Emmanuel Sulle’s research while affiliated with University of the Western Cape and other places

Eastern and southern Africa has been a key laboratory for community‐based approaches to conservation for over three decades. During the 1990s, field‐level initiatives and national policy reforms across the region put it at the forefront of global experiments with community‐based conservation. Community‐based conservation, in theory and practice, is closely tied to institutional reforms that devolve rights over wildlife and natural resources to local communities. As such, these efforts have frequently encountered political‐economic and institutional barriers that limited their impact. This contributed to a rising sense of rollback and recentralization of community conservation approaches during the 2000s. Since then, community‐based conservation has expanded its scope considerably in some countries, notably Kenya and Namibia, primarily as a result of relatively supportive legal and policy provisions coupled with sustained government, civil society, and private sector support. At a wider scale, sufficient devolution of rights over wildlife and natural resources has been a chronic constraint, but community‐based initiatives have still managed to persist, adapt, and deliver some evidence of positive ecological and social impacts in Zambia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Three key overarching trends across the region are (a) the significant growth and expansion of community‐based conservation where key institutional enabling conditions exist; (b) pervasive institutional limitations on community rights over wildlife and other valuable natural resources, which continue to constrain and undermine community‐based approaches; and (c) local entrepreneurship and resilience that continues to create new opportunities for community‐based approaches, even under adverse conditions.

This paper focuses on smallholder agriculture and livelihoods in north-central Tanzania. It traces changes in agricultural production and asset ownership in one community over a 28 year period. Over this period, national development policies and agriculture programs have moved from socialism to neo-liberal approaches. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we explore how farmers have responded to these shifts in the wider political-economic context and how these responses have shaped their livelihoods and ideas about farming and wealth. This case study clearly debunks the idea that rural farmers are slow to respond to “modern” farming methods or that smallholder farming is stagnant and cannot reduce poverty. While changes overall are very positive in this rural community, challenges remain as land sizes are small and markets often unreliable. This research cautions against a shift in emphasis to large-scale farming as a strategy for national development. It suggests instead that increased investment in supporting smallholder farming is critical for addressing poverty and rural well-being.

Indigenous and community lands, crucial for rural livelihoods, are typically held under informal customary tenure arrangements. This can leave the land vulnerable to outside commercial interests, so communities may seek to formalize their land rights in a government registry and obtain an official land document. But this process can be time-consuming and complex, and in contrast, companies can acquire land relatively quickly and find shortcuts around regulatory burdens. This article reviews and maps 19 community land formalization and 14 company land acquisition procedures is 15 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Comparing community and company procedures identifies multiple sources of inequity.