Environmental Justice and the Market: The Politics of Sharing Wildlife Revenues in Tanzania

Abstract

In northern Tanzania in the late 1980s and 1990s, rural communities displaced by the creation of wildlife protection areas advanced a number of grievances centered on equitable access to resources and compensation for wildlife-induced property loss and injuries, only to find their concerns largely ignored by policymakers. Instead, the country's elite cadre of wildlife managers has formed a consensus around the idea that community concerns can best be addressed “through the market” by redistributing wildlife-sector revenues. This article explores three different initiatives whose proponents enjoy different levels of tenure security vis-à-vis wildlife resources. A comparison of these programs demonstrates that they stress quite different and sometimes competing and contradictory rationales for pursuing revenue-sharing strategies, with varying degrees of emphasis on the environmental justice claims of Tanzania's rural citizens.

Keywords:

• community conservation
• environmental justice
• Tanzania
• wildlife management

I am especially grateful to Ben Gardiner, Dorothy Hodgson, Dave Peterson, Alais Morindat, and anonymous reviewers for sharing their insights into the issues described here.

Notes

This is a particularly well-traveled article that has benefited from critical feedback from colleagues at the following colleges and universities: Barnard, Macalester, Minnesota, Oregon, Stanford, UC–Berkeley, UC–Santa Cruz, UCLA, Washington, and Wisconsin–Madison.

The research was funded in part by a Research Council grant from Rutgers University.