Abstract/Summary

This thesis is about wildlife conservation and people's livelihoods in Tanzania. Through an ethnographic study of a protected area known as Ugalla Game Reserve, it looks at the manner in which different groups of people view and use the locality to make a living. By focusing on two activities established in the reserve, beekeeping and fishing, it seeks to identif,' how the existence and management of a protected area may - or may not - contribute to people's lives and well-being. Emphasis is placed in the study on the need to understand how local resource use and practices of resource allocation engage with wildlife management as carried out by representatives of the state and of international conservation bodies. In short, how externally generated conservation planning meets with internal responses, and the nature of local social processes and idioms of understanding that give rise to these responses. The research takes as its starting point the so-called 'people-oriented' approaches to wildlife conservation. Such initiatives have been seen as a means of going beyond the 'conventional' forms of wildlife management that grew up in southern Africa during the colonial era, and which were perpetuated by independent African governments. These conventional approaches have been widely criticised for their failure to achieve the objective of conserving wildlife, while their preservationist orientation has been held to be inherently inequitable, ignoring the lives and livelihoods of rural African people.