Botswana is home to as many as one-half of Africa’s remaining elephants and plays a key role in conserving the species. To support global elephant conservation efforts, and partly in response to population declines in other species, in 2014 Botswana placed a moratorium on all trophy hunting. Not only did this act forfeit potentially significant state and community revenue from safari hunting, but community-based institutions were excluded from the entire decision-making process.
The Botswana hunting moratorium comes at a critical juncture, not only for elephant population management, but also for the long-running, local-level efforts of community-based conservation (CBC) in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), the world’s largest transfrontier conservation area. Here, CBC has been a fixture across nations in KAZA and represents the foundational conservation strategy to promote natural resource rights of people living near protected areas across the tropics. Yet, the hunting moratorium in Botswana threatens the already small funding stream to communities that keeps CBC programs solvent. The moratorium also calls into question community rights over land and resources.
The hunting moratorium and the increase in KAZA elephant numbers in the last two years correspond to an increase in human-elephant conflict (e.g., destruction of crops and property, degraded natural resources). We present data describing elephant populations, human-elephant conflict, and tourism revenue in Botswana and Namibia (both before and after Botswana’s hunting moratorium; hunting remains legal in Namibia). We then interpret these data in light of focus group discussions conducted within CBC project communities in 2016 and 2017 and 500 household surveys conducted in 2017.
CBC policies across KAZA, and elsewhere, are imperfect instruments for supporting people within conservation landscapes. However imperfect, CBC should be adequately supported, and this current period of global interest in elephant conservation poses an opportunity. KAZA stands unique in its ability to act as a boundary organization, linking needs of communities and of elephants with multiple nations and the global support for conservation. KAZA should therefore assume the role of facilitating systems leadership in an elephant landscape, based on collaboration and collective action at multiple scales.
Topics: Transboundary Species Management , Topics: Community-Based Conservation , Topics: Social-Ecological Systems/Coupled Human-Natural Systems
