Community perspectives of empowerment from trophy hunting tourism in Namibia’s Bwabwata National Park

Abstract

Trophy hunting (TH) tourism plays an important and often controversial role in wildlife conservation and community livelihood in many African countries. Despite its potential social and economic benefits, TH can have a negative impact among the locals and pose critical challenges in governance. However, research on the local community perspective of TH and how it is linked to empowerment of locals and wildlife conservation in Namibia remains limited. Therefore, to address these gaps, our study explores how communities of Namibia's Bwabwata National Park perceive TH and how TH supports or hinders empowerment of local communities and their relationship with wildlife. Through semistructured interviews with community members, this study elucidates the economic benefits and inequities, cultural impacts from lack of traditional hunting, perceived relationship to poaching, and limitations of governance and distrust among stakeholders. This research innovatively applies empowerment theory to TH tourism and thus, can strengthen and inform sound governance and sustainable practices of TH at local, national, and international levels by providing the local perspective that has largely been absent from the TH debate.

Tourism, Empowerment and Sustainable Development: A New Framework for Analysis

“…Scholars of tourism were relatively quick to start discussing empowerment [34,35], and have since grappled with urgent questions of power, power inequities, disempowerment and empowerment in tourism [7,[36][37][38]. Interest in the tourism-empowerment interface has been notable in writing on particular aspects of tourism, as follows: community-based tourism [39,40], business tourism [41], coastal and marine tourism [42,43], cultural tourism [15,[44][45][46][47], ecotourism [13,38,[48][49][50][51], Indigenous tourism [52][53][54], naturebased tourism [55,56], rural tourism [57,58], wildlife-based tourism [49,59], and urban tourism [60]. Countries located in the Global South (including Botswana, Ecuador, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, Namibia, Nepal, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, Mexico, Costa Rica, Fiji and Zimbabwe) feature prominently in the related literature.…”

Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Consumer Profile of Hunting Tourism and Trophy Hunting from Tradition to Protected Areas: Study Case on Romania and Spain

“…Moreover, as a primeval human activity, hunting has an increasing effect on the conservation of nature and positive economic effects through hunting tourism [20]. Trophy hunting tourism plays an important and often controversial role in wildlife conservation and community livelihood especially for African countries [8,[21][22][23][24]. For example, the annual amount spent by trophy hunters in South Africa is USD 250 million and contributes more than USD 341 million to the South African economy, and supports more than 17,000 employment opportunities [8].…”

“…Hunting has also been the subject of worldwide criticism in recent years, both moral and economic value of hunting tourism business [6] or regarding the negative impact among the locals [10,21] being researched by academics. Both ethically, as well as biodiversity conservation, or economically [28], it is rightly called into question that hunting is an activity based exclusively on the appetite of a limited group of people who enjoy the mere fact of killing animals.…”

“…African countries such as Namibia [17,21,23,26,[28][29][30]33,53,54], Ghana [55], Botswana [32,56,57], Zimbabwe [15,58], Senegal [28], and Ethiopia [16,59];…”

“…Focus group discussions with stakeholders and local households [19] or local communities [15,55]; • ethnographic interviews with business operators [6,61]; • community perspectives of empowerment from trophy hunting tourism [21]; • semi-structured interviews with community members by applying the empowerment theory to trophy hunting tourism [21], the Community-based natural resource management [56] or key stakeholders [13]; • interviews with a small number of Swedish hunters regarding the human-nonhuman animal relationship [50].…”