Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Tourism.
6
One initial challenge facing such community-based tourism ventures at
this time, which made Wildlife Division support vitally important, was that most
wildlife-rich community lands were allocated as centrally controlled tourist
hunting concessions, posing a significant conflict with the development of
tourism activities in these areas. The ventures initiated in the early 1990s were
predicated on an assumption that these areas would not be allocated for hunting,
or at least that control over all commercial activities would be transferred to
communities as the new wildlife policy, then in draft, called for (Dorobo Tours
and Safaris and Oliver's Camps Ltd, 1996). But rather than abate, the conflict
with hunting and between central and local authority was destined to grow
substantially over time.
Although their initial social, environmental and business objectives would
continue to face challenges from without and within, these pilot efforts were key
in establishing a conceptual and procedural model for private sector tourism
partnerships with local villages in Tanzania. This effectively established wildlife-
based tourism as a potential component of local common property management
systems in a way that created both collective (through village revenues) and
individual (through employment and the sale of goods) economic opportunities.
A critical aspect of this Tanzanian model, which differentiates it from many
community-based tourism concessions in other countries such as Kenya, is the
way that it integrates wildlife-based tourism with existing pastoralist production
systems and land use patterns. This greatly reduces the opportunity costs local
communities incur in granting tourism concessions over large portions of their
land; helps to maximize tourism's value as a complement to rather than replace-
ment for transhumant livestock production; and enhances the resilience of local
livelihoods through economic diversification.
By the late 1990s, as the northern circuit's visitor numbers grew and national
parks became more congested, more mainstream tour operators began to look at
community lands as an untapped business opportunity. Community lands have a
number of key attributes that have attracted growing interest from operators over
the past decade (see Nelson, 2004):
•
opportunities for fairly large and exclusive 'wilderness' concession areas; such
exclusivity is greatly valued by high-end operators and in decreasing supply in
many parks as visitor numbers rise and lodges proliferate;
•
opportunities for alternative activities such as walking or night drives which
are prohibited or heavily curtailed in the parks; and
•
opportunities for cultural interactions that are also unavailable in national
parks.
Driven by these market incentives and government policy reforms supportive of
community-based tourism ventures, the late 1990s were a period of rapid prolif-
eration of village-operator agreements.
7
In the Loliondo area to the east of
Serengeti National Park, for example, six villages bordering the park increased
their revenues from new agreements to over $100,000 annually by 2003, up from
Search WWH ::
Custom Search