Women, wellbeing and Wildlife Management Areas in Tanzania

ABSTRACT

Community-based wildlife management claims pro-poor, gender-sensitive outcomes. However, intersectional political ecology predicts adverse impacts on marginalised people. Our large-scale quantitative approach draws out common patterns and differentiated ways women are affected by Tanzania’s Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs). This first large-scale, rigorous evaluation studies WMA impacts on livelihoods and wellbeing of 937 married women in 42 villages across six WMAs and matched controls in Northern and Southern Tanzania. While WMAs bring community infrastructure benefits, most women have limited political participation, and experience resource use restrictions and fear of wildlife attacks. Wealth and region are important determinants, with the poorest worst impacted.

KEYWORDS:

• Married women
• Tanzania
• conservation impacts
• causal evaluation
• wellbeing
• Community-Based Wildlife Management
• Bayesian hierarchical models

Acknowledgements

We thank all participants who made this research possible. We also thank the Government of Tanzania for their permission to carry out field work, colleagues who supported the research and the Tanzanian field workers and communities who participated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Section 77 in the 2002 and 2005 WMA Regulations authorised NGOs, in collaboration with government agencies, to facilitate WMA initiation, planning, establishment, rulemaking, enforcement. Section 28(1) in the 2012 WMA Regulations maintains similar wording. New subsection 28(2) specifies written approval from the Minister before establishing/ implementing WMAs. Implementing NGOs have included World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), Conservation International (CI) among others.

2 CWMA consortium website: www.twma.co.tz.

3 USAID_PROTECT 2016 Promoting Tanzania’s Environment, Conservation and Tourism (PROTECT) Activity. Analysis of WMA Financial Viability and Options Study. Acacia natural resources consultants for USAID-PROTECT. Contract No. Aid-621-To-15-00004.

4 Additional funding comes to the WMA administration through NGOs in cash and in kind (Village Game Scout [VGS] equipment, their salaries, crop protection patrols, VGS training, predator-proof bomas, workshops, seminars, boundary demarcations and surveys, land use planning, etc).

5 See recent CWMA vacancy (Capacity Building and Advocacy officer) (CWMAC 2018).

6 For which entrepreneurs’ licenses and revenues are managed by the central state, with WMAs minimally involved.

7 The term ‘normal’ here emerged during the focus group discussions as a common parlance shorthand indicating women and households considered to be neither particularly poor nor rich. There is no connotation that other categories (very poor/poor/rich) are in any sense abnormal. More households fell into the ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ categories in most study sites, making alternative terms like ‘average’ or ‘medium income’ problematic. While we acknowledge the risk of the term ‘normal’ reinforcing perceptions instead of questioning them, ultimately we have chosen to retain it for consistency in terminology with other publications on this dataset, and with the publicly available dataset itself.

8 Our (small, geographically restricted) subset of female-headed households (n = 187) were on average smaller in terms of membership than male-headed households (n = 1737), and markedly less well off in terms of land owned and cultivated per adult equivalent (Table S4). Intersections of gender, poverty, culture and education predict that rural female-headed households are likely to be among the poorest, with the most limited opportunities. However, out of 187 female-headed households, 41% received remittances (compared to 21% all wives) and two showed up as outliers, owning and cultivating an order of magnitude more land than the mean for women heads of household: one of these was a retired police officer, whose salary and subsequent pension had enabled her to buy land.

9 Omitting ‘other costs’ which ranked third but which comprise a miscellany.

10 Kitendeni women’s, men’s and youth focus groups, Enduimet WMA, 2017.

11 Laigwenan interview, Sinonik, 2012.

12 By design, our control villages are likely affected by other conservation restrictions (e.g. they should be similarly close to other protected areas). This begs a bigger conceptual question about what the appropriate counterfactual for a WMA effect should be? This study took as controls other villages that could plausibly have become WMAs according to their observed characteristics: this contributes to WMA effects being relatively small. But there could be an argument for a hypothetical ‘village that isn’t affected by conservation at all’ being the counterfactual that some will have in mind.

13 Ngabobo focus group, 2017.

14 Pastoral Women’s Council: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD-RNhMHrDo&feature=youtu.be.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the UK's National Environment Research Council NERC (grant number NE/L00139X/1) in association with the UK Department for International Development and the Economic and Social Research Council, under the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme.

Notes on contributors

Katherine Homewood

Katherine Homewood is Professor of Human Ecology in the Anthropology department, University College London. Her research group integrates natural and social sciences approaches to environment/development interactions around the global South. She uses mixed methods and international interdisciplinary collaborations to research the implications of environmental policy for local livelihoods and wellbeing, and implications of changing land use for environment and biodiversity. She has published several books and numerous papers in both natural and social sciences journals.

Martin Reinhardt Nielsen

Martin Reinhardt Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on the human dimensions of wildlife management and conservation and particularly the socioeconomic importance of bushmeat in rural livelihoods and the impacts of policies to regulate trade in wildlife products.

Aidan Keane

Aidan Keane is Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Conservation Science at the School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh. His research aims to benefit both the environment and human wellbeing by contributing robust evidence and practical tools for improving conservation interventions, focusing particularly on understanding interactions between conservation and human behaviour. He has worked in East Africa and South-East Asia and has published widely in international journals.