Livelihoods, Conservation and Community-based Tourism in Tanzania: Potential and Performance - Responsible Tourism: Critical Issues for Conservation and Development - page 282

necessarily translated into broad reductions in poverty or improvements in liveli-
hoods at the local level (URT, 2005). The failure to translate increasing growth
and investment into widespread livelihood improvements, in a country where
three-quarters of the population still lives in rural areas, reflects political economic
factors causing a concentration of wealth in the hands of the governing and affili-
ated elites, and widening inequality. Tourism in Tanzania is embedded in these
broader economic and institutional dynamics, which fundamentally shape
tourism's developmental impacts.
Tourism is a source of significant potential livelihood diversification and
economic opportunities for local communities, and of conservation incentives at
both national and local levels. At the same time, however, tourism's rapid growth,
in the context of Tanzania's institutional environment, is a source of growing
tensions and conflicts over the natural resources - lands, wildlife, forests and
marine resources - that this industry relies on. These conflicts occur at national,
district and local levels, and reflect challenges relating to the governance of
common pool resources at different scales. While Tanzania's tourism industry will
most likely continue to play a major role in supporting macroeconomic growth, at
least over the course of the next decade, the broader impact of tourism on conser-
vation and development objectives will depend on political economic and
governance factors. The outcomes of institutional struggles over the new sources
of wealth that tourism creates in a poor and largely rural country such as Tanzania
will be pivotal in efforts to translate the industry's growing potential into broader
beneficial socioeconomic impacts.
This chapter provides a brief history of the Tanzanian tourism industry's
development over the past two decades, including the emergence of innovative
models for community-based tourism partnerships that channel benefits directly
to rural landholders. It reviews several local case studies of community-based
tourism in northern Tanzania in order to examine outcomes and impacts and the
factors underlying them in greater detail.The chapter concludes with a discussion
of the institutional forces and trends that shape tourism's impacts in Tanzania, and
what this implies for the future of tourism as a development and conservation
strategy.
The rise of community-based tourism in Tanzania
The origins of Tanzania's tourism industry trace back to the safari hunting era of
the early colonial period. After independence, Tanzania had high expectations of
developing wildlife-based tourism as a significant source of foreign exchange, but
the country's socialist economic policies and regional conflicts with Kenya and
Uganda in the late 1970s largely undermined that aim (Honey, 1999). In 1986,
following the severe economic crises of the early 1980s, a prolonged debate with
foreign donors over economic policy, and the departure from power of independ-
ence leader and President Julius Nyerere in 1985, Tanzania adopted a Structural
Adjustment Agreement with the International Monetary Fund (Campbell and