Abstract
The increasing importance of the wildlife management areas (WMAs) in Tanzania, where 17 WMAs are now functioning and 22 others are in various stages of development, begs the question of what successes have been achieved and what challenges remain to be addressed if this Community-Based Conservation model is to be sustained and even scaled up. There has not been a country-wide evaluation of WMAs since the pilot-phase evaluation in 2007 at a time when most WMAs were too new to yield firm projections for the long term. The evaluation team chose five of the nine pilot WMAs for which full baseline studies were available: Wami-Mbiki, Pawaga-Idodi, Ipole, Burunge, and Enduimet. All five had been officially launched in 2003 and all had reached fully registered status with user rights by 2007. The four-person evaluation team spent approximately four weeks in the field visiting 15 villages around these five WMAs, at the same time that a 750-person household survey was carried out in 25 villages in the same WMAs. The evaluation had three objectives: (1) assess what have been the key outcomes and achievements of the overall WMA approach for the Tanzanian government, local communities, and conservation of wildlife and other resources in terms of creating increased financial benefits, strengthening governance, improving human-wildlife conflicts, and strengthening wildlife management; (2) Identify whether the policy framework and the WMA institutional structure is effective and sufficient in meeting the overall WMA goal of providing benefits to both communities and wildlife; and (3) identify what opportunities and challenges exist to the sustainability and scaling up of the current approach. The review found that WMAs in Tanzania are presently at a key inflection point in their evolution, with a number of possible future pathways of development. Considerable progress has been made during the past decade in terms of: (1) creating a basic legal and institutional framework for WMAs; (2) supporting communities to establish the basic management structures and land use patterns required to form and oversee WMAs; and (3) building broad support for WMAs as a key component of both conservation and natural resource-related development policies and approaches in Tanzania. However, despite this significant progress, major challenges remain, particularly in the economic and governance realms. New approaches to organizational development of authorized associations (AAs), enterprise development and private sector engagement in WMAs, and larger-scale wildlife sector governance issues will be an important element of continuing support by USAID to WMAs, and create numerous opportunities for future support to be designed in a more strategic way. The recommendations highlight these opportunities and suggest specific steps for developing them. (Excerpt, modified)