Informations et ressources scientifiques
sur le développement des zones arides et semi-arides

Titre : The Effects of Governance Type and Scale on Community Conservation in Southern Africa

Auteur : Shimansky, Tierney Lee

Université de soutenance : University of Florida

Grade : Master of Science (MS) 2021

Résumé
Community based natural resource management (CBNRM) concerns the governance, management and use of natural resources and wildlife in communities where livelihoods depend on the natural environment. Despite the agreement on the importance of CBNRM, performance is often disappointing, frequently because of weaknesses in governance, low participation and lack of equitable benefit sharing. This study assesses the importance of Ostrom and Murphree’s call for inclusive decision making of all people impacted by the decisions through face-to-face participatory governance structures in small communities. We examine the extent to which indicators of governance (e.g., trust of leaders with money, general opinion about governance, use of money for community benefits versus other uses) vary, and how this variability is affected by the enabling environment (i.e., country), community size (scale), and type of governance (i.e., participatory versus representational). We used logistic regression models to analyze data from governance dashboard surveys from seventeen CBNRM communities in Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe that include both individual village and multi-village communities. The findings of this study support the hypothesis that variability in member satisfaction is affected by factors such as country and the enabling environment, community size, type of governance and overall satisfaction with the community-based organization, and that single villages outperformed multi-villages regarding overall satisfaction with the conservancy. The results from this study imply that the design of CBNRM organizations and processes needs to be more cognizant of Ostrom’s and Murphree’s principles, suggesting that participatory practices that are possible in small communities provide significant advantages in terms of financial transparency, social capital formation (trust), participation, and member satisfaction

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