Livelihoods, Conservation and Community-based Tourism in Tanzania: Potential and Performance - Responsible Tourism: Critical Issues for Conservation and Development - page 293

conservation goals are in fact limited by market demand and weaknesses in the
community-level incentives that these ventures establish. Others argue that
tourism's contributions to rural livelihoods are often marginal or insignificant.
This review of Tanzania's experiences with community-based tourism suggests
that, by contrast, there is substantial evidence of large-scale conservation benefits
and local economic benefits in northern Tanzanian landscapes. Certainly,
community-based tourism has been the main force behind rural communities
voluntarily setting aside land for wildlife conservation in different parts of north-
ern Tanzania, and it has also had a significant economic impact in certain settings.
That said, it should be highlighted that Tanzania, and particularly northern
Tanzania, has a potential for community-based tourism, with respect to both
environmental and rural economic objectives, that exceeds most areas in sub-
Saharan Africa.Tanzania's wildlife populations are unparalleled, and its savannahs
and grasslands create comfortable viewing and travelling conditions for tourists.
The migratory nature of wildlife in these landscapes, coupled with the traditional
co-existence and conservation ethic of local pastoralists, creates tremendous
opportunities for integrating tourism with local land uses and economic activities
that few other areas can offer.
But despite this potential and the development of relatively practicable and
transparent institutional models for private-community partnerships, commu-
nity-based tourism has been fighting against the tide for most of the past decade.
These countervailing forces are institutional and political economic in nature, and
reflect the efforts of political elites to monopolize control over valuable resources
and commercial activities. Tanzania's modern economy is highly contested
terrain, with rural communities struggling to access the opportunities that
growing markets like tourism create, in the face of competition from more power-
ful public institutions and some private sector actors.
Tourism is thus both an opportunity and a threat for rural communities
negotiating this institutional environment. Tourism increases the incentives for
other, usually more powerful, actors to encroach on and appropriate local lands
and resources, but it also creates the opportunities that rural people need to diver-
sify their livelihoods and generate economic and political capital to support them
in long-term contests over resources.
Ultimately community-based tourism has a major role to play in Tanzania in
the attainment of both conservation and local developmental objectives, but
capitalizing on its potential is a generational institutional process. It should be
noted, though, that the same institutional struggles over control of tourism invest-
ments apply to the entire political economy of Tanzania; private elite capture of
public resources is increasingly the dominant theme in the country's social and
political discourse. Tourism is but a single, albeit important, part of this broader
developmental process, the outcomes of which are largely unpredictable and
unknown.