When it Comes to Conserving for the People, Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority - TAWA is ‘Walking the Talk’

Excluding people living in poverty from needed resources has inherent issues and conflicts since conservation is arguably for the people. As such, the integration of local communities’ needs into biodiversity conservation has become one of the ways forward to ensure the sustainability of protected areas. While the integration of local communities into conservation is generally well documented, its analysis is rather rudimentary, and the depth of its implementation of it hardly exists in the literature. Taking a multiple-case design and a multiple-method approach, this study questions whether the authorities that are mandated to manage wildlife resources in Tanzania (NCAA, TANAPA, and TAWA) have really considered the approaches (benefit-sharing; mitigating human-wildlife conflicts; opening limited access to PA resources; and managing PAs in collaboration with communities) widely applied by protected area (PA) managers worldwide to integrate local communities into conservation. And if so, to what extent the integration has been, and how this has shaped their relationship with communities. The results indicate that while the extent of application of these approaches varies considerably across the three wildlife authorities in Tanzania (NCAA, TANAPA and TAWA), the focus of such authorities has been predominantly on benefit-sharing, mitigating human-wildlife conflicts, and managing PAs in collaboration with communities. The other approach (opening limited access to park resources) has been considered by TAWA only, making the authority ‘walking the talk’ when it comes to conserving for the people. Yet NCAA and TANAPA have not considered opening limited access to their PA resources, despite being relevant. Threat-based conservation embraced by NCAA and TANAPA places them in a permanently defensive mode of thinking and acting in a way that reflects resistance to allowing limited access to their resources.