Abstract
Concerns about the impacts of national parks and protected areas upon local populations have generated significant interest in community conservation initiatives that attempt to include local knowledge and participation in natural resource decision-making. While there has been much interest in the institutional frameworks and livelihood impacts of community conservation, emerging research is documenting the various factors that shape local perceptions. This paper uses a case study of the Mahushe Shongwe Game Reserve in South Africa to examine the key variables shaping community perceptions of community conservation. We employ multinomial logistic regression models to understand views of the benefits and future direction of the reserve. These models are coupled with information collected from semi-structured interviews that assists in providing a detailed, and more complex, understanding of the diverse ways that community conservation is perceived by local residents. The paper demonstrates that multiple factors, particularly household history, education, and gender contribute in shaping views of the reserve. While these variables are often identified in the academic literature as important, we argue that the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods helps reveal the interplay between them in shaping perceptions of community conservation.
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Notes
Other terms include co-management, participatory conservation, and conservation-with-development. This paper uses community conservation as a general term to describe the attempt to include local populations directly in natural resource management.
Financial assets were defined as cash, savings, loans and gifts, regular remittances or pensions, and other financial instruments. Physical assets included housing and building materials, land and other physical items which increase in value such as jewelry, or physical items that decrease in value including consumer durables such as household appliances, shoes, clothing, and vehicles. Human assets were defined as skills and knowledge, ability to engage in the labor force, educational training, and health resources. Social assets included membership or participation in social networks or organizations, with particular emphasis upon the tribal authority and local governmental structures.
Even though the independent variable “ckngfl” shows a statistically significant relationship with the second independent variable, it was removed from the regression analysis because the limited number of responses in one cell made the result numerically unstable.
The reason for removing the “I do not know” is that it we were primarily concerned with whether respondents had a positive or negative view of the reserve. For a number of cases, respondents who had recently moved to Mzinti indicated they did not know because they were unsure about Mahushe Shongwe and its impacts. A lack of awareness about the reserve was particularly pronounced within the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) housing project that was finished just months before the household survey was completed. Many of these residents have moved from other villages and evidenced less interest in Mahushe Shongwe. For a fuller discussion of intra-community dynamics within Mzinti see King (2007a) and (2006).
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Acknowledgements
Data collection from 2001–2002 was funded by the Institute for the Study of World Politics, the Association of American Geographers (AAG), the Cultural Ecology specialty group of the AAG, the Graduate School at the University of Colorado, and the Program in Developing Areas, Research and Teaching (DART) at the University of Colorado. Additional fieldwork in 2004 was supported by the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas. A University of Texas Special Research Grant helped fund the data analysis. The authors want to thank the members of the Mzinti community who helped make this research possible. Thanks also to the three anonymous reviewers who commented on a previous version of the paper, as well as the helpful suggestions from Kelley Crews, Erica King, and Dan Powers.
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King, B., Peralvo, M. Coupling Community Heterogeneity and Perceptions of Conservation in Rural South Africa. Hum Ecol 38, 265–281 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-010-9319-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-010-9319-1