Governance characteristics and feelings of safety are associated with attitudinal success in community‐based natural resource management & conservation organizations in northern Kenya

Abstract

For Community‐based Conservation (CBC) projects to be effective in the long‐term, they need to receive the support of the communities involved. Assessing whether CBC governance systems are working effectively is challenging, and it is important to evaluate both the characteristics of these governance systems, and the perceptions of community members. It is also important to understand how factors other than the governance features of individual CBC organizations may affect feelings of satisfaction. Using existing data collected by a local NGO in northern Kenya from 2014 to 2017, we investigated whether characteristics indicative of good governance have increased over time in 28 community‐owned natural resource management & conservation organizations (“conservancies”). We also assessed whether the presence of good governance characteristics, and other factors (whether community members feel safe, conservancy population size, and age of conservancy) predict the degree to which community members reported feeling satisfied with their conservancy. We adapted an existing monitoring dataset that captured governance, management, and administration practices. We created a modified index that focussed on concepts that have been identified in wider literature as being important aspects of the governance of socio‐ecological systems. Our analyses produced the following main findings: Characteristics of good governance significantly increased in conservancies over the study period. Self‐reported satisfaction with a conservancy was most strongly predicted by self‐reported feelings of safety and our measure of good governance. Livestock raiding and land/boundary conflicts appears to be the security issues most closely associated with community members reporting that they feel unsafe. Our adapted measure of governance and analyses provide a more robust assessment of the idea that governance characteristics of conservancies improved in meaningful ways during the study period. However, these analyses also point to the ways in which the monitoring of governance of CBC projects could be improved by incorporating or strengthening assessments of concepts that are known to be of importance in governing the use of natural resources. Our analyses of community members' satisfaction with their conservancies point to the need for CBC projects to consider interactions with other groups in the wider landscape, and to engage with issues of governance at different levels of organization. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.