Community-based wildlife management (CWM) in Tanzania: Are the communitiesinterested?

The fences-and-fines approach (the American National Park model) to wildlif e protection is now perceived by many conservationists to have failed in Af rica. An alternative approach whereby rural communities are given ownership rights or custodianship and management responsibilities for the resource h as been introduced under the name Community-based Wildlife Management (CWM) (also known as Community-Based Conservation or CBC). This new approach is currently under experimentation in many parts of Africa. It is based on a n umber of assumptions, one being that the communities are interested and wil ling to conserve wildlife on their lands. Using the Selous Conservation Pro gramme (SCP) in Tanzania and seven other African cases, this paper examines the plausibility of this assumption. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All ri ghts reserved.