Transfrontier parks and development in southern Africa: The case of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park

The interface between local communities and transfrontier parks has received considerable attention, yet the utility of the transfrontier concept in developing livelihoods and environmental sustainability in southern Africa remains questionable. This paper argues that the benefits of transfrontier parks at regional, national and community levels cannot be overstated; neither should the problems be underestimated. Transfrontier parks may be viable alternatives in achieving development that is sustainable by protecting southern Africa's fragile environments, generating more funds and bringing significant and major improvements to the lives of the rural poor. At the same time, transfrontier parks raise issues of sovereignty of national governments, create complexity in governance processes and can lead to the needs of rural communities being sacrificed. Therefore, there is a need to find ways to reconcile conflictual and sometimes controversial circumstances in the establishment of transfrontier parks and, inquire further into the programmatic blueprints for transfrontier initiatives.     

Local participation in transfrontier tourism: Case of Sengwe community in Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area,Zimbabwe

Transfrontier cross-border nature conservation has become a fashionable target in many parts of the world, including Southern Africa. Transfrontier conservation initiatives are considered to have great capacity for biodiversity conservation and sustainable tourism development by providing employment and revenue opportunities for poor people and communities. However, many previous studies have indicated that in spite of expectations and rhetoric there is often rather minimal community awareness and participation in conservation management, tourism economy and related opportunities. This study aims to discuss local people’s perceptions of community participation, opportunities and constraints in sustainable transfrontier tourism in south-eastern Lowveld, Zimbabwe. The results based on community interviews show that the people are aware of the potential role of tourism in improving livelihoods. The major challenge, however, is to address how this can be turned into concrete benefits for households and communities.     

Tourism-conservation enterprises for community livelihoods and biodiversity conservation in Kenya

Tourism-conservation enterprises (TCEs), such as eco-lodges, are a relatively new strategy of the African Wildlife Foundation for enhancing community livelihoods and wildlife conservation in wildlife-rich areas outside state-protected areas in sub-Saharan Africa. This article investigates the extent to which TCEs succeed in meeting these objectives by focusing on two enterprises in Kenya: the Sanctuary at Ol Lentille and the Koija Starbeds. Empirical data were gathered between October 2010 and March 2013 through semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, literature review and document analysis. Both TCEs demonstrated significant contributions to employment, education, healthcare and security. Compared with the Starbeds, the Sanctuary realised a much larger conservation area and more pronounced biodiversity recovery. The analysis showed that the contribution of TCEs to livelihoods and biodiversity conservation depends on the nature of the partnership arrangement, as well as the local, national and international contexts in which they operate.     

Shocks and rural livelihoods in the Okavango Delta,Botswana

This paper describes the impacts that three shocks in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, have had on rural livelihoods: the desiccation of river channels, animal diseases, and HIV/AIDS. Primary data was collected from five study areas, using formal questionnaire interviews and focus group discussions. The paper reveals the adverse effects on rural livelihoods. It describes the way households have been exposed to poverty and vulnerability and the various ways they have coped or adapted, such as by re-allocating their labour, liquidating their assets to cover medical expenses and funeral costs, reducing the area ploughed for crops, hiring labour, digging wells and switching from flood recession agriculture to dryland farming. The Botswana government has provided safety nets to help households cope, but this paper recommends that people's responses to these shocks should be taken into account in future policy and programme formulation.     

Tourism in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park

The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) is a transboundary protected area that straddles the borders of Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The park's development was partly motivated by the ecological objective of re-establishing traditional migratory wildlife routes once fences between the three countries are dismantled. Besides biodiversity conservation benefits, the park may also provide a basis to generate revenue for conservation and local economic development through tourism. This paper describes current state and private sector tourism within the GLTP and planning initiatives that may promote responsible tourism, and describes the achievements by community-based tourism enterprises and public–private partnerships in generating economic, social and environmental benefits. The livelihoods of people living in the park are outlined in relation to government policies on land redistribution, resettlement and options for the future, and progress in biodiversity conservation and responsible nature-based tourism development within the GLTP over the past five years is evaluated.     

Modelling nature-based tourism impacts on rural development and conservation in Sikunga Conservancy,Namibia

Community-based natural resource management and nature-based tourism often go hand in hand to drive conservation and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the complementarity of the two strategies is controversially discussed in the literature. Built on survey data from 200 households conducted in 2012 we analysed the trade-off between conservation and development objectives by means of a mathematical programming model representing the economy of a rural conservancy in Namibia. We found that in the scenario describing unrestricted resource extraction, local communities mainly benefit from fishing and utilising forest products. In comparison, the scenario representing the social optimum, implying sustainably managed fish stocks and appropriate diets for community inhabitants, shows that community households increase agricultural diversification and shift livelihoods towards tourism employment.     

Understanding the Links Between Conservation and Development in the Bamenda Highlands,Cameroon

Integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) attempt to link the conservation of natural resources with the development needs of local people. Recent reviews have provided differing perspectives on the relative success of ICDPs in addressing either their conservation or development objectives. This paper explores local perceptions of an ICDP that has been established for more than a decade around the Kilum–Ijim Forest, in North West Province, Cameroon. The study tested the assumptions underlying the ICDP: that by improving incomes and livelihoods from the land in and around the forest, pressure on the forest would decrease, contributing to conservation objectives. The study provides evidence that livelihood activities can have a conservation impact by helping to change local attitudes and behavior. Furthermore, the study analyzes and develops, some of the “factors for success” highlighted by previous papers.     

Integrating tourism to rural development and planning in the developing world

In the past few decades, rural areas have experienced major socioeconomic changes. Due to modernisation and deepening globalisation, the economic and employment potential of many traditional livelihoods has decreased. Currently tourism is increasingly seen as a relevant tool for addressing rural problems in developing countries and tourism is actively used for economic diversification and opening up new ways to generate income and employment. However, many development models, such as integrated rural tourism (IRT) with emphasis on co-planning, learning and participation, originate from the Global North. This calls for careful considerations when such models are applied to the Global South's rural contexts. This research note discusses some of the key challenges of rural tourism development, especially related to the integration of the tourism industry and rural communities in developing countries, and overviews the applicability and conditions of the IRT framework as a potential approach for rural tourism development in the developing world.     

基于碳足迹计算的开发区低碳发展战略——以曹妃甸开发区为例

目前,国内外开发区低碳发展战略集中于技术升级和产业结构调整层面,以定性的描述居多。碳足迹作为评估碳排量最有效的工具,文章提出了基于碳足迹的低碳分析模式,同时基于碳足迹计算提出了包含战略性新兴产业、节能减排、新能源替代化石能源的开发区低碳发展战略。     

Effects of wildlife crop raiding on the livelihoods of arable farmers in Khumaga,Boteti sub-district,Botswana

Human–wildlife interaction in Boteti district, Botswana is critical. Wild animals destroy agricultural products and threaten human lives. This paper, therefore, assesses the economic effects of wildlife crop raiding on the livelihoods of arable farmers in Khumaga, Boteti sub-district, Botswana. A total of 119 arable farmers were interviewed using open and closed-ended structured questionnaires in this study. Key informant interviews were also conducted through purposive selection. Findings indicate that wild animals destroy agricultural production at Khumaga leading to food insecurity; sometimes farmers can lose the entire field in single elephant crop raiding. The elephant (Loxodonta africana) was reported by respondents to be a problem animal. In conclusion, decision-makers should ensure that farmers at Khumaga are protected and inducted with mitigation strategies that are effective against wildlife to improve arable farmer’s livelihoods and conservation efforts at Khumaga village and in Botswana.     

District Assemblies in a fix: the perils of the politics of capacity in the political and administrative reforms in Malawi

This article appraises the prospects of District Assemblies institutionalising local governance structures and processes that are responsive, democratic and capable of improving the livelihoods of the poor. District Assemblies have been established against the backdrop of a radically reconstituted policy, governance and administrative framework following the transition from one-party rule to multiparty democracy in Malawi in May 1994. The underlying argument of this paper is that the potential success of the District Assemblies is effectively hampered by widespread self-seeking tendencies and orientations among various stakeholders in grassroots development, strategically veiled as lack of capacity on the part of the decentralised planning framework. Unless these seemingly idiosyncratic tendencies are subordinated to the underlying noble cause of the decentralisation policy and institutional reforms, the trinity of good governance, development and poverty reduction in the evolving structures and processes of local government will remain a virtually unattainable ideal.     

Urban agriculture promotes sustainable livelihoods in Cape Town

Urban agriculture has long been endorsed as a means to promote food security and economic wellbeing in African cities. However, the South African context presents mixed results. In order to establish the contributions of urban agriculture to sustainable livelihoods, the sustainable livelihoods framework is applied to a case study on cultivators from Cape Town’s Cape Flats. This study contributes to the empirical literature on urban agriculture by providing a deeper understanding of the benefits cultivators themselves attribute to urban agriculture. The key finding is that cultivators use urban agriculture in highly complex ways to build sustainable livelihoods. NGOs are central to this process. Distrust, crime and a lack of resources are, however, limiting factors. The paper concludes with policy recommendations to support pro-poor urban agriculture in African urban centres.     

A Framework for Understanding On-farm Environmental Degradation and Constraints to the Adoption of Soil Conservation Measures: Case Studies from Highland Tanzania and Thailand

This article presents a simple but valuable framework that helps to generate a clear understanding of the social causes of environmental degradation and factors that affect land user decision-making in soil conservation. It is grounded in structuration theory and resonates with recent ideas encompassed by the “sustainable livelihoods” approach. The framework is illustrated with reference to two case studies in mountainous areas where officials have, for some time, expressed a considerable degree of concern about degradation. The first is from the Uluguru Mountains of central-eastern Tanzania and the second is from the Chiang Dao District of the Northern Highlands of Thailand. The framework helps to reveal the diverse factors contributing to a lack of investment in conservation measures in these two places, in a comprehensive but nondeterministic and culturally-specific way.     

Few Opportunities, Much Desperation: The Dichotomy of Non-Agricultural Activities and Inequality in Western Kenya

Using data from Western Kenya, we confirm the existence of a dichotomous non-agricultural sector. The poverty and inequality implications of the differently motivated diversification strategies only partly correspond to expected patterns. While high-return activities are indeed confined to richer households, low-return activities constitute an important income source for households across the entire income distribution. Finally, we examine the wider implications of our findings for rural livelihoods. We find that only engagement in high-return non-agricultural activities is significantly associated with increased agricultural productivity. It seems that such high-return activities play a key role in triggering cumulative effects of relative livelihood success.     

Mining and Social Movements: Struggles Over Livelihood and Rural Territorial Development in the Andes

Social movements have been viewed as vehicles through which the concerns of poor and marginalized groups are given greater visibility within civil society, lauded for being the means to achieve local empowerment and citizen activism, and seen as essential in holding the state to account and constituting a grassroots mechanism for promoting democracy. However, within development studies little attention has been paid to understanding how social movements can affect trajectories of development and rural livelihood in given spaces, and how these effects are related to movements’ internal dynamics and their interaction with the broader environment within which they operate. This paper addresses this theme for the case of social movements protesting contemporary forms of mining investment in Latin America. On the basis of cases from Peru and Ecuador, the paper argues that the presence and nature of social movements has significant influences both on forms taken by extractive industries (in this case mining) and on the effects of this extraction on rural livelihoods. In this sense, one can usefully talk about rural development as being co-produced by movements, mining companies, and other actors, in particular the state. The terms of this co-production, however, vary greatly among different locations, reflecting the distinct geographies of social mobilization and of mineral investment, as well as the varying power relationships among the different actors involved.     

The contribution of livelihood activities in the Limpopo province: Case study evidence from Makua and Manganeng

This article uses case study evidence from Makua and Manganeng, two rural villages in the Capricorn region, to investigate the effects of private and social costs, such as land degradation, on rural livelihoods in the area. Information is derived from household surveys, key informant interviews, participatory appraisal techniques, and a detailed ecological baseline study of the area. Livelihood activities such as agricultural practices (crop and livestock production), and wood and edible product gathering are included. This article attempts to synthesise the information gathered and lessons learnt from these studies, quantifies the contribution of these livelihood activities in monetary terms, and considers the implications for sustainable livelihood practices. The study finds that non-cash earnings contribute an important component of overall household income - between 40 and 50 per cent before social and opportunity costs are deducted. However, external costs significantly undermine overall earnings from natural resource-based products.     

A critique of planning concepts and methodology in Nigeria

Conclusion This evaluation of the concepts and methodology of planning and plan implementation in Nigeria has been motivated by an abiding commitment to effective planned development. The analysis maintains that in order to achieve this urgent goal, the current bourgeois intellectual tradition of planning in Nigeria which is so deeply steeped in imported Keynesian economics must be transcended. This requires the substitution of a social for current technical approach to planning and the shift of emphasis from elitism, financial planning, and dominant private enterprise which define the essential character of contemporary neocolonial capitalist planning to mass participation in comprehensive socialist planning with material balances. This demand is predicated on the empirical experience of 14 years of the anarchy of planned capitalist development whose unmitigated disaster demonstrates that neocolonial capitalism and its handmaiden of neocolonial capitalist planning are doomed.     

南水北调西线工程若干问题述评

南水北调西线工程规划于2010年开工,然而,论证尚不充分。相关领域的许多专家,特别是长期在该区域工作生活的四川学者,从地质、生态、水利、经济、社会、宗教、替代方案、科学决策机制等方面进行了广泛探讨,汇集为《南水北调西线工程备忘录》,其中尤其对是否存在“安全岛”和“避让”可能、调水量是否可靠、投资预算和运作方式、超乎寻常的移民难度和文物保护难度、西线调水与国家能源战略和生态安全、全局利益和替代方案、公平性和科学决策机制等问题,提出了令人震撼的质疑和结论,专家们还提出应从源头治理生态、恢复若尔盖湿地功能、调整工业布局、加大中线调水(重庆开县小江调水方案)、长江黄河水电互济等多方面来缓解北方缺水,并认为,西线工程不仅仅是技术工程,而且是社会工程,科学决策应包括广泛征求各界专家和老百姓意见。本文的作者作为《南水北调西线工程备忘录》编者之一,就该书对南水北调西线工程涉及的这些重大问题进行综述和探讨,希望西线工程论证和决策能够更加科学,尽可能避免和降低风险。     

From strategic urban planning to strategic urban management: Problems and solutions

This paper provides a short review of the history of urban development planning at different stages of urbanization, of the discussions and visions of the future of cities. It considers the urban planning doctrines in the Soviet Union and in today’s Russia (transition to strategic planning) and justifies the project of the system for managing the implementation of these strategic plans.     

Rurality as a choice: Towards ruralising rural areas in sub-Saharan African countries

Rural development practices in sub-Saharan Africa are still based on modernisation approaches. This has led to distortion in rural identity in most sub-Saharan communities. This article embeds this issue in the development discourse. It calls for developing rural areas rurally – rather than urbanely. The paper argues that improvements in rural conditions should aim to make rural lives and the environment sustainable, while preserving rural identities. Drawing from literature, it presents a conceptual framework for understanding rurality and shows how planning can serve as a tool for achieving rurality focused development. It provides six suggestions that could lead to integrating rurality-as-a-choice in development policies and practices. The suggested measures include the heritagisation of rural areas, introduction of rurality-focused vision in planning, and organisation of campaigns for the protection of rural heritages, among others. It contributes to emerging literatures on identifying problem-generating issues in rural development in sub-Saharan Africa.