Paper short abstract:

Community based natural resource management (CBNRM) is a popular concept to foster development in conservation areas through tourism. This research looks at the factors defining the capacity of CBNRM programmes to capture value in tourism global production networks.

Paper long abstract:

Tourism plays a key role in the design of community based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes for nature conservation. By commodifying wildlife, an utilisationist approach is applied that aims at fostering regional development to achieve consent among local communities on conservation measures. The benefits are mainly generated by both trophy hunting and safari tourism. Local communities are awarded direct use rights, which are then transferred to tourism investors and hunting companies. By this means, conservancies in peripheral rural areas are integrated into global production networks (GPN) of the tourism industry. While benefit-sharing and value distribution at the local level are subject of an ongoing debate, less attention has so far been paid to the negotiation processes of conservancies with actors of the tourism GPN. Moreover, it can be assumed that linkages of tourism operations to the local economic structure are weak. Thus, a global production network approach is used to reveal varying patterns of local value capture and territorial embeddedness of tourism enterprises in conservancies of the Zambezi region in Northern Namibia. This is based on qualitative interviews with tourism entrepreneurs and conservancy managements as well as on conservancy financial reports. In this way, the factors that influence the effectiveness of conservancies to capture value in tourism GPNs are highlighted. All in all, the study leads to a refined understanding of the role conservancies play in the process of marketing their wildlife to global players.