Resource Tenure and Power Relations in Community Wildlife Contexts: the Case of the Mkambati Area on the Wild Coast of South Africa

Through a case study of the Mkambati area in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, this paper analyses the prospects for community wildlife management (CWM) for communities who neighbour Mkambati Nature Reserve. In this area, an ambitious Spatial Development Initiative (SDI) project, which hinges around eco-tourism, and with a significant component of community participation, is proposed. Although wildlife is present in the Mkambati Reserve, it is not the sole attraction, and the eco-tourism scheme is premised largely on the scenic beauty of the area. Nevertheless, wildlife and other wild resources do play a role in the present and proposed tourist industry, and also in the livelihoods of local people. Furthermore, many of the problems currently being experienced in relation to the establishment of the SDI are reminiscent of those encountered in wildlife management projects elsewhere (Evaluating Eden Phase I Report). In this case study, therefore, the SDI will stand as a proxy for a community wildlife project. While there is no focused CWM initiative at Mkambati, authorities responsible for the existing nature reserve have made gestures in that direction in accordance with international trends. While the nature reserve is important for local livelihoods, this is predominantly through illegal use rather than structured participation in conservation based enterprises. Our analysis of the Mkambati case focuses largely on two clusters of issues, which we propose are crucial in any community based resource management situation. The first cluster is centred on the idea of 'resource tenures', and the need to locate wildlife in a fuller resource/livelihood/tenure institutional context. Who benefits from wildlife, what form do those benefits take, and what institutions regulate the distribution of benefits? Increasingly these have emerged as critical issues in the design of community wildlife projects aimed at reconstituting the social and economic basis of wildlife management. They are pre-eminently resource tenure questions, if tenure is defined as 'the bundle of rights and duties governing access to and control over resources, which provide a stream of benefits to the holders of rights'. This suggests that wildlife tenure could be viewed as only one of the 'sticks' making up the 'bundle' of resource tenures available to rural people-although clearly the wildlife 'stick' could itself be decomposed into a bundle of rights and duties. This means that community wildlife projects must be contextualized within broader resource tenure systems. In the Mkambati area the history of settlement by and dispossession of the …