Wildlife conservation in Tanzania is fraught with conflicts between the state, international organizations, private investors, and local communities over the rights to rangeland resources and the benefit streams associated with safari tourism. This book takes up the question of how a Wildlife Management Area (WMA) in Tanzania's Tarangire ecosystem is viewed from the bottom up, by the people who are directly affected by its implementation. Based on historically grounded ethnographic research, Justin Raycraft documents a shift in local attitudes toward Randilen WMA-from fear and protest to widespread support. He analyzes this process of transformation in the context of empathetic management practices that have fostered feelings of trust and uncovered common ground between conservation stakeholders. Raycraft shows that although WMAs are not fully devolved to the local level, pastoral communities can use them to defend the things they value most: their land and livelihoods. Conservation in Common makes a much-needed intervention in critical political ecology literature by providing the first account of a conservation area in Tanzania that serves the interests of its local community, thereby making the case that protecting wildlife habitat and safeguarding human well-being are not mutually exclusive activities.
"Justin Raycraft has produced a detailed and nuanced account of the complexities involved in the establishment and current conditions in the Randilen Wildlife Management Area in Northern Tanzania. Conservation in Common is extremely well written and avoids unnecessary jargon, appealing to experts and non-experts alike."
J. Terrence McCabe
"In lucid prose, Justin Raycraft offers a fresh contribution to over fifty years of scholarship on East Africa's Maasai pastoralists' fraught encounters with modern wildlife conservation. He tackles the essential question underlying the history and future of this conflict: Do the goals of wildlife conservation necessitate the displacement of Maasai from their homelands? Raycraft's study provides a
Roderick Neumann, PhD
"At a time when the world increasingly recognizes the centrality of community-led action in addressing the biodiversity and climate crises, Conservation in Common provides a fascinating portrait of what community conservation is all about-from the political struggles over land use and wildlife revenues, to the local NGOs and community leaders that can make co-existence a reality. Raycraft's study
