The United Nations and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change deem many regions of southern Africa as vulnerable landscapes due to changing climatic regimes, ecological conditions, and low adaptive capacity. Typically in highly vulnerable regions, multiple livelihood strategies are employed to enable sustainable development. In Botswana, livelihood strategies have diversified over time to include tourism and other non-agricultural activities. While such diversification and development have been studied, little is known about how locals perceive livelihood risks. This article analyzes perceptions of risk through a risk hazards framework. During the summer of 2010, 330 surveys were completed within seven villages in northern Botswana and the Caprivi Strip of Namibia. During the survey respondents were asked to list the biggest threats/challenges to their livelihoods. Responses were grouped into categories of risk according to the capital assets on which livelihoods depend: natural, physical, financial, human, and social. A risk mapping procedure was utilized, for which indices of severity, incidence, and risk were calculated. It is hypothesized that people’s perception of risk is directly dependent on environmental conditions and employment status of the household. Results indicate that problems related to natural and financial assets are the greatest source of risk to livelihoods. Furthermore, flood, drought, and other measures of climate variability are perceived as influential, typically negatively, to livelihood strategies
Local level governance is crucial in delivering benefits of conservation to communities. This paper provides a historical review of the evolution of governance and the emergence of elite capture in Masoka's wildlife program in Zimbabwe between 2009 and 2011. Fifty-four key informant interviews and reviews of numerous secondary data sources analyzed in order to understand accountability mechanisms, collective decision-making, and the allocation of wildlife revenues into various local initiatives. The local narratives and secondary data suggested that the governance had flipped from one of impersonal and democratic rule to one based on personal rule of traditional leaders. These outcomes were in part a result of the shift in meso level structures that previously supported the program structures at community level, the shifting national politics that led to increased sense of enfranchisement and impunity among traditional leaders, and non-merit based system of appointing committee members. The results suggest that locally elected committees when left at the peril of strong and unchecked powers of traditional leaders they are bound to collapse. Second, the findings also indicate that in the absence of weak land tenure rights, locals have no "teeth" to challenge tradition-based authorities in order to demand for accountable governance. We conclude that given such condition of weak tenure and access to resource rights, local democratic institutions do not emerge naturally even if most people want them and if not protected from outside, they are bound to fail and superseded by personalized ones.
Eastern and southern Africa has been a key laboratory for community‐based approaches to conservation for over three decades. During the 1990s, field‐level initiatives and national policy reforms across the region put it at the forefront of global experiments with community‐based conservation. Community‐based conservation, in theory and practice, is closely tied to institutional reforms that devolve rights over wildlife and natural resources to local communities. As such, these efforts have frequently encountered political‐economic and institutional barriers that limited their impact. This contributed to a rising sense of rollback and recentralization of community conservation approaches during the 2000s. Since then, community‐based conservation has expanded its scope considerably in some countries, notably Kenya and Namibia, primarily as a result of relatively supportive legal and policy provisions coupled with sustained government, civil society, and private sector support. At a wider scale, sufficient devolution of rights over wildlife and natural resources has been a chronic constraint, but community‐based initiatives have still managed to persist, adapt, and deliver some evidence of positive ecological and social impacts in Zambia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Three key overarching trends across the region are (a) the significant growth and expansion of community‐based conservation where key institutional enabling conditions exist; (b) pervasive institutional limitations on community rights over wildlife and other valuable natural resources, which continue to constrain and undermine community‐based approaches; and (c) local entrepreneurship and resilience that continues to create new opportunities for community‐based approaches, even under adverse conditions.
Using a logistic regression model, this paper examines key factors that influence individual support for communal conservancies in Namibia. It tests the hypothesis that if individuals are compensated for their wildlife related losses, they are more likely to support community based wildlife management projects. Data for this study were collected from 472 members of five conservancies in the Caprivi Region of Namibia. Respondents were selected through convenience sampling. The key findings are that receiving meat, activity during the Annual General Meeting (AGM), and being a member of a specific conservancy are the key predictors of satisfaction with the conservancy among the respondents. On the other hand, cash and jobs have no significant impact on individual attitudes toward communal conservancies. Based on these findings, the paper argues that the focus on incentives omits broader factors that motivate individuals to participate in community-based conservation.
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