The comparative financial and economic performance of protected areas in the Greater Kruger National Park, South Africa: functional diversity and resilience in the socio-economics of a landscape-scale reserve network

Abstract

Economic contributions of park-tourism are rarely documented for individual parks in developing countries or made relevant to management or governance concerns. If economic monitoring is to aid management, economic studies of tourism are a useful starting point but traditionally yield only narrow metrics or are applied only to public parks despite many parks being connected to private or communal reserves. We evaluated a network of private and public reserves – the Greater Kruger National Park (GKNP) – comparing economic contributions of member reserves while also attributing a range of values in financial, social and political domains to different components of the system, thus enabling integration of results with resilience-oriented management frameworks and decision-making processes. We show that the diversity of management units corresponds with a diversity of values that we argue underpins institutional resilience. Although private reserves constitute only 12% of the land area, visitor spending there is responsible for over 60% of employment, tax and GDP contributions. The national park is less commercialized but accounts for almost all domestic visits by maintaining affordable access, performing a vital political and social function. However, weak community and joint-governance undermines resilience and limits the ability of stakeholders to act on economic monitoring data.

Keywords:

• Indicators
• protected areas
• socioeconomic impacts
• tourist expenditure
• wildlife tourism

Disclosure statement

The findings and conclusions in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the South African National Parks.

Funding

This work was supported by The School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Florida; UNDP in collaboration with GEF-STAP; The Norwegian Programme for Capacity Development in Higher Education and Research for Development (NORHED); and The Center for African Studies at the University of Florida.

Acknowledgments

We thank SANParks, the Mpumalanga Tourism and Development Agency, and the Limpopo Economic Development, Environment, and Tourism department for their cooperation with this research.

Notes

1 Institutional resilience is equivalent to the concept of institutional robustness (Janssen & Anderies, 2007). We use the former term to simplify the connection drawn to functional diversity, which is often associated with “resilience”.

2 1.00 US dollar was equal, on average, to 14.08 SA rands from April, 2016 to March, 2017.

3 A visitor-night is counted for every night a visitor sleeps in the GKNP, for every overnight visitor. A day-visit is counted for every day a visitor enters the GKNP, for every non-overnight visitor (i.e. those sleeping outside the GKNP proper).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander Chidakel

Alex Chidakel, PhD, received his PhD in interdisciplinary ecology from the University of Florida. His research explores the potential strategic, management and academic roles for the economic monitoring of protected areas.

Candice Eb

Candice Eb, resource economist in the park planning section of South African National Parks (SANParks).

Brian Child

Brian Child, PhD, completed a D.Phil. in wildlife and livestock economics as Rhodes Scholar in Oxford. As a scholar-practitioner in the Parks agency in Zimbabwe, he coordinated the CAMPFIRE programme. In Zambia, he restructured South Luangwa National Park as a sustainable cost center, established a CBNRM programme, and initiated performance-based law enforcement and significant donor funding of Kafue National Park. He chaired the IUCN-Southern African Sustainable Use Specialist Group for six years and served as the Biodiversity Panel Member for the Scientific and Technical Panel of the Global Environmental Facility (GEF-STAP). As Associate Professor at the University of Florida, his teaching and research focus on the wildlife economy, parks, CBNRM and governance, mainly in Africa.