Staying Maasai? : Livelihoods, Conservation and Development in East African Rangelands

The area of eastern Africa, which includes Tanzania and Kenya, is known for its savannas, wildlife and tribal peoples. Alongside these iconic images lie concerns about environmental degradation, declining wildlife populations, and about worsening poverty of pastoral peoples. East Africa presents in microcosm the paradox so widely seen across sub Saharan Africa, where the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations live alongside some of the world’s most outstanding biodiversity resources.

Over the last decade or so, community conservation has emerged as a way out of poverty and environmental problems for these rural populations, focusing on the sustainable use of wildlife to generate income that could underpin equally sustainable development. Given the enduring interest in East African wildlife, and the very large tourist income it generates, these communities and ecosystems seem a natural case for green development based on community conservation.

This volume is focused on the livelihoods of the Maasai in two different countries - Kenya and Tanzania. This cross-border comparative analysis looks at what people do, why they choose to do it, with what success and with what implications for wildlife. The comparative approach makes it possible to unpack the interaction of conservation and development, to identify the main drivers of livelihoods change and the main outcomes of wildlife conservation or other land use policies, while controlling for confounding factors in these semi-arid and perennially variable systems. This synthesis draws out lessons about the successes and failures of community conservation-based approach to development in Maasailand under different national political and economic contexts and different local social and historical particularities.

People, livestock and wildlife have lived together on the savannas of East Africa for millennia. Their coexistence has declined as conservation policies increasingly exclude people and livestock from national wildlife parks, and fast-growing human populations and development push wildlife and pastoralists onto ever more marginal lands. The result has been less wildlife, and more pastoral people struggling to diversify their livelihoods as access to pasture and water becomes harder to find.

This book examines those livelihood and land use strategies in detail. In an integrated research effort that involved researchers, local communities and policy analysts, surveys were carried out across a wide range of Maasai communities providing contrasting land tenure and national policies and varying degrees of intensification of agriculture, tourism and other activities. The aim was to create a better understanding of current livelihood patterns and the decisions facing Maasai at the start of the 21^st Century in the context of ongoing environmental, political, and societal change. With a research design that linked quantitative and qualitative methods and research teams across multiple pastoral sites for the first time, a comparison of livelihood strategies and returns to livestock, crops, wildlife tourism, and other activities across Kenyan and Tanzanian Maasailand was possible.

While livestock remains the critical anchor for most Maasai households, many are obtaining income from a variety of alternative sources. Unfortunately, income from wildlife/tourism, an option seen as most desirable by many because of its potential to provide economically and environmentally win-win situations, still benefits relatively few Maasai. Similarly, although governments favor agricultural intensification, significant crop income or enhanced food security from subsistence cropping elude most.

This book provides a rich source of new data from across Maasailand and its unparallelled multi-site comparative analyses give valuable lessons of broader applicability. It is a valuable resource for anyone, researchers, development workers and policy makers, who is concerned with improving environmental as well as economic security on the wildlife-rich Maasai pastoral lands in Kenya and Tanzania.