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| Drawing on a study of community-managed forest reserves in southern Tanzania, this article discusses how
community members engage and shape inclusive protected area management practices to produce outcomes that
were not intended by external implementers. The article shows how a participatory natural resource monitoring
scheme operating in the area becomes part of the villagers’ collective and individual efforts to assert their claims
to territory and resources vis-a-vis the state, other communities, and other community members. By altering the
monitoring procedures in subtle ways, community members strengthen the monitoring practices to their advantage,
and to some extent move them beyond the reach of government agencies and conservation and development
practitioners. This has led to outcomes that are of greater social and strategic value to communities than the
original ‘planned’ benefi ts, although the monitoring scheme has also to some extent become dominated by local
‘conservation elites’ who negotiate the terrain between the state and other community members. Our fi ndings
suggest that we need to move beyond simplistic assumptions of community strategies and incentives in participatory
conservation and allow for more adaptive and politically explicit governance spaces in protected area management. | |
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