[De]constructing a partnership: evaluating a win-win conservation and development story, the case of the Mara conservancies, Kenya
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Date
2015-01-08
Authors
Jandreau, Connor
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Abstract
Kenya's Maasai Mara ecosystem is a particularly contested landscape when it concerns conservation and development interests. In recent years, private conservancies have emerged, redefining the relationships between conservation, tourism and local Maasai pastoralists. The partnership forged between ecotourism operators and Maasai landowners is celebrated as community conservation, bringing together a win for wildlife, and a win for livelihoods. Despite the rhetoric, inherent trade-offs are being made, particularly by pastoralists who now have to navigate an extended network of conservation boundaries with their livestock. Through a qualitative methods approach, this research gauges various stakeholder positions in relation to the emerging conservation partnership. Initial findings suggest the conservancies have made progress in alleviating some of the historical failures inherent in East Africa’s well-preserved ‘fortress conservation’ story. Yet the future of the conservancies remains unclear, in large part due to community concerns for livestock, resource access, and rights to self-determination. The conservancy format in Maasailand needs to consider greater efforts in fashioning a true partnership before it can consider itself a win-win enterprise.
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Keywords
conservation and development, wildlife, pastoralism, partnership, governance