Livelihoods, Conservation and Community-based Tourism in Tanzania: Potential and Performance - Responsible Tourism: Critical Issues for Conservation and Development - page 292

patron-client interests that bridge private and public spheres of activity. 15 There
are strong disincentives for those central interests and institutions to devolve
control over valuable resources to local communities. For example, Tanzania's
land tenure reform process in the late 1990s began with a strong push for more
secure local tenure but was eventually shaped by key Ministerial officials in a way
that maintained key discretionary powers over land in the hands of state agents
(Sundet, 1997; Shivji, 1998). Over 15 years of donor-led efforts to devolve greater
powers over wildlife to local communities has had little impact on this heavily
centralized sector (Nelson, 2007).
This political economy of centralized resource control set against a backdrop
of reformist narratives is a fundamental characteristic of many African economies
during the past 20 years (Van de Walle, 2001). African states seek to maintain
control over key patronage resources, and thus ensure their own stability,
meanwhile seeking international legitimacy for their policies through the adoption
of 'liberalization' discourses. In the case of natural resource management, the
outcome is the widespread endorsement of decentralization and devolution of
authority as a narrative discourse, but the practical reality of 'aborted devolution'
or recentralization (Murphree, 2000; Ribot, 2004; Ribot et al, 2006). The
management of Tanzania's tourism industry fits within this much broader political
economic pattern of natural resource governance, not only in Africa but in parts
of Asia and Latin America as well.
Within this political economic environment, growing levels of tourism invest-
ment in rural Tanzania often serve to exacerbate tensions among actors operating
at different institutional scales. For example, in northern Tanzanian savannahs,
traditional pastoralist rangelands are subject to growing external pressures as their
value for tourism investment rises. Such pressures can be manifested in various
ways, including as pressure from state agencies to allocate land to commercial
investors, or direct pressure from investors to purchase lands, which is often
pursued through illegitimate means at the village level. 16
The other side of the coin, though, is that if communities are able to secure
commercial tourism agreements that recognize their jurisdiction over village lands
and create economic opportunities at the local level, it can support local interests
in maintaining their resources in the face of external appropriative pressures. In
other words, community-based tourism can create financial capital that is trans-
formable into political capital at the local and national level. 17 In a political
economic environment that strongly promotes capital markets as the key to
improvements in Tanzania's living standards, often at the expense of the security
of local resource tenure, the ability of communities to enter formal markets as
competent actors is critical to their long-term security and resilience.
Conclusion
Some contemporary critiques of ecotourism (e.g. Kiss, 2004; Walpole and
Thouless, 2006) argue that the prospects for tourism to contribute to biodiversity