlife and biodiversity conservation, poverty alleviation and rural development. We carried out a quasi-experimental impact evaluation of social impacts of WMAs, collecting data from 24 villages participating in 6 different WMAs across two geographical regions, and 18 statistically matched control villages. Across these 42 villages, we collected participatory wealth ranking data for 13,578 households. Using this as our sampling frame, we conducted questionnaire surveys with a stratified sample of 1,924 household heads and 945 household heads’ wives. All data were collected in 2014/15, with a subset of questions devoted to respondents’ recall on conditions that existed in 2007, when first WMAs became operational. Questions addressed household demographics, land and livestock assets, resource use, income-generating activities and portfolios, participation in natural resource management decision-making, benefits and costs of conservation. Datasets permit research on livelihood and wealth trajectories, and social impacts, costs and benefits of conservation interventions in the context of community-based natural resource management.

Problematizing debates on wildlife conservation and the war on poaching

The biannual Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute (TAWIRI) conference in Arusha is a science policy event where ideas about conservation science and practice in Tanzania and beyond are exchanged. At the 2015 conference, I learned through event ethnography (Brosius & Campbell 2010) how the paradigmatic crisis narrative of the so-called war on poaching shaped debates and created a sense of urgency to save elephants and other flagship species, which pushed certain topics and perspectives to the forefront and marginalized others. Considerable time was spent emphasizing that poaching is an organized-crime phenomenon. Conference participants agreed that the war on poaching needs to be fought in rural communities, amidst high-level government networks, and in global ivory markets. However, such a framing of the issue precludes wider debates about the tensions and contradictions in conservation practice. Who are the poachers and why do they risk their lives to hunt illegally in the first place? Can militarized antipoaching strategies have unintended negative spillover effects on rural people who are not involved in poaching? Can these effects undermine our conservation and development efforts? Such questions would inevitably spark controversies because the war-on-poaching narrative and approach cannot provide answers to such complex and pertinent questions. The significance of wildlife-based tourism for Tanzania’s national economy, 18% of the gross domestic product (GDP), was a key message at the conference; it generated praise and reminded participants of the importance of wildlife for economic growth and development. However, the other 82% of GDP remained unmentioned in conference presentations. Tourism’s contribution to the national economy was not discussed relative to other economic sectors that can be in direct competition with tourism-based land use, such as commercial and subsistence agriculture and use of environmental goods in rural livelihoods. It would be worthwhile to compare different economic activities and how the state is managing competing sectors within society. Are agriculture and livestock contributing more or less than conservation? Are these activities appropriately acknowledged in economic statistics, or do they largely go unnoticed (Behnke & Muthami 2011)? What about opportunity costs of conservation (Norton-Griffiths & Southey 1995)? Do ecotourism and conservation activities on communal lands actually generate the promised benefits to rural communities who bear the brunt of conservation costs? Although I am not suggesting that one sector should be prioritized over another, such questions would problematize a single number (18%) that tends to depoliticize the ongoing struggles between conservation, tourism, and rural development. In a session on wildlife censuses, participants had an open debate on how to improve detection quality, consistency, and collaboration between scientists and managers of protected areas (PAs). It was acknowledged that there is a problem with communicating findings to the media and politicians because of the lack of accuracy and the complex statistics behind census results. However, the discussion failed to problematize the political pressure to deliver positive results that are expected by government authorities, who are under growing pressure to sell success (Büscher 2014) to a global conservation and donor community (Arusha Times 2015; NatGeo 2015). Perceptions of growing trends pertaining to land under cultivation around PAs and livestock herds within PAs were widely reported. However, the reasons behind such trends remained unexplored. Is it population growth? Are droughts or other environmental stressors responsible? Are people pushed into PAs by land-based conflicts? Is a combination of these factors driving change? Rather than discussing possible causes of social–environmental change, many participants jumped straight to blaming rural residents for illegal and criminal behavior, thereby invoking a militant response in line with the narrative of a war on poaching. In 2008, Bram Büscher (2008) published an editorial in Conservation Biology reflecting on the 2007 Society for Conservation Biology conference. There he pointed to a lack of debate (i.e., a consensus that silenced critique) that resulted from the neoliberalization of the field. In 2015 things have not changed in a similar but regional conference, albeit under different political circumstances. The growing international pressure on government officials to wage a war on poaching (EIA 2013) peaked in 2014 when results of the most recent elephant

Sustainable Extensification as an Alternative Model For Reducing GHG Emissions From Agriculture. The Case of an Extensively Managed Organic Farm in Denmark

GHG emissions of an extensively managed Danish organic farm were estimated upstream and on-farm. The results were compared to Danish national levels based on land area and output. Overall, the farm emitted 2.12 t CO2eq ha−1 yr−1. Excluding land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) related emissions, the combined GHG emissions from energy- and agriculture-based activities at the case farm were 47% lower (per unit area) and 12% higher (per unit output), than GHG emissions from Danish agriculture. With current livestock density (0.64 LU ha−1) and crop production area, the case study farm would supply at average 1,466 kcal per inhabitant per day in Denmark, if the farm was scaled up to Danish national level. With a reduction of livestock density to 0.36 LU ha−1 and proportional cropland area expansion for food production (ceteris paribus), the case study farm could supply around 4,940 kcal person−1 day−1, matching Danish national levels (including Danish net food export surplus of 41.5%). Simultaneously, the case study farm would have a better GHG balance per unit area and unit output in food, compared to the rest of Denmark. Hence, the case study farm system could serve as an alternative model for Danish agriculture under a sustainable extensification scenario with lower GHG emissions, while maintaining sufficient output for human consumption.

Bringing back complex socio-ecological realities to the study of CBNRM impacts: a response to Lee and Bond (2018)

Lee and Bond (2018) claim to quantify the ecological success of a community-based wildlife conservation intervention in Tanzania. In this reply to their article, we take issue with 3 aspects of their study. First, the study inadequately equates ecological success with increased wildlife and reduced livestock densities. Second, the study fails to adequately account for causality between the Wildlife Management Area (WMA) policy and the observed changes in wildlife and livestock densities. Third, the study misrepresents the reality of communitybased conservation in Randilen WMA. Researchers seeking to further our understanding of community-based natural resource management by evaluating its impacts must proceed with careful attention to the complex and dynamic socio-ecologies of the environments they study.