Community-Based Wildlife Management (CWM) in Tanzania: Are the Communities Interested?

Abstract

The fences-and-fines approach (the American National Park model) to wildlife protection is now perceived by many conservationists to have failed in Africa. An alternative approach whereby rural communities are given ownership rights or custodianship and management responsibilities for the resource has been introduced under the name Community-based Wildlife Management (CWM) (also known as Community-Based Conservation or CBC). This new approach is currently under experimentation in many parts of Africa. It is based on a number of assumptions, one being that the communities are interested and willing to conserve wildlife on their lands. Using the Selous Conservation Programme (SCP) in Tanzania and seven other African cases, this paper examines the plausibility of this assumption.