Presents 26 papers given at a workshop held to determine future policy towards community-based conservation in Tanzania. Papers cover a range of topics including the relevance of traditional practices, and of land, village, and wildlife laws and policies; case studies of different projects in Tanzania; and an overview of community-based conservation initiatives in five other African countries.

This research goes beyond the traditionally studied intricacies and contentions within northern Tanzania's community-based conservation by looking at how the state's engagement, through wildlife tourism, with local communities in and around protected areas impacts the country's development and conservation of its wildlife. It draws heavily on Tanzania's Development Vision 2025 and how the wildlife tourism industry feeds into achieving its objectives. This research looks through the theoretical lens of political ecology, the theory of access, and the powers of exclusion. It applies a qualitative content analysis by coding different types of existing literature in NVivo, and includes semi-structured interviews with key respondents. The research concludes that the government's recentralization of wildlife management is working opposite to its development ambitions as per Vision 2025, and it is doing very little to address the crisis within its ecosystems and to enhance wildlife conservation. Ultimately, it is through the government's efforts to protect Tanzania's ecological uniqueness that both conservation and development have faced increased challenges in its efforts to improve.

Over the past three decades, there has been a global paradigm shift in biodiversity conservation approaches from exclusive protected areas (PAs) towards people-centred conservation. This has encouraged the development of community-based conservation across the world, promoting reconciliation between livelihood improvement and biodiversity conservation. However, there is a growing body of literature that demonstrates mixed outcomes of community-based conservation approaches in contributing to improved conservation and local livelihoods, especially to the communities neighbouring PAs in Africa. This dissertation examines the experience of implementing one community wildlife management area (WMA) in Tanzania, with a particular focus on the effectiveness of Ikona WMA in contributing to improved conservation and local livelihoods in Western Serengeti. Specifically, the study investigates livelihood benefits and conservation impacts attributed to Ikona WMA in the study area. It also explores the success and challenges of implementing Ikona WMA and suggests areas for improvement. Qualitative and quantitative data were gathered through field-based research in Nyichoka and Robanda villages, which participate in Ikona WMA, and Rwamchanga village, which does not. Research methods employed in this study include interviews, focus group discussions, and household surveys. With regard to livelihood benefits attributed to Ikona WMA, results show benefits to the communities participating in WMA at the community level, especially improvement of social infrastructure, while few or no benefits were realized at the household level. In addition, findings show variation in perceptions between and among the communities participating in Ikona WMA and the community not participating, and among conservation experts about community access to natural resources and benefits experienced at the household level in the study area.Findings show that the communities participating in the WMA had more positive perceptions of Ikona WMA, and perceived more conservation impact than did the community not participating in the WMA. Both community members and WMA administrators perceived a decline of illegal activities, improvement of habitat, increase of wild animals, and increase of wildlife protection as the major conservation impacts attributable to Ikona WMA. Ikona WMA demonstrates some success in contributing to improved conservation and local livelihoods at the community level. However, the study reveals a number of challenges hindering effective implementation of Ikona WMA, including insufficient power over crucial decision making and ownership of wildlife resources, insufficient involvement of community members, unequal distribution of benefits at the village level, and insufficient transparency, accountability, and monitoring of village development projects ... .

One of the major challenges of sustainable development is the interdisciplinary nature of the issues involved. To this end, a team of conservation biologists, hunters, tourist operators, ranchers, wildlife and land managers, ecologists, veterinarians and economists was convened to discuss whether wildlife outside protected areas in Africa can be conserved in the face of agricultural expansion and human population growth. They reached the unequivocal - if controversial - conclusion that wildlife can be an economic asset, especially in the African savannas, if this wildlife can be sustainably utilized through safari hunting and tourism. Using the African savannas as an example, Wildlife Conservation by Sustainable Use shows that in many instances sustainable wildlife utilization comprises an even better form of land use than livestock keeping. Even when population pressure is high, as in agricultural areas or in humid zones, and wild animal species can pose a serious cost to agriculture, these costs are mainly caused by small species with a low potential for safari hunting. Although ranching has a very low rate of return and is hardly ever profitable, the biggest obstacle to the model of sustainable wildlife use outlined in Wildlife Conservation by Sustainable Use is from unfair competition from the agricultural sector, such as subsidies and lack of taxation, resulting in market distortion for wildlife utilization. This book thus gives valuable evidence for a different way of working, providing arguments for removing such distortions and thereby facilitating financially sound land use and making it a rationally sound choice to conserve wildlife outside protected areas. The expert team of authors, most of whom came together at a workshop to thrash out the ideas that were then developed into the various chapters, has written a superb account of recent research on this complex subject, resulting in a book that is a major contribution to our understanding of sustainable use of land. The important conclusion is that wildlife conservation can be possible for landholders and local communities if they have a financial interest in protecting wildlife on their lands.

"This paper examines how community wildlife management (CWM) needs to be approached as part of a broader social process of building local rights and access to resources through institutional reforms, rather than as a project-based or technical assistance strategy with short time horizons. It also provides suggestions for how practitioners in Tanzania and elsewhere might foster more effective and adaptive CWM approaches in light of these outcomes and experiences."--Editor.