Local communities’ valuation of environmental amenities around the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in Southern Africa

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to examine how communities value a variety of dryland environmental amenities provided by the Kgalagadi Transfontier Park where there is an interest in limiting their access, both in order to protect the environment and in order to make it more attractive for tourists. This is done using a choice experiment, which targeted households in the Kgalagadi area. The values placed on environmental amenities by indigenous communities are estimated using a conditional logit model, a random parameter logit model and a random parameter logit model with interactions. The results show that local communities would prefer getting increased grazing opportunities and bush food collection. This is an important policy issue in itself, and it also ties in well with on-going discussions on how to compensate (or at least attach reasonable cost estimates to) losses to local communities linked to environmental preservation policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Choice experiment
• conditional logit
• environmental amenities
• local communities
• random parameter logit

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article appears as ERSA Working Paper 383. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The land restitution programme in South Africa attempts to restore land rights lost after 19 June 1913. According to Roux (2006), the 19 June 1913 cut-off date was agreed upon as it was the date when the Native Land Act, which allowed for systematic land dispossession by the apartheid state, was promulgated.

2. The Mier community subsequently gave the Khomani San two farms adjacent to the park as a goodwill gesture for crowding out some land, which the Khomani San might have won in the absence of their land claim. The Khomani San and Mier communities are located in the Mier Municipality. Livelihood strategies in this area traditionally combine pastoralism, hunting and gathering. The status of the dryland environment affects the wellbeing of local communities. Our discussion focuses on the Khomani San as they are the group heavily reliant on natural resources – see Dikgang and Muchapondwa (2016).

3. To the best of our knowledge, only LIMDEP 10 in NLOGIT 5 pioneers the new developments for estimation on ‘WTP space’, hence our study's inability to report WTP in space.

4. The San farmlands carrying capacity is around 958 large stock. The land has become overgrazed (two-thirds of the range) and was not productive (stocking rates should be kept to a minimum until vegetation had recovered).

5. It should be noted that one of the major content validity issues in CE is that of scenario design (i.e. whether the attributes and their levels described in an understandable and clear manner). It is for this reason, that we undertook a pilot study prior to finalising the questionnaire. For example, in the case of the tree attribute, the levels were defined both as the absolute kilograms of collected firewood and number of bundle/s. Our observation from the fieldwork is that there was no confusion with regard to attribute definitions. Therefore, we conclude that the local respondents could make a realistic valuation of the impacts of reductions in these uses.

6. Essentially, if IIA is satisfied then the ratio of choice probabilities should not be affected by whether another alternative is in the choice set or not. One way of testing IIA is to remove one alternative and re-estimate the model and compare the choice probabilities. Although you can test for IIA, for generic experiments we often get problems with attributes with little variation when we drop an alternative (Carlsson 2008). With our data, we actually have this problem. Thus, we could not confirm its validity. Accordingly we ran the RPL. According to Carlsson (2008), a mixed logit model is a CL model with random coefficients that are drawn from a cumulative distribution function. One of the advantages of mixed models is that the alternatives are not assumed to be independent, i.e. the model does not exhibit IIA.

7. US$ 1 = South African Rand (R) 8.48 at the time the paper was written.

Additional information

Funding

Funding from Economic Research Southern Africa (ERSA); FORMAS through its COMMONS programme; Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) through its Environment for Development (EfD) programme; and People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/ [REA grant agreement number 609642] is gratefully acknowledged. Edwin Muchapondwa worked on parts of this research while visiting the African Development Bank (AfDB).