Wildlife Conservation Through Tourism Microentrepreneurship Among Namibian Communities

Abstract

Wildlife conservation has often focused on protecting charismatic wildlife from native communities and allowing multinational companies to profit from showing those resources to foreign tourists. This has contributed to local poverty and fueled poaching and concomitant policing of resources by governments, foreign conservationists, and private industry. An alternative receiving increasing scholarly attention consists on enabling eco-dependent tourism microentrepreneurship as a way to foster local conservation behaviors. In the case of wildlife tourism in Namibia, this might entail the provision of wildlife tours and camping services by indigenous communities. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which wildlife tourism microentrepreneurship leads to intrinsically motivated wildlife conservation. A controlled comparison case study design was used to test this research question. The findings reveal that males in conservancy communities have internalized proconservation behaviors and both males and females in those communities report richer and more complex wildlife value orientations.