In eastern and southern Africa, problems of biodiversity loss, rural poverty and unsustainable land-use practices are interdependent and linked to institutional deficits in land-tenure and property rights systems, as well as to the values attached to land and natural resources by various actors (e.g. Adams 2004; German et al. 2012; Nelson 2010). These interconnected problems form one of the world’s greatest challenges of the twenty-first century, calling into question how the balance between nature conservation and human development in Africa is changing. Particularly outside state-protected areas, governmental and non-governmental organizations have been confronted with human-wildlife conflicts and disputes over access to and ownership of land.

The troublesome relation between local communities, land use and nature conservation in eastern and southern Africa has existed for many decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, during which many African states became independent from colonial powers, nature conservation was dominated by state dominated approaches characterized by ‘fortresses, fines and fences’. These approaches sealed off land and natural resources from the rest of society by attributing land as national parks and reserves. Local communities were predominantly seen as a threat to wildlife both inside and outside these national parks, and their rights for consumptive use were limited by means of strict enforcement (e.g. Peluso 1993).

Around the 1970s, ecological studies showed that the fortress conservation model alone is insufficient to combat biodiversity loss, because national parks are too small and fragmented to prevent species from going extinct (e.g. Western 2002; Adams 2004). The areas adjacent to national parks and nature parks became thus critical for conservation. Yet, for local communities whose livelihoods depend on agriculture and livestock, wildlife presents a threat. Elephants are notorious for raiding agricultural crops and lions for killing livestock. Therefore, to be able to conserve wildlife beyond the boundaries of national parks, wildlife has to become of value for the communities and land-owners on whose land it lives (Western 2002). This led to the realization that human development and livelihood issues should be included in the conservation agenda (e.g. Colchester 2002; Western 2002).

An alternative perspective emerged, in which the involvement of communities, also through the establishment of tourism projects, was seen as a key development to warrant nature conservation. In the decades that followed, alternative forms of tourism were promoted and funded by international nature conservation organizations (e.g. World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, African Wildlife Foundation) as well as development organizations (e.g. SNV Netherlands Development Organisation, see Hummel and Van der Duim 2012). These alternative tourism projects focused on the development of small-scale businesses and involved local communities in their management (e.g. Barrow and Murphree 2001; Scheyvens 2002, 2007). The key argument behind these initiatives was that local communities could be enticed to start conserving wildlife, or other natural resources, if these resources represented greater value to them and if they played a greater role in decision-making processes on their use and management (Hughes and Flintan 2001; Scheyvens 2002, 2007). This development became evident in the rise of community-based tourism (CBT) and more broadly community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) projects.

CBT and CBNRM have undoubtedly resulted in a range of community benefits, such as increased levels of relevant skills, education, awareness, responsibility and empowerment in conserving nature (e.g. Spenceley 2008). However, critics have argued that achieving sustained success in CBT projects has proven to be challenging due to the long-term dependency on external donor funding (e.g. Kiss 2004) and the tendency of projects to collapse when donor funding stops (e.g. Mitchell and Muckosy 2008), the insufficiency and unequal distribution of benefits among individual community members (e.g. Manyara and Jones 2007), and the internal conflicts and power struggles within local communities (e.g. Ahebwa et al. 2012a; Lamers et al. 2014; Southgate 2006). Consequently, the effectiveness of CBNRM and CBT initiatives for both conservation and development has been under constant debate (Adams et al. 2004; Leach et al. 1999; Mbaiwa and Kolawole 2013; Sebele 2010).

To address these challenges, in the 1990s a more market-based approach emerged in which partnerships between public, private and civic actors were actively promoted (Adams 2004; Van der Duim 2011). In these neoliberal institutional arrangements it was argued that communities often lack business skills and access to the transnational tourism market to run a tourism business profitably. Joint ventures or partnerships between communities and private entrepreneurs were seen as a way to face these challenges (Spenceley and Snyman 2012).

Over the years, this market-based shift in the tourism, conservation and development nexus has led to a wide variety of novel institutional arrangements in eastern and southern Africa, in which actors take on different roles in generating and sharing the economic value of nature conservation. We define institutional arrangements as a set of organizational forms, policies, rules, practices and cultural norms designed and deployed to govern a group of actors towards the attainment of a particular objective. In most of the arrangements under study in this book, wildlife conservation and tourism are promoted and managed as an alternative form of land use, replacing or complementing agricultural practices, but without changing land tenure or ownership. These arrangements can be initiated and driven by international donors, but also by state agencies, private sector, social movements or local communities. In these arrangements, the value of nature for tourism has increasingly become a means to derive a livelihood from private or communally-owned land, a development that progressively is reflected in scientific literature (Brockington et al. 2008; Hottola 2009; Saarinen et al. 2009; Spenceley 2008; Suich et al. 2009). As such, many of the institutional arrangements in this book focus on attaining a tripartite goal: (a) developing an economically viable (tourism) business in order to generate sufficient benefit streams to (b) improve people’s livelihoods and (c) create a net positive contribution to conservation.

In the remainder of this chapter we will clarify how this book attempts to understand these innovative institutional arrangements for tourism, conservation and development in eastern and southern Africa. The next section explains the key questions that run through the different chapters of this book, as well as the relevance of these questions. Section 1.2 also provides a primer on how different contemporary institutional arrangements are framed in the literature and by the authors of this book. It is argued that in the midst of instrumentally and critically oriented views, our book aims to take a middle position by providing a stage for reflecting on these different views. In Sect. 1.3 we will introduce each chapter of this book, followed by concluding remarks in Sect. 1.4.