ABSTRACT
Increasingly, policy makers have come to view wildlife – and the ‘African safari lodge’ industry based on it – as a resource uniquely suited to the needs of rural development. The safari lodge sector, in the form in which it has evolved in southern Africa, is often seen as an important source of employment and revenue generation for rural people who would otherwise exist on the margins of the societies in which they live (Ashley et al, 2000; Massyn and Koch, 2004, Poultney and Spenceley, 2001). However, there is also widespread concern that the pro-poor benefits of the sector are muted by factors such as remoteness, skills shortages, insecure land rights and generally weak levels of human and social capital. These elements typically combine to create situations in which the local poor provide only menial labour while external interests capture the lion's share of the benefits generated by the tourism market (Massyn, 2007). This results in a skewed distribution of returns that has led some commentators to question whether the African safari lodge sector is ‘socioeconomically sustainable’ (Mbaiwa, 2003, 2005; Perkins, 2005).
