ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s, in Eastern and Southern Africa partnerships have been established between local communities, private entrepreneurs and nature conservation organizations to enable the development of conservation tourism for generating livelihood and conserving nature (e.g. Ahebwa et al., 2013; Ashley and Jones, 2001; Lamers et al., 2013, 2014; Van der Duim et al., 2015). So far, academics and practitioners have viewed such conservation tourism partnerships (CTPs) with rational actor perspectives, focusing on the extent to which these partnerships generate socioeconomic incentives for local people to change unsustainable land uses (Sumba et al., 2007), with instrumental perspectives assessing the effectiveness of the partnerships for nature conservation and livelihood creation (Ahebwa et al., 2013; Lamers et al., 2014; Van der Duim et al., 2015), and with critical political economy perspectives on the desirability of neoliberal institutional arrangements in nature conservation (Brockington et al., 2008; Sachedina et al., 2010). In this chapter we will provide an alternative perspective by focusing on how such partnerships are connecting practices of livelihood creation, tourism and conservation, with the aim of realizing change in the constituting set of practices. This process of integrating practices will be comparatively analysed in two distinct cases in Laikipia Country, Kenya. The questions which practices underlie such partnerships and how they are changed by these partnerships have remained undisclosed. This chapter therefore contributes to the practice theory agenda by providing a ‘zoomed out’ (Nicolini, 2012) analysis of how practices are connected and how bundles of practices compare with the policy aims of enhancing livelihood creation and nature conservation through tourism. We will conceptualize CTPs as deliberate attempts to create distinct nexuses of practices and material arrangements (Schatzki, 2002, 2005) to tackle societal challenges. We will investigate how CTPs originated from existing practices, and how they are sustained and perpetuated, that is how individuals carry them forward (Schatzki, 2005). Second, we will demonstrate how different attempts to create CTPs in different local contexts are shaped in their own distinct ways,
perpetuated through successive moments of performance, while also changing over time. We will argue that, and examine how, conservation tourism partnerships emerged out of the co-location and connections between three existing practices. We show how conservation practices of NGOs, livelihood practices (pastoralism) of local communities and business venturing practices of tourism entrepreneurs result in a hybrid nexus of practices, facilitated by particular ‘bridging’ or ‘connecting’ practices. By referring to two different CTPs in Kenya we show how conservation tourism only exists and endures because of countless recurrent and situated practices, producing particular interdependencies that are characteristic for CTPs. The value of practice theory for informing policy making and implementation has only recently received some attention (Shove et al., 2012). Also the application of practice approaches to tourism contexts, particularly in developing countries, is very recent. The analysis of nature-based tourist experiences (Rantala, 2010; Rantala et al., 2011) and the exploration of sustainable modes of tourist transport (Verbeek et al., 2011) are two examples, but both in European contexts (for an exception see Lamers and Pashkevich, 2015). In the next section we will elaborate the conceptual framework used in this chapter, followed by the methodological approach. The empirical part of this chapter focuses on the CTPs developed and implemented by the African Wildlife Foundation across the African continent, with a specific focus on two cases of CTPs in Kenya, the Koija Starbeds lodge and the Santuary at Ol Lentille (see also Van der Duim et al., 2015; Lamers et al., 2014). Having introduced the conceptual framework and the empirical cases, we combine both in order to discuss the four contributions outlined above. We close the chapter by drawing some main conclusions.
