Leveraging local livelihood strategies for conservation and development in West Africa
Over the past 30 years, the promotion of alternative occupations has been central to livelihood-centered conservation projects (LCP). However, continued pressure on protected areas and high poverty levels in surrounding communities suggest that other LCP approaches may be needed. One historically understudied approach focuses on enhancing pre-existing livelihood strategies to achieve conservation and development goals. We assessed the efficacy of the alternative occupations and pre-existing livelihood strategies approaches to LCPs using two case studies of adjacent protected areas along the Senegal River in West Africa. One community in Senegal promotes tourism as an alternative occupation; another in Mauritania builds on the local fishing-farming mixed livelihood strategy. From 2014 to 2015 we used qualitative methods (e.g. semi-structured interviews and participant observations) to examine each LCP’s capacity to deliver positive conservation and development outcomes, focusing on perceived outcomes on local livelihoods and conservation goals. Overall, LCP which focused on the pre-existing fishing-farming livelihood strategy received more positive perceptions in terms of enhancing local livelihoods, fostering positive conservation behaviors, and improving park-community relations. We conclude that these observed outcomes stem from acknowledgment of and adherence to local needs and priorities within the context of local vulnerability and a park management approach that fostered a sense of resource ownership. In places where alternative occupations like tourism have not succeeded in delivering positive conservation and development goals, this paper presents an alternative strategy that is rooted in the social and environmental realities of local communities.

Community-based tourism around National Parks in Senegal.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, resource managers often promote community-based tourism (CBT) around national parks as a win-win strategy for local sustainable development and conserving biodiversity. In Senegal, however, the social, economic, and environmental impacts of CBT remain elusive. Important aspects of the former French colonial policies are still reflected in the ways national parks in Senegal are managed. Such policy framework is inconsistent with participatory management approaches and overall goals of tourism development. This paper examines how this inconsistency impedes the contributions of CBT to local communities, focusing on: 1) the absence of communal land tenure policies; 2) the inequitable allocation of hunting concession rights; and 3) the military culture in the administration of national parks. The paper discusses how these issues reduce the channels through which locals can benefit from tourism, the collaborative space between community members and park administrators, and ultimately, precludes the sustainability of CBT projects in Senegal.

Tourism, social representations and empowerment of rural communities at Langue de Barbarie National Park, Senegal
Evidence of tourism as a strategy to empower local communities around national parks remains elusive. Scholars argue that a prerequisite to empowering community members is to decipher their ideas, beliefs and perceptions. Social representations (SR) theory provides a framework to engage in such a task yet very few studies have taken on such analysis. The paper presents a study of the SR across 10 communities surrounding the Langue de Barbarie National Park in Senegal using survey and interview data. Specifically, we examine their representations towards tourism and the park as a basis to better inform their empowerment process. We conducted a cluster analysis, grouping community members responses into polemical, emancipated, and hegemonic representations. Most participants held polemical representations and perceived tourism and the park as a continuity of colonialism. Others with emancipated representations advocated for alternative tourism structures. The hegemonic representations on the other hand assessed tourism based on the direct impact it provides to individual members of their communities. For each cluster, we propose a form of empowerment that is better aligned with their social representations as a catalyst for their capacity to carve a meaningful space in tourism.

Women, fishermen, and community-based tourism at Djoudj Bird National Park, Senegal
While Community-based tourism (CBT) has delivered on economic opportunities in some cases, researchers have questioned the viability of its impacts, often citing inequitable distribution of benefits as a critical debilitating factor. CBT is often based on normative principles that assume all actors have equal aspirations, power, voice, and access to resources. Yet, tourism activities are embedded in the same uneven social structures that envelope and define local livelihoods. In this qualitative case study of a fishing community outside of Djoudj National Bird Park in Senegal, we analyze the way a CBT project fits within women’s and fishermen’s livelihood strategies, focusing on the social and cultural norms structuring their participation in tourism. We apply the actor-structure livelihood framework to unveil the interactions between the norms embedded in the community-level social structure (i.e. social and cultural norms) and individuals’ agency as they seek out meaningful livelihood opportunities in CBT. The results of our study show that social norms, implicit biases, and cultural identities associated with women and Black Moorish fishermen, normalize their nonparticipation in certain positions within the CBT project. Through this analysis, we highlight norms shaping other livelihood activities and how they spill into the CBT sphere. We situate our findings within the broader scholarly discussion on CBT as a tool that encourages the equitable distribution of benefits and empowerment of local communities. We also discuss livelihood perspectives, specifically actor-structure framework, as a viable approach to explore failures, challenges, and opportunities of tourism as a community development tool.

Terms of Empowerment: of Conservation or Communities?
In this era of socially-oriented biodiversity conservation and resource management, practitioners and scholars all too often invoke unclear and imprecise claims of empowerment to describe changing relations between people and resources. Empowerment is an important indicator of conservation success and social transformation. Yet, when scholars and practitioners fail to adequately conceptualize empowerment, they run the risk of undermining the importance of local involvement and capacity building to achieve biodiversity conservation. Here we explore the many ways empowerment has been conceptualized in conservation. We root our commentary in the history of the use of empowerment in conservation from these diverse perspectives. We then present examples of different meanings, measurements and outcomes ascribed to empowerment. We conclude with suggestions for harnessing empowerment for the benefit of conservationists and communities alike. Because empowerment has the potential to improve resource management outcomes and local livelihoods, we recommend building an adaptive empowerment assessment framework to assist with its deployment where it is most needed. Although empowerment goals in conservation can guide practitioners and scholars to engage with communities in transparent, meaningful and lasting ways, conservation needs a critical approach that builds from an appreciation of the nuances underlying the purpose and power of empowerment for conservation.

A holistic framework for participatory conservation approaches.
Organizations seeking better methods for conservation have attempted to use participatory processes to fulfill human and ecological/environmental goals. As a result, the academic literature is filled with examples of community-level approaches to conservation. While such case studies are highly valuable, much of this literature has placed a strong emphasis on the institutional conditions surrounding successful participatory practices. Here, we seek to complement the participatory conservation literature with the community participation literature, which has tended to follow an actor-centered (e.g., residents) approach to successful participatory practices. By merging these two literatures, our goal is to offer a holistic framework that accounts for a more comprehensive understanding of the different forms and benefits of participation. We hope this framework will serve as a tool for field practitioners to implement the most effective action plans resulting in greater future successes.

Does diversification lead to livelihood security in fishing-farming communities? Insight from the Senegal River Delta.
Livelihood diversification is often regarded as a mechanism to reduce poverty, making rural communities more resilient to resource fluctuations. However, despite engaging in diversification, many rural households continue to grapple with poverty and vulnerability. We explore the extent to which livelihood diversification reduces vulnerability of resource-dependent livelihoods and the factors shaping these outcomes. We specifically examine fishing households also engaged in farming as a supplementary income-generating activity in three communities in the Senegal River Delta. We apply a framework built on the concepts associated with livelihood security (i.e., income, asset, food, and nutritional security). We address the question of how and why engaging in farming as a livelihood diversification strategy enhances the livelihood security of some fishing households but not others. Overall, we found that commercial horticulture (irrigated) rather than rain-fed agriculture was more effective at reducing household seasonal vulnerability to food and income insecurity, in addition to improving nutritional security at the community level. Furthermore, households that collected high farm revenues were able to build their productive assets by purchasing fishing gears and livestock. Underlying factors shaping these outcomes included risk, crop diversity, household debt accrued, livestock holdings, and technical knowledge.