Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
10
Citizen Participation in the Lodge
Sector of the Okavango Delta
Peter John Massyn
Introduction
Increasingly, policy makers have come to view wildlife - and the 'African safari
lodge' industry based on it - as a resource uniquely suited to the needs of rural
development.The safari lodge sector, in the form in which it has evolved in south-
ern Africa, is often seen as an important source of employment and revenue
generation for rural people who would otherwise exist on the margins of the
societies in which they live (Ashley et al, 2000; Massyn and Koch, 2004, Poultney
and Spenceley, 2001). However, there is also widespread concern that the pro-
poor benefits of the sector are muted by factors such as remoteness, skills
shortages, insecure land rights and generally weak levels of human and social
capital. These elements typically combine to create situations in which the local
poor provide only menial labour while external interests capture the lion's share of
the benefits generated by the tourism market (Massyn, 2007). This results in a
skewed distribution of returns that has led some commentators to question
whether the African safari lodge sector is 'socioeconomically sustainable'
(Mbaiwa, 2003, 2005; Perkins, 2005).
Since the 1980s, the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana's Ngamiland
District has emerged as an iconic 'high value, low volume' African destination.
Today, it hosts one of the continent's largest and most successful safari lodge
clusters (Massyn and Koch, 2004). As such, it has attracted widespread attention
from policy makers and academics interested in the poverty-reducing impacts of
wildlife tourism. A leading voice in this regard is that of Mbaiwa, a scholar
attached to the University of Botswana's Harry Oppenheimer Okavango
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