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Abstract:
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"Tourism enterprises based on natural attractions are today regarded as important drivers of development, particularly in remote areas with rich resource endowments but few other formal economic opportunities. In these settings, however, the local poor typically provide only unskilled labour with external interests supplying other factor inputs in the form of land, capital and skilled labour as well as other goods and services. This results in a skewed distribution of returns that does little to advance local economic development.
"Several interventions have attempted to improve the integration of the poor into the tourism market. One widely advocated option is for the poor to make land available for tourism development. The ability of the poor to trade in land has however been widely constrained by a variety of factors, including insecure tenure and the lack of institutional capacity. This has often led to suboptimal outcomes in which communal resources are effectively privatised with little common gain. Part of the solution to this problem is located in tenure reform that devolves resource rights to those denied them under colonialism. This has, in some cases, led to promising results, with rural residents acquiring tradable rights over one of the principal factors (land) of the ecotourism market.
"These programmes have however rarely targeted Africa's core protected areas, more often focusing on adjacent lands where the rural poor are resident. Typically, ownership of public conservation assets remains vested in the state and commercial development is outsourced to the private sector. However, in a few recent cases, poor rural communities have acquired formal land rights in core protected areas and used these rights to achieve high levels of participation in the tourism industry.
"The paper considers two such examples from the north of South Africa. In the first case, the Balete community obtained lease rights to a prime tourism concession in the Madikwe Game Reserve. In the second, the Makuleke community acquired ownership of a portion of the Kruger National Park through post-apartheid land restitution. The paper critically examines the terms on which these communities integrated their newly acquired assets into the market. In both instances, a clear rights framework, strong commercial orientation, competent technical advice and responsiveness to local institutional conditions contributed to strong outcomes. And, in both cases, broader structural reform created conditions seemingly conducive to an application of the approach at scale.
"The paper notes these successes but also questions whether the outcomes have been optimal from a community perspective. There are indications that, while the communities have benefited considerably from their ownership of valuable resource rights, especially the Makulekes may not have optimised the integration of their land into the market.
"Much has been written about the two cases. The paper draws on this wide-ranging literature but also on the author's extensive personal experience as a facilitator intimately involved in both cases over a period of more than a decade."
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