RP-School of Hospitality and Tourism

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Browsing RP-School of Hospitality and Tourism by Subject "Amboseli"

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    Contributions of Partnerships to Conservation and Development: Insights from Amboseli
    (Cognizant Communication Corporation, 2021) Mugo, Tabitha; Visseren-Hamakers, Ingrid; Dui, Rene van der
    For several decades, both academics and practitioners have fiercely debated how to reconcile conservation and development objectives. In Sub-Saharan Africa, efforts to align biodiversity conservation and livelihood goals have triggered a shift from pure protected area approaches to a hybrid scenario, including diverse partnership arrangements that consider livelihood needs of communities neighboring protected areas. These partnerships often include tourism to provide income and jobs. The future of the Amboseli landscape in Kenya has been an integral part of these debates, since it has faced long-lasting conservation and development challenges. Many initiatives, often in the form of partnership arrangements, have tried to address these challenges. By using the Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF) and a set of indicators to measure the contributions to conservation, we examine two of these partnerships—the Amboseli Ecosystem Trust (AET) and Big Life Foundation (BLF)—with the aim of understanding the extent to which they contribute to addressing these challenges. Data were collected using document analysis, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, nonparticipant observation, and informal conversations. Findings show that both AET and BLF have been able to address direct drivers of biodiversity loss (such as human wildlife conflicts, poaching, unplanned infrastructural developments) and—to a much lesser extent—the indirect drivers, such as poverty and land subdivision. Through the workings of both partnerships, more community members have gained access to specific community capital assets, through employment opportunities and other monetary incentives and education. However, it is not clear if and how the livelihood benefits transfer to real and long-term support for wildlife conservation.
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    Landscape Governance through Partnerships: Lessons from Amboseli, Kenya
    (Taylor & Francis, 2020) Mugo, Tabitha; Visseren-Hamakers, Ingrid; Dui, Rene van der
    The Amboseli landscape in Kenya has long been facing persistent challenges regarding conservation and development. To mitigate these problems and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), various policy interventions have been initiated, mostly in the form of partnership arrangements. This article examines two such partnerships, the Amboseli Ecosystem Trust (AET) and the Big Life Foundation (BLF), to understand how they contribute to the governance of the Amboseli landscape, and the intrinsic link to power and politics. The research findings, based on document analysis, interviews and focus-group discussions, reveal that the partnerships have performed complementing landscape governance roles. Whereas AET focused on policy development, agenda-setting and meta-governance, BLF concentrated on policy implementation and meta-governance in relation to wildlife security. The way the partnerships performed these governance roles can be explained through the four faces of power, which reveal BLF’s compulsory power and AET’s institutional power. Nevertheless, the partnerships have only partially managed to bridge conflicting conservation and development discourses illustrating that the concept of sustainable development appears to hold little productive power on the ground. Overall, the article provides important insights into the contributions that partnerships can make to the SDGs, but also their limitations.