the role of tourism in natural resource management in the okavango ...

Findings indicate that tourism has stimulated the development of a variety of allied
infrastructure and facilities, such as hotels, lodges and camps, airports and airstrips,
within and around the Delta. Through its backward linkages, wholesale and retail
businesses have also been established, particularly in Maun, to offer various goods
to the tourist industry. Tarred roads and other communication facilities in and to
Ngamiland District have also been developed, making the Delta more accessible to
more people than ever before. The populations of the larger towns in the Delta
region have more than doubled over the past three decades with urban drift
becoming an unstoppable flood. As tourism brings about increasing infrastructure
and economic development and modernisation, it is becoming more and more
difficult for local inhabitants to maintain independent, traditional subsistence
livelihoods based on natural resource utilisation, without integration into the formal
monetary-based economic institutions. This process of integration is leading to
drastic, often negative socio-economic changes as increasing numbers of rural,
communal agricultural people are forced to participate in modern, capitalist social­
structures, while the negative environmental impacts of this tourism-based
development and increase in numbers of people in the Delta, on such a fragile
wetland, are becoming more and more visible.
The next chapter focuses on the utilisation and management of natural resources in
the Okavango Delta, with particular reference to tourism's impact upon such
resources, and provides an overview of the Community Based Natural Resource
Management (CBNRM) programme.
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