In East Africa, community-based conservation models (CBCMs) have been established to support the conservation of wildlife in fragmented landscapes like the Tarangire Ecosystem, Tanzania. To assess how different management approaches maintained large herbivore populations, we conducted line distance surveys and estimated seasonal densities of elephant, giraffe, zebra, and wildebeest in six management units, including three CBCMs, two national parks (positive controls), and one area with little conservation interventions (negative control). Using a Monte-Carlo approach to propagate uncertainties from the density estimates and trend analysis, we analyzed the resulting time series (2011-2019). Densities of the target species were consistently low in the site with little conservation interventions. In contrast, densities of zebra and wildebeest in CBCMs were similar to national parks, providing evidence that CBCMs contributed to the stabilization of these migratory populations in the central part of the ecosystem. CBCMs also supported giraffe and elephant densities similar to those found in national parks. In contrast, the functional connectivity of Lake Manyara National Park has not been augmented by CBCMs. Our analysis suggests that CBCMs can effectively conserve large herbivores, and that maintaining connectivity through CBCMs should be prioritized.

Community-based conservation can support livelihoods and biodiversity, while reinforcing local and Indigenous values, cultures, and institutions. Its delivery can help address cross-cutting global challenges, such as climate change, conservation, poverty, and food security. Therefore, understanding trends in community-based conservation is pertinent to setting and implementing global goals. We undertook a horizon scan to prioritize 15 emerging threats and opportunities expected to impact the future effectiveness of community-based conservation. Topics relate to global biodiversity policy; human rights; shifting human geography; inclusion, diversity, equity, and access; conservation finance and income; and economic reforms. Our findings offer guidance on strengthening community-based conservation to achieve global environmental and development goals.

Abstract Eastern and southern Africa has been a key laboratory for community‐based approaches to conservation for over three decades. During the 1990s, field‐level initiatives and national policy reforms across the region put it at the forefront of global experiments with community‐based conservation. Community‐based conservation, in theory and practice, is closely tied to institutional reforms that devolve rights over wildlife and natural resources to local communities. As such, these efforts have frequently encountered political‐economic and institutional barriers that limited their impact. This contributed to a rising sense of rollback and recentralization of community conservation approaches during the 2000s. Since then, community‐based conservation has expanded its scope considerably in some countries, notably Kenya and Namibia, primarily as a result of relatively supportive legal and policy provisions coupled with sustained government, civil society, and private sector support. At a wider scale, sufficient devolution of rights over wildlife and natural resources has been a chronic constraint, but community‐based initiatives have still managed to persist, adapt, and deliver some evidence of positive ecological and social impacts in Zambia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Three key overarching trends across the region are (a) the significant growth and expansion of community‐based conservation where key institutional enabling conditions exist; (b) pervasive institutional limitations on community rights over wildlife and other valuable natural resources, which continue to constrain and undermine community‐based approaches; and (c) local entrepreneurship and resilience that continues to create new opportunities for community‐based approaches, even under adverse conditions.

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Continued biodiversity loss has prompted calls for half of the planet to be set aside for nature – including E. O Wilson's “Half-Earth” approach and the Wild Foundation's “Nature Needs Half” initiative. These efforts have provided a necessary wake-up call and drawn welcome global attention for the urgent need for increased action on conserving biodiversity and nature in general. Yet they have also sparked debate within the conservation community, particularly due to the huge practical and political obstacles to establishing or expanding protected areas on this scale. The new designation of “other effective area-based conservation measures” (OECMs) provides the opportunity for formal recognition of and support for areas delivering conservation outcomes outside the protected area estate. We argue that OECMs are essential to the achievement of big and bold conservation targets such as Half-Earth. But integration of OECMs into the conservation estate requires fundamental changes in protected area planning and how the conservation community deals with human rights and social safeguards issues; it therefore challenges our understanding of what constitutes “conservation”. It will only succeed if the key drivers of biodiversity and ecosystem service loss are addressed in the whole planet. A broad, multifaceted and innovative approach, coupled with ambitious targets, provides our best hope yet of addressing complex conservation challenges.

This paper reflects on IUCN's ongoing progress to develop technical guidance on 'other effective area-based conservation measures' (OECMs) and begins to explore under what conditions OECMs -as a new form of recognition -might make a positive contribution to territories and areas conserved by Indigenous peoples and local communities (abbreviated to 'ICCAs').It argues that while the protected areas framework is a potentially useful means by which to recognise the biodiversity contributions of some ICCAs, it is not universally appropriate.In this context, and subject to important caveats, OECM-related frameworks offer an important opportunity to increase recognition and support for ICCAs.The paper concludes with two practical recommendations: first for the development of supplementary guidance on OECMs and ICCAs; and second, for further discussion by a wide range of interested parties on whether 'OECMs' should be referred to as 'conserved areas'.

In 2010, the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity adopted the Aichi Biodiversity Targets as part of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020.Target 11 calls for 'at least 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland water areas and 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas' to be conserved by way of 'well-connected systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures'.Yet four years after their adoption, parties to the CBD and other rights-and stakeholders have not received guidance about either what kinds of arrangements do and do not constitute 'other effective area-based conservation measures', or how best to appropriately recognise and support them.The paper argues that without clear guidance on the issue, conservation law and policy will continue to inappropriately and/or inadequately recognise the great diversity of forms of conservation and sustainable use of ecosystems and their constituent elements across landscapes and seascapes, including by Indigenous peoples and local communities.In this context, and in line with calls from the Convention on Biological Diversity and the IUCN, it proposes the establishment of an IUCN Task Force to further explore the issues with a view to developing clear guidance on 'other effective area-based conservation measures' as a means to effectively and equitably achieve Aichi Biodiversity Target 11.

Abstract Lion Panthera leo populations and distributions in Africa have contracted considerably in the past 30 years. Recent policy debates focus on restricting trophy hunting as a measure to address concerns about excessive offtakes of lions. We review the impact of trophy hunting in relation to lion conservation goals, using comparative case studies from Southern and East Africa, which together contain most of Africa's remaining lion populations. The comparison demonstrates that the impact of trophy hunting on lion populations is variable and shaped by the way trophy hunting is managed and wildlife is governed in different range states. In Tanzania, the most important lion range state, hunting produces significant revenues but weaknesses in how hunting is managed and revenues are distributed undermine the potential of hunting and encourage overharvesting. In Southern Africa linkages are stronger between revenue generated by trophy hunting and lion conservation outcomes on private and communal lands. Trophy hunting is most beneficial to lion conservation where revenues and user rights over wildlife are devolved, ensuring benefits from lion hunting compensate for their costs to local people, and where hunting is managed through long-term and competitively allocated concession systems. Policy interventions should focus on supporting trophy hunting as a conservation tool where it is effective and well-managed, and work to promote reform of hunting and wildlife governance elsewhere.

The land management practices of pastoralist Maasai communities have a major bearing on landscapes and wildlife habitats in northern Tanzania and play a key role in maintaining habitat for one of the world's most spectacular assemblages of terrestrial large mammals. Pastoralists manage lands according to locally devised rules designed to manage and conserve key resources such as pastures and water sources. Dry season grazing reserves are an important part of traditional land management systems in many pastoralist communities, providing a ‘grass bank’ for livestock to consume during the long dry season when forage invariably becomes scarce and domestic animals are stressed for water and nutrients. Because of the scale and importance of northern Tanzania's wildlife-based tourism industry, and its indirect dependence on communal lands under the authority of pastoralists, these land use practices have an important economic dimension. By conserving large proportions of northern Tanzania's wildlife ecosystems, local pastoralist communities collectively make an important contribution to the national and regional economy. Using data regarding the degree to which wildlife depends on pastoralist lands in different ecosystems, and the relative importance of different areas in terms of generating revenue for the northern safari circuit, the annual value of pastoralist land uses to the wildlife-based tourism industry in northern Tanzania is estimated at approximately US $83.5 million. The economic value of pastoralists' contribution to wildlife conservation highlights the importance of Tanzanian policies in land, livestock, tourism, and wildlife sectors prioritizing measures that promote communal rangeland management and support traditional land use practices.

We provide a synthesis of recent scholarship on social safeguards and co-benefits in REDD+ with a focus on debates on: first, tenure security, and second, effective participation of local communities. Scholars have explored both proximate and long-term co-benefits of REDD+ interventions, with an emerging trend that links safeguards to improved social co-benefits. Proximate co-benefits include improved rural livelihoods and lower costs of implementation. Long-term co-benefits include greater adaptive capacity of local communities and increasing transparency and accountability in forest governance. Our review suggests that greater tenure security and effective participation of local communities in management will not only prevent adverse social outcomes, but will also enable better forest outcomes and improved capacity for forest governance.

This paper examines the Community Based Natural Resource Management Programme in Namibia. It finds that the policy of transferring property rights to natural resources from the state to local communities has brought significant economic and environmental benefits. Though the system has been quite successful, there are lingering weaknesses. These include an incomplete devolution of management and use rights, problems related to human–wildlife conflict and continuing concerns with land tenure insecurity.

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Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are an increasingly promoted approach to conservation. These approaches seek to develop financial mechanisms that create economic incentives for the maintenance of ecosystems and associated biodiversity by rewarding those who are responsible for provision of ecological services. There are, however, few cases in which such schemes have been used as a strategy for conserving wildlife in developing countries and very few operational examples of such schemes of any sort in sub-Saharan Africa. In savannah ecosystems, large mammal populations generally depend on seasonal use of extensive areas and are widely declining as a result of habitat loss, overexploitation, and policies that limit local benefits from wildlife. Community-based conservation strategies seek to create local incentives for conserving wildlife, but often have limited impact as a result of persistent institutional barriers that limit local rights and economic benefits. In northern Tanzania, a consortium of tourism operators is attempting to address these challenges through an agreement with a village that possesses part of a key wildlife dispersal area outside Tarangire National Park. The operators pay the community to enforce voluntary restrictions on agricultural cultivation and permanent settlement in a defined area of land. The initiative represents a potentially cost-effective framework for community-based conservation in an ecologically important area and is helping to reconcile historically conflicting local and national interests relative to land tenure, pastoralist livelihoods, and conservation. Wider adaptation of payments for ecosystem services approaches to settings where sustaining wildlife populations depends on local stewardship may help address current challenges facing conservation outside state-protected areas in savannah ecosystems in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world.

AbstractThe institutional arrangements governing forests will be a critical factor in reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) as part of the global effort to mitigate climate change. A growing body of empirical research demonstrates how local forest governance can be as, if not more, effective than centralized state-based regimes. Local forest governance can secure improvements in multiple forest outcomes such as biomass and carbon storage and livelihoods contributions for the poor, and it can do so at lower cost than is possible through centralized governance. Many national governments have implicitly recognized these findings in their pursuit of decentralized forest governance and in strengthening local rights and capacities to use and manage forests. However, such reforms are often politically resisted, particularly where the value of forest resources is high and central government bodies are able to capture the majority of benefits. Ongoing negotiations related to the design and delivery of REDD policy and practice must take into account both the importance of local forest governance arrangements and the political–economic barriers to devolving secure rights over forests to local communities. These political dimensions of forest tenure and policy create a paradox for REDD: increasing the value of forest resources through global carbon markets without attending to local governance and rights will create political incentives towards centralized governance, which could lead to greater forest loss and lower forest-related benefits for the poor.

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Abstract Two issues of central importance to conservation are developing an improved understanding of the relative roles of state protected areas and local institutions and developing effective strategies for creating community-based incentives for conservation. We provide a case study of northern Tanzania’s Maasai Steppe to explore these issues in the context of a savannah ecosystem where wildlife is mobile and depends extensively on community lands for seasonal habitats. We compare the impacts and outcomes of four approaches to developing local incentives for wildlife conservation on community lands: protected area benefit-sharing, trophy hunting donations, village–private tourism concession contracts, and a direct payment scheme for habitat conservation. Tourism and direct payment concession areas have resulted in large areas of community land being protected for wildlife by villages as a result of the conditional and contractual nature of these ventures. By contrast, other approaches that provide economic benefits to communities but are not conditional on defined conservation actions at the local level demonstrate little impact on wildlife conservation on community lands. In spatially extensive ecosystems where protected areas cover limited areas and wildlife relies heavily on community and private lands, strategies based on maximizing the direct income of communities from wildlife are fundamental to the sustainability of such systems.