Improved livelihoods and governance of natural resources ... - WWF

projects. In the case of village payouts, the villages collectively decide how to spend that money and have constructed maize storage facilities, school buildings, ceremonial buildings, and boreholes, which benefit the whole village and which would not have been possible without that money l . It is rare that CBNRM becomes the sole or even primary source of income for rural people living on communal land, but rather the CBNRM income or benefits are supplementary to people’s existing livelihoods (e.g. farming) and are valuable as an additional livelihood diversification strategy li . The community in a registered conservancy retains all the revenue generated from the conservancy, for example from hunting and tourism concessions and/or community campsites. Since inception of the programme in the mid-­‐1990s, the attitudes of many local communal area residents have changed from resentment of the state managed wildlife system where the state received all benefits, whilst the community bore the brunt of wildlife in their area, to seeing wildlife as a community asset. Prior to the formation of communal conservancies, wildlife was largely regarded as competition to livestock grazing and/or despised as a threat to personal assets (i.e., crops, livestock, and infrastructure) or even the lives of one’s family. Poaching is no longer socially acceptable and the presence of wildlife is being promoted through participatory community land-­‐use zoning processes which create core wildlife (wildlife only) and multiple-­‐use (wildlife mixed with livestock and people) areas in which wildlife numbers are increasing and flourishing lii . The change in attitudes is attributable to the increased income and other benefits local communities receive from wildlife enterprises and management liii . While economic benefits, such as income or employment, are easier to quantify, other important benefits for communities are less quantifiable socio-­‐cultural benefits such as participation in decision-­‐making and authority to make decisions regarding the resource (i.e. empowerment) and receipt of meat from hunted wildlife to supplement diets. The change in attitude has resulted in improved governance over the wildlife and a significant recovery of wildlife populations, with population trends of all species (with the exception of lion and hyena in some conservancies in the north east of Namibia) either stable or increasing. The increasing wildlife populations have resulted in increased tangible benefits for the communities – including cash pay-­‐outs, job creation, tourism enterprise development, meat (from trophy hunting) livlv . Increasing wildlife numbers include lions which, in the Kunene have increased from approximately 30 to an estimated 125 by 2008 lvi and expanded their range by several thousand square kilometres. Such a recovery was only possible because it was accompanied by a massive recovery of the prey base and increased tolerance by resident communities. Namibia is the only country in the world where populations of black rhino outside protected areas are rising (Weaver, Petersen, Diggle and Matongo, 2010). The free-­‐roaming black rhino population has more than doubled from 1990 to 2008 in the north-­western communal and state lands, and elephant numbers have increased from approximately 7,000 in 1995 to more than 16,000 by 2008. 12