Evaluating impacts of community-based conservation on attitudes towards wildlife in Namibia

Namibia’s community-based natural resource management program has successfully recovered wildlife and delivered tangible benefits such as financial gains to local communities. Less-tangible impacts like changes in attitudes... [ view full abstract ]

Namibia’s community-based natural resource management program has successfully recovered wildlife and delivered tangible benefits such as financial gains to local communities. Less-tangible impacts like changes in attitudes towards wildlife are not as well-understood, both in Namibia and in other community-based conservation initiatives. Yet positive attitudes can help mitigate against human-wildlife conflict in the short term, and in the long term may be important determinants of sustainability in community-based conservation programs. Here, we evaluated how differences in benefit generation among communal conservancies in Namibia have impacted local residents' attitudes towards wildlife. We administered a questionnaire based on the cognitive hierarchy model of human behaviour to > 400 local community members across 18 conservancies that generated either (i) high benefits from tourism, (ii) high benefits from hunting, or (iii) low/no benefits. We used an empirical modelling approach that isolated the impact of conservancy benefit generation while controlling for a variety of factors that can also influence attitudes towards wildlife. Using an information theoretic and model-averaging approach, we show that all else equal, respondents living in conservancies generating high levels of benefits from hunting had more favourable attitudes towards wildlife than those living in conservancies generating low benefits (as expected), but also as compared to those living in conservancies generating high benefits from tourism. Regional variation in attitudes was not apparent, but a variety of individual-level characteristics, such as the costs and benefits (both tangible and intangible) that respondents have personally experienced from wildlife, as well as demographic factors, were also important in conditioning attitudes. Our results demonstrate that community-based conservation programs can positively impact attitudes towards wildlife, but that this is conditioned by the type and magnitude of tangible and intangible benefits and costs that individuals experience from wildlife, all of which should be assessed in order to effectively support such programs.