Environmental justice and the market: The politics of sharing wildlife revenues in Tanzania

Abstract

In northern Tanzania in the late 1980s and 1990s, rural communities displaced by the creation of wildlife protection areas advanced a number of grievances centered on equitable access to resources and compensation for wildlife-induced property loss and injuries, only to find their concerns largely ignored by policymakers. Instead, the country's elite cadre of wildlife managers has formed a consensus around the idea that community concerns can best be addressed "through the market" by redistributing wildlife-sector revenues. This article explores three different initiatives whose proponents enjoy different levels of tenure security vis-à-vis wildlife resources. A comparison of these programs demonstrates that they stress quite different and sometimes competing and contradictory rationales for pursuing revenue-sharing strategies, with varying degrees of emphasis on the environmental justice claims of Tanzania's rural citizens.