Title: Community-Based Conservation and Maasai Livelihoods in Tanzania
Abstract: Northern Tanzania is renowned for hosting the most significant populations of large terrestrial mammals left on the earth, particularly those found in the expansive ecosystems of the Serengeti and the Maasai Steppe. The region’s savanna and grassland landscape, which has been managed by pastoralists 1 for thousands of years 2 through burning, grazing, and the exclusion of large-scale agriculture, maintains a remarkably diverse and widespread wildlife fauna. Since the early colonial era, Tanzania’s wildlife has been a focus of management and conservation efforts. Maasailand, with its wildlife richness, has received much of the attention of government conservation initiatives. Pastoralist livelihoods have been transformed by the loss of land to state protected areas, as Tanzania has accumulated one of Africa’s most extensive networks of National Parks and Game Reserves (Homewood and Rodgers, 1991 ; Neumann, 1998 ; Igoe, 2004) . More recently, the rapid growth of northern Tanzania’s tourism industry, based upon the wildlife and scenery of the region’s pastoral landscapes, has intensified the political and economic forces affecting rural people and their livelihoods. While the history of the impact of wildlife conservation on the Maasai of northern Tanzania is relatively well-documented, the impact of contemporary developments in wildlife conservation policy and practice on pastoralist and agro-pastoralist livelihoods has been less extensively explored. Using several case studies, we show how Tanzania’s formal ‘community wildlife management’ initiatives may in practice represent the same threat that protected area creation and conventional
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 27
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