The effects of governance type and scale on community conservation in Southern Africa

Keywords: Natural resource management, community conservation, governance
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 15

Abstract

Community based natural resource management (CBNRM) concerns the governance, management and use of natural resources and wildlife in communities where livelihoods depend on the natural environment. Despite agreement on the importance of CBNRM, performance is often disappointing, frequently because of weaknesses in governance, low participation and lack of equitable benefit sharing. This study assesses the importance of Ostrom and Murphree’s call for inclusive decision making through face-to-face participatory governance structures in small communities. We examine the extent to which indicators of governance (e.g., trust of leaders with money, general opinion about governance, use of money for community benefits versus other uses) vary, and how this variability is affected by the enabling environment (i.e., country), community size (scale), and type of governance (i.e., participatory versus representational). We used logistic regression to analyze data through “governance dashboard surveys” from seventeen CBNRM communities in Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe including both individual village and multi-village communities. Our findings support the hypothesis that variability in member satisfaction is affected by factors such as country and the enabling environment, community size, type of governance and overall satisfaction with the community-based organization, and that single villages outperformed multi-villages regarding overall satisfaction with the conservancy. The results from this study imply that the design of CBNRM organizations and processes needs to be more cognizant of Ostrom’s and Murphree’s principles, suggesting that participatory practices that are possible in small communities provide significant advantages in terms of financial transparency, social capital formation (trust), participation, and member satisfaction.