Conservation in Common: Managing Wildlife and Sustaining Community on the Maasai Steppe

Wildlife conservation in Tanzania is fraught with conflicts between the state, international organizations, private investors, and local communities over the rights to rangeland resources and the benefit streams associated with safari tourism. This book takes up the question of how a Wildlife Management Area (WMA) in Tanzania’s Tarangire ecosystem is viewed from the bottom up, by the people who are directly affected by its implementation. Based on historically grounded ethnographic research, Justin Raycraft documents a shift in local attitudes toward Randilen WMA--from fear and protest to widespread support. He analyzes this process of transformation in the context of empathetic management practices that have fostered feelings of trust and uncovered common ground between conservation stakeholders. Raycraft shows that although WMAs are not fully devolved to the local level, pastoral communities can use them to defend the things they value most: their land and livelihoods. Conservation in Common makes a much-needed intervention in critical political ecology literature by providing the first account of a conservation area in Tanzania that serves the interests of its local community, thereby making the case that protecting wildlife habitat and safeguarding human well-being are not mutually exclusive activities.

JUSTIN RAYCRAFT is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Lethbridge. He received his PhD from McGill University and was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Program on Science, Technology, and Society. His past honors include the Peter K. New Award First Prize by the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Salisbury Award from the Canadian Anthropology Society. He has been carrying out ethnographic research on the human dimensions of conservation in Tanzania since 2014.