Local communities’ valuation of environmental amenities around the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in Southern Africa

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine how communities value a variety of dryland environmental amenities provided by the Kgalagadi Transfontier Park where there is an interest in limiting their access, both in order to protect the environment and in order to make it more attractive for tourists. This is done using a choice experiment, which targeted households in the Kgalagadi area. The values placed on environmental amenities by indigenous communities are estimated using a conditional logit model, a random parameter logit model and a random parameter logit model with interactions. The results show that local communities would prefer getting increased grazing opportunities and bush food collection. This is an important policy issue in itself, and it also ties in well with on-going discussions on how to compensate (or at least attach reasonable cost estimates to) losses to local communities linked to environmental preservation policies.