ABSTRACT
Northern Tanzania’s savannahs have long been a hotly contested landscape. During the colonial era large tracts of fertile land, particularly highland ranges around mountains such as Kilimanjaro and Meru, were appropriated for agriculture or ranching by European settlers. East Africa’s first state-protected areas for wildlife, most notably the iconic Serengeti National Park, were created out of savannah landscapes that had been managed by pastoralists for hundreds or thousands of years. During the past 30 years, state and private interests in wildlife, tourism and commercial agriculture have continued to increase the pressure on these landscapes and the land and resource rights of resident communities. As a result, people with pastoralist livelihoods have faced escalating pressures and continuous challenges to their ability to use and access their lands and resources. A vast scholarship from the region documents how external commercial interests in wildlife and land in northern Tanzania have weakened local communities’ land tenure security, undermining both livelihoods and traditional natural resource governance regimes (e.g. Lane, 1996; Neumann, 1997; Igoe and Brockington, 1999; Homewood et al, 2009). As a result, northern Tanzania has become a general reference point for the global discourse on interactions between local people and conservation goals, with case studies often highlighting the negative impacts that external global and national conservation interests have on local communities’ rights and livelihoods (e.g. Dowie, 2009). Various studies highlight the role played by western conceptualizations about nature conservation (Neumann, 1998; Brockington, 2002; Goldman, 2003; Igoe, 2004); the importance of wildlife’s growing economic value through tourism in terms of increasing external interest in pastoralist lands (Nelson et al, 2007; Sachedina, 2008); and the influence of globalization in terms of both private sector investors’ and NGO networks’ abilities to influence natural resource policies in African countries (Igoe and Croucher, 2007).
