Indigenous Communities and Wildlife Tourism: Issues of Sustainability in Botswana’s Tourism Industry

As in many countries in southern Africa, wildlife tourism in Botswana is one of the fastest growing sectors of the tourism industry with significant impacts on the national economy and livelihoods of indigenous communities living adjacent wildlife habitats in remote rural areas of northern Botswana. Tourism in Botswana is dominantly wildlife based, thriving on the viewing of varieties of wildlife species and unique forest and riparian vegetation providing the much tourist-sought after scenic beauty. Tourist activities in wildlife tourism include photographic and safari hunting. Central to the success of wildlife tourism is ensuring sustainable development. However, sustainability is a concept that has become decidedly trendy and highly contested in scholarly spaces and wildlife management practitioners. From the classical neo-liberal point of view, sustainability refers more to exclusive conservation of the natural resources such as wildlife, its habitat, and ecosystems. For this school of thought, paramountcy is thus placed on the protection of the natural environment and its beauty for future generations, and for the attraction of tourists. On the other hand, other development practitioners argue that the exclusive protection of wildlife assets at the exclusion of development needs of indigenous communities around protected areas (PAs), households that are largely destitute, cannot achieve the threshold of sustainable development in wildlife tourism. This chapter examines the complex nature of tourism in Botswana, the role of indigenous communities in the wildlife tourism development trajectory and explores the conservation-local communities development nexus in wildlife tourism development. It argues that the exclusion of local communities, with their indigenous knowledge systems, has the undesired effect of alienating the communities that have historically been key players in the conservation of wildlife, and that the threshold of sustainable wildlife tourism can only be achieved if there is a synergistic match between wildlife conservation and economic development of indigenous communities.