Local Sustainable Development and Conservation?

Business community partnerships are vested in private sector development and are the study topic of this research. This study will elaborate on the role of local partnerships to understand to what extent they contribute to a sustainable environment for local socio-economic and private sector development. In addition, it will assess the critical success factors of business community partnerships.

The study analyses nine tourism conservation partnerships in one country, Tanzania. Certainly, there is a risk of generalizing from a few case studies in one particular sector. Tanzania, however, is a good place to embark on an investigation on tourism conservation partnerships. Conservation aspects and commercial efforts in the area of tourism are of importance and do relate to each other. Without the conservation of wildlife and the existing ecosystem, there will be less nature based tourism.
However, population pressure in these areas, environmental challenges as well as the willingness to become more commercially oriented causes frictions and requires for partnerships. These challenges include loss of natural wildlife levels, loss of biological diversity, and pollution of off-farm ecosystem in terms of the overgrazing of cattle in possible and existing ecosystems. On the development of the commercial side also many challenges arise as the private sector environment is in many places still very poorly developed.