ABSTRACT
This book is a sister volume to Parks in Transition: Biodiversity, Rural Development and the Bottom Line (Child, 2004). It chronicles southern Africa’s search for a new conservation paradigm that is more politically resilient and relevant to society. The book includes four sections providing case studies that reflect the temporal evolution of these new ideas. Part II describes the evolution of state protected areas using case studies from four countries. The period 1930 to 1970 was one of energetic park building, resulting in globally important parks like Kruger, Hwange, Chobe, South Luangwa, Etosha, Serengeti and Tsavo. Towards the end of this period, conservation was strengthened by recruiting professional conservation managers and researchers. These professionals realized that parks alone could not conserve the region’s spectacular wildlife and ecosystems, and off-reserve conservation had to be a part of the conservation matrix. This led to policy experimentation with conservation on privately held land, which is described in Part III. The third phase of experimentation, described in Part IV, was the transfer of the economic model for wildlife utilization developed on private (and, in some cases, state) land to the more complex socio-economic conditions of southern Africa’s communal lands. Coming full circle, many of the ideas developed to encourage communities and farmers to manage wildlife sustainably are now being applied back to the management of protected areas, and this is described in Part V, as are other, more recent, innovations in conservations.
