Land Tenure, Livelihoods, and Conservation: Perspectives on Priorities in Tanzania’s Tarangire Ecosystem

Research on conservation efforts demonstrates that local community support is critical to achieving conservation goals. In this chapter, we highlight innovative approaches which are currently being taken in the Tarangire Ecosystem to combine access to secure land tenure rights with landscape scale access to functional heterogeneity, governed through both formal and informal institutions. Informed by the concepts of social-ecological systems and just conservation, this chapter begins by considering the recent history of natural resource governance institutions in the Tarangire Ecosystem, where traditional systems were matched to the social-ecological context of that time. We go on to discuss how modernisation has resulted in significant changes to these systems over time, with a focus on the ways in which changes in land tenure have resulted in a loss of flexibility and shifts in local livelihoods. We highlight how, in this context, land tenure rights can play a critical role in community-based conservation efforts in the Tarangire Ecosystem to benefit both people and wild animals. We follow this with a description of the ongoing process in the Tarangire Ecosystem to secure rights to land and resources through spatial planning at a local scale, and how this can be expanded to the landscape scale. Finally, we reflect on some of the challenges with such an approach, particularly given the significant social-ecological variability and uncertainty that lies ahead.