From Exploitation to Ownership: Wildlife-Based Tourism and Communal Area Conservancies in Namibia

A number of factors drove the policy shift that led to the emergence of conservancies and community involvement in tourism (Jones 2010b). The concept of sustainable use of wildlife as a conservation tool had already been established through the provision of rights over wildlife to white freehold farmers in the 1960s and 1970s. This move led to the increase in wildlife on freehold land as farmers no longer saw the wildlife as competing with livestock for grazing. Instead wildlife had gained a realisable financial value (Barnes and Jones 2009). According to Lindsey (2011), the increase in wildlife populations continues on freehold land in most areas with the percentage of mammal biomass comprised by wildlife rising from 8 % in 1972, to 18 % in 1992 and 29 % in 2011.

Prior to independence the work of conservationists with communities in the north-west of Namibia and Caprivi in the north-east had demonstrated that community-based approaches could work if based largely on the return of authority over wildlife to local people, backed by some form of financial return. The introduction of community game guards reporting to local headmen helped to restore a sense of ownership over wildlife and low amounts of income from small-scale tourism activities demonstrated to local people that wildlife could bring financial benefits. The result was a decline in poaching and the start of a gradual recovery of wildlife populations, which would be continued through the establishment of conservancies (Long and Jones 2004).

Nelson and Agrawal (2008) note that Namibia’s independence and the opportunities it created among policy makers catalysed the extension of the same privileges to communal lands that had already been established on white-owned freehold lands. The new policy and legislation was supported by the post-independence government. Providing the same rights over wildlife to black communal farmers that were enjoyed by white freehold farmers could be implemented as part of the government agenda of dismantling apartheid in Namibia (Jones 2010b).

Newsham (2007) identified a network of like-minded individuals working in conservation at independence that was able to drive policy reform that resonated with the agenda of the new government to abolish apartheid in Namibia. This network consisted of a coalition of government officials, NGO personnel and the new Minister of Wildlife, Conservation and Tourism, which was able to develop and present to parliament the legislation that would provide for the creation of communal area (Jones 2010b).

This coalition of individuals was influenced by challenges to the narrative of ‘fortress’ conservation and the emergence of the counter-narrative of community-based conservation. Those driving reform in Namibia were linked to a broader network of conservationists in southern Africa involved in promoting community-based approaches to conservation in neighbouring countries, such as the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) in Zimbabwe (Jones 2010b). In addition, this southern African network had been influenced by emerging thinking in common property resource management that suggested that groups of people could successfully cooperate to develop rules and practices for sustainably managing natural resources (e.g. Berkes 1989; Ostrom 1990).

A crucial point often overlooked, is that there was also demand for policy change from the bottom up. In the early 1990s, personnel from the new Ministry of Wildlife, Conservation and Tourism and Namibian NGOs carried out a series of socio-ecological surveys in communal areas. These surveys were internally led and funded. They revealed that while black communal farmers wanted something done about problem animals that damaged crops and killed livestock, they wanted to keep wildlife on their land. In addition, they were aware of the rights over wildlife given to white freehold farmers and wanted these rights extended to themselves (Jones 2010b).

By 1992 conservation officials had begun to work on the new conservancy policy that would pave the way for the development of new legislation giving communal area residents rights over wildlife and tourism. The same year a series of consultations and negotiations between USAID and the Namibian government and Namibian environmental organizations led to the establishment of the Living in a Finite Environment (LIFE) Programme which aimed at supporting Community-based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) in Namibia.

This CBNRM agenda was not imposed by external donors. Namibian NGOs and government had already embarked on developing CBNRM as a conservation approach as described above. USAID and other donor assistance was used to enable local NGOs in particular to provide support to community involvement in wildlife and tourism before the legislation was changed. Once the new legislation was in place, donor funding enabled NGOs to assist communities to establish and operate conservancies (Jones 2004).

Finally, Nelson and Agrawal (2008: 567) suggest that several other important factors also helped the development of the conservancy approach: “The combination of limited state control over tourist hunting revenues and concessions, low value of wildlife on communal lands prior to conservancy formation, transparent hunting administration procedures, and the generally high quality of national governance institutions all serve to reduce the incentives that state wildlife authorities in Namibia possess to resist devolution of wildlife management to local communities”. The main events in the development of Namibia’s conservancy approach are summarised in Table 2.2.

Conservancies have become central in the evolution of new institutional arrangements for community involvement in tourism. The communal lands of north-western and north-eastern Namibia offer significant tourism attractions mostly absent from freehold land. Tourism companies have therefore become more interested in conservancy areas where wildlife roams in unfenced areas with unspoilt scenery, compared to the more ‘developed’ and fenced freehold farmland. This increased interest in tourism in conservancies led to the development of joint venture (JV) lodges where a conservancy would offer land to a private sector investor to build a tourism lodge in return for payments of various fees, such as bed-night fees or percentage of turnover, to the conservancy. The first such agreement was concluded in the Kunene Region by the residents of what is now Torra Conservancy and Wilderness Safaris in 1995. The legal rights given to conservancies and policy statements from government provided an overall environment in which private sector investors were expected to enter into negotiations with conservancies if they wished to engage in tourism activities within the conservancy boundaries. As a result, by 2011, there were 32 formal JV lodges on conservancy land (NACSO 2013a). A number of lodges was in place prior to the establishment of the conservancies, thus necessitating retrospective development of joint venture agreements.

The first JV lodges in conservancies were developed according to a simple model where the conservancy operated essentially as a landlord, and ownership and management were in private hands. However, there has since been an increasing shift away from the landlord-tenant relationship to the promotion of some form of conservancy ownership. For instance, in 2005 the ≠Koadi //Hoas conservancy became the first conservancy to own lodge assets and in 2011 became the first conservancy to own the lodge business, while hiring a management company to run the operations. This development reflects broader shifts in thinking concerning community involvement in tourism. For example, Elliott and Sumba (2011) discuss different models of community relationship with the private sector used by the African Wildlife Foundation. The model most used is one described as community ownership–private sector management (see Chaps. 11 and 12, this volume). The Namibian government is keen to promote community ownership of enterprises as part of its policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) aimed at shifting ownership of businesses from predominantly white-owned to predominantly black-owned. For example the MET’s Policy on Tourism and Wildlife Concessions on State Land states the following (MET 2007: 13):

MET’s first preference is that communities should own and manage concessions awarded to them and any business enterprise derived from that, and MET is committed to assist communities to achieve this objective to the greatest possible extent.

In addition, the policy aims to promote the acquisition of shares in the business by the community.

As with the conservancy legislation itself, the Joint Venture approach intends to maximise the sense of ownership as well as the generation of income from the lodge operations, based on the expectation that a combination of property rights and sustained income will help to create the appropriate conditions for sustainable resource management. Figure 2.2 tries to illustrate this conceptualisation. Enterprise A is a tourism lodge with ownership and management by the private sector, paying fees to the community. It can generate a high return to the community but there is little sense of ownership. In this case, according to CBNRM theory, the business is less likely to optimise community commitment towards the management of the surrounding environment. Enterprise B is a community owned and run campsite, that generates far less income to the community than Enterprise A, but should generate more commitment from the communities to look after their environment, due to the higher degree of ownership. Enterprise C is a community owned lodge, but managed by a private management company through a contract with the conservancy. In this case there should be a high level of community ownership matched with a high level of income to the local communities, which should theoretically lead to community commitment to sustainable management of natural resources.