Southern African conservation projects and their impacts on local people’s drought adaptation strategies A Meta-synthesis By D. Németh Date of submitting: October, 17, 2020 Word count: 21087 Master ‘s Thesis Sustainable Development International Development Track Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development Utrecht University Submitted by Dániel Németh Student number: 6501532
[email protected] Supervisor: Dr. Kei Otsuki Assistant Professor Department of Human Geography and Planning Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University
[email protected] Second reader: Dr. Murtah Shannon Lecturer Department of Human Geography and Planning Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University
[email protected] Cover photo from pxhere.com 2 Summary This research explores the relationship between two increasingly central concepts of sustainability: drought adaptation strategies and conservation projects. Despite their importance, till time no attempt has been made of bridging them. Current research does so by asking how can conservation projects address local drought adaptation strategies in southern Africa. This question is answered through multiple stages. First, an extensive literature review was conducted in order to find out what drought adaptation strategies do local communities employ. Then, a meta-synthesis, containing more than 500 academic papers was employed in order to discover the different impacts conservation projects have on the local livelihood. These multi-dimensional impacts were spatially visualized with data-analysis and GIS mapping. Both the drought adaptation strategies and the conservation projects’ impacts were categorized into the seven community capitals: natural, human, social, financial, built, cultural, and political capitals. The categorization illustrated that drought adaptation strategies are primarily based on the social and political capitals, while conservation projects can enhance financial and human capital the most and primarily depreciate the social and political ones.