Thanks for your comment! My firm had a reading group last summer which included an email interchange with Gigu Varghese. As a team, we dug into some of his concerns about oligarchical private businesses controlling much of the commerce. I see that diversity of competition has often been the root of the problem in concessioning. Getting compliance on social and environmental performance is key and more competition to win the right to manage tourism in PAs could help. I wrote a detailed paper since on Best Practice for Concessions in Latin America which will be published soon. The biggest issue in both case studies was the lack of diversity of ownership of the concessionaires. (These are policy reviews, not performance reviews to your point)

Here was one question formulated by our EWI team in follow up to the chapter and Varghese’s reply.

Our team:
What is being done about the lack of diversity in ownerships of the concessionaries? Has SanParks been able to address this and increase diversity of ownership?

Varghese answered:

Transformation, as the name implies is a process. After the initial contracts were awarded, the landscape of the ownership into the tourism sector in the country has changed. Large companies like Southern Sun, Tourvest, and the Don Group etc are having a majority black shareholding. This diversity of ethnicity in shareholding addresses Oligopolies to a small extent with some industry-thinking opening up. Tourism as a sector is also growing, and this implies that there is more competition – so slowly Oligopolies could reduce. Nature based African tourism is obviously limited to Africa and with the sizable part of that relatively small industry (in global terms) based in S Africa; it is difficult to address the oligopoly issues. India seems to be starting to develop good models one could learn from.

If you read his (diplomatically-written) chapter in Anna Spenceley’s book more carefully, you’ll see that the private concessions in Kruger NP actually haven’t worked nearly as well as was hoped.

One can learn the same in blunter language from the local tour operators. That model is not being duplicated elsewhere, which tells us a lot.

Meanwhile there is a much larger-scale experiment under way in the USA, where the Delaware North property corporation now operates visitors services at Yosemite National Park.

There are good reasons why parks management agencies hold tourism developers at arms length. If they don’t, history indicates that conservation comes off second best.

There are indeed private tourism corporations around the world which have contributed successfully to conservation and community development. But not many of them.

The bottom line for parks agencies is pretty much the same as for any long-term relationship: pick your private sector partners with extreme care.

Regards to all

Ralf Buckley