No abstract

Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) are establishments that promote wildlife conservation and rural development in Tanzania. However, through focus group discussions, key informant interviews, a questionnaire survey, and literature review, we found that the participation of local people in both the establishment and management of the WMA was limited and rife with conflict. While benefits have materialized at the communal level, local people saw neither value nor benefit of the WMA to their livelihoods. Specifically, local people's access to natural resources got worse while private eco-tourism investors and the central government have gained financially. Contrary to the livelihood enhancing WMA rhetoric, top-down institutional choices have sidelined democratically elected Village Governments and successive legislative adjustments disenfranchised and dispossessed them and their constituencies. We conclude that village governments should consistently demand for their legal rights to the resources on their land until the WMA approach to conservation and development is democratized.

Unfortunately, adverse rather than positive local welfare outcomes of community-based conservation initiatives are quite common. Through the case of Burunge Wildlife Management Area (WMA) this study documents how WMAs in Tanzania appear designed to facilitate accumulation by dispossession in the name of decentralized wildlife management. Based on focus group discussions, interviews, and policy-document analyses, we show that the process of establishing the WMA was fraught with hidden agendas and lacked legitimacy as well as transparency. Villagers and their local governments were also oblivious to the fact that the village land they contributed to forming the WMA would no longer be under village control even if they withdrew from the WMA. Decentralized revenue streams were gradually recentralized, and when the High Court ruled in favor of a Village Government that did not want to be part of the WMA, higher levels of government scared it to stay and to drop its legal as well as economic claims. We conclude that by mechanisms of rule-through-law WMAs deliberately dispossess village communities by attenuating the authority of democratically elected village governments. Hence, the wildlife policy needs urgent revision to democratize and thus promote positive livelihood outcomes of the WMA concept.

Through a cross-sectional research design, this study examined power struggles in Burunge Wildlife Management Area (WMA) in Tanzania. Four out of ten villages comprising the WMA were purposively selected, and data were collected via focus group discussions, key informant interviews, questionnaires to household heads, and a literature review. Results showed that the central government, investors and non-government organisations held institutional and strategic powers, while the democratically elected Village Councils held structural powers and lost most of their pre-WMA institutional powers to a legally required new institution, the Authorised Association. Therefore, Village Councils lost influence on strategic, institutional and management decisions pertinent to the WMA and their constituencies' livelihoods. Accordingly, Burunge WMA dedemocratised wildlife management by eroding the relevance of Village Councils to their constituencies. The study also found power struggles over revenues, land management and access to resources among the stakeholders, mainly due to a divergence of interests. However, there was no conflict management mechanism in place. Hence, we recommend that the institutional powers to establish, govern and dissolve WMAs should go back to Village Councils. The purpose is to establish economic incentive structures that promote (i) wildlife conservation, (ii) an equitable distribution of associated costs and benefits between Village Councils forming WMAs and (iii) an equitable distribution of costs and benefits between WMAs and higher levels of government as well as international conservation NGOs.

586Open Journal of Ecology level, alternative income-generating activities need to be promoted accompanied by not only well-funded anti-poaching programmes but also more effective surveillance plans. These should entail the use of advanced techniques and skills, such as wildlife forensics.