Politics where the wild things are: Nature tourism, property rights, and traditional leadership, and the State in rural Botswana and South Africa.

摘要

This study analyzes the relationship between nature tourism and local politics in contemporary rural southern Africa, addressing three interrelated questions: how does the growth of nature tourism affect political dynamics in nearby localities; how are nature tourism's costs and benefits distributed within and across localities; and what explains variation in political dynamics and distributional outcomes across localities? To answer these questions, I conducted a comparative study of ten rural localities clustered around four nature tourism destinations in Botswana and South Africa. Finding that these localities evinced a greater range of outcomes than influential theories would predict, I contend that particular political dynamics and differential allocation for tourism costs and benefits arise from the interaction between three factors over time: the structure of formal authority, property rights and regimes, and economic sector characteristics.;The argument in brief is as follows. The historical processes of conquest, colonization, and dispossession laid the groundwork for contemporary politics by creating two quite different types of rural localities, communal localities and freehold farming areas, in which property and authority were structured quite differently. Subsequent decisions by national policymakers at Botswana's independence and South Africa's democratization reformed this configuration, producing cross-national variation in communal localities but not eradicating the profound differences between communal and farming localities. These differing configurations of property and authority shaped the development of nature tourism in rural southern Africa, as did the structure of the transnational nature tourism industry, strongly influencing rural people's ability to garner economic benefit from nature tourism resource and affecting the channels through which tourism resource flows entered localities. Concurrently, the differing sectoral characteristics of photographic nature tourism and safari hunting presented rural people with different incentives and opportunities. It is the varied configurations of property rights, formal authority, and economic sectors, and rural people's choices within these constraints, which account for the varied contemporary politics evident in these localities.;This study addresses micro-scale development questions that are crucial to the everyday lives of rural people, and contributes to our understanding of the relationship between states, societies, and economic sectors, between conservation and development.