Researching during a period of transition for Tanzania's state wildlife conservation policies, Goldman analyzes the government's new laws and projects that profess a shift from protectionist conservation to Community-based Conservation (CBC). She examines the new government policy document, planning papers, and subsequent policy, legal and academic debates about CBC design in Tanzania to find the country's strategies contradictory to the basic tenets of CBC. Goldman acknowledges the core problem of identifying and designating proper community structures for participation in CBC, but emphasizes another fundamental challenge to such projects. While CBC promotes the incorporation of indigenous or local knowledge claims, the mismatched interface of this type of knowledge with project demands for Western scientific data and concise managerial boundaries incapacitates stated intentions to utilize local knowledge for improving official conservation practices. The incompatibility of government conservation mechanisms with dynamic local knowledge and land use practices undermines the very culture and institution of conservation in such settings. The author draws on the case of Maasai pastoralists in the Tarangire-Manyara ecosystem in Northern Tanzania to exemplify the incongruity of what the new policy rhetoric espouses and the steps designed to achieve it.

Goldman notes that despite the new policy granting locals “full mandate of managing and benefiting from their conservation efforts, through community-based conservation programmes,” conservation in Tanzania continues to rely on government authorities for its design. Though conservationists regard Maasai land management practices as compatible with wildlife and therefore target Maasai communities for incorporation into Tanzania's new Wildlife Management Areas (WMA), the state's strategy is ill-conceived. The physical boundaries and restrictions imposed by WMAs partition landscapes whose integrity dictates the viability of traditional Maasai pastoralism. Maasai livestock, as well as migratory wildlife, depend on fluid and seasonal access to distant grazing lands, necessitating management arrangements that are conducive to this reality. That governmental planning, zoning, and partitioning of land indicates disregard for the needs of pastoralists and contradicts the recognized utility of traditional wildlife management practices. This results in the “creation of politically and ecologically fragmented landscapes” (848). Whereas these projects ostensibly aim to integrate traditional inhabitants into a participatory process of land management, what is achieved is the alienation of local actors from official modes of nature conservation.

Furthermore, the process that communities must engage in, in order to establish community rights to new WMAs, is dismissive of customary land tenure arrangements and is described by the author as prohibitively bureaucratic and reliant upon Western scientific data. Only if locals follow policy guidelines can they acquire user rights to the area's wildlife, while the state retains all ownership. Goldman sees locals being regarded as a tool for the state's conservation agenda and “rather than embracing active participation, WMAs present new ways in which communities can be acted upon” (p.838).

The author suggests that the Maasai possess an under-recognized potential to make important contributions to conservation planning. Anecdotal evidence demonstrates the effectiveness of Maasai wildlife stewardship, but their specialized knowledge has not been analyzed in a way that would allow for its practical contribution to wildlife management planning. Instead of looking for ways to learn from the Maasai, conservationists in Tanzania continue to teach them official wildlife policies and contradict the CBC theory that they purport to embrace. Goldman recommends that policy and program designers take the opposite approach and rework state agendas and institutions to conform to local understandings of landscapes and resource management.

Prepared by Megan Glore