Conservation in Common
Managing Wildlife and Sustaining Community on the Maasai Steppe
Will be published approx. on 1. December 2025
Book
Hardback
229 pages
978-0-8203-7478-9 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
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 * author of Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies: Turkana Ecology, History and Raiding in a Disequilibrium System * 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 cautiously hopeful answer for those who think the protection of Indigenous rights and wildlife is not a zero-sum game. -- Roderick Neumann, PhD * professor, Florida International University * 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 moves an understanding of the relationship between local communities and conservation beyond polarized and often insular discourse to show how, with the right insights and approaches, the interests of agropastoralist communities in Tanzania and conservation can advance in tandem. -- Fred Nelson * CEO at Maliasili *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Georgia
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paper over boards
Illustrations
2 Maps; 2 Maps; 2 Maps; 2 Maps; 2 Maps; 2 Maps; 2 Maps; 2 Maps; 2 Maps; 2 Maps; 2 Maps
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
530 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8203-7478-9 (9780820374789)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
JUSTIN RAYCRAFT is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Lethbridge. He received his PhD from McGill University and was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Program on Science, Technology, and Society. His past honors include the Peter K. New Award First Prize by the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Salisbury Award from the Canadian Anthropology Society. He has been carrying out ethnographic research on the human dimensions of conservation in Tanzania since 2014.