Governing Nature Tourism in Eastern and Southern Africa

This chapter shows how the logics in the conservation discourse over time have expanded from a conservation to a development and market logic, allowing communal and individual landowners to play a pivotal role in conservation by assuming the roles of entrepreneur and wildlife asset manager. We illustrate this market-based approach to conservation by discussing four institutional arrangements for nature tourism that have emerged in eastern and southern Africa in the 1990s: conservancies in Namibia, tourism conservation enterprises in Kenya, private game reserves in South Africa and transfrontier conservation areas. This chapter provides a comparative analysis of these arrangements. In each of these arrangements, nature tourism has been the main mechanism for accruing benefits from wildlife to support conservation and community livelihoods.