Trade-Offs of Conservation Fencing in Western Serengeti: Enhancing Agricultural Security While Navigating Unintended...

Protected areas (PA) in African savannas support biodiversity and ecosystem services, but are increasingly surrounded by hard land-use transitions as surrounding human populations grow. Fencing PAs is a potential, yet contested, response to mitigate growing human-wildlife conflicts at their edges. We test the consequences of such conservation fencing for communities neighboring PAs in the Serengeti ecosystem, Tanzania, in a multi-year before-and-after study of an adjacent fenced (Ikorongo Game Reserve) and unfenced (Serengeti National Park) area, using remote sensing, ground transects, and community interviews. We found that conservation fencing contributed to changes in cropland or livestock grazing coverage. In addition, conservation fencing did not have a clear impact on the spatial zonation of specific crop types. Positive perceptions expressed by community members towards the conservation fence were: (i) more success with crop farming due to less time needed for guarding crops against nocturnal elephant damage, (ii) youth shifting their focus from (risky) poaching to crop farming and small business. Negative perceptions included: (i) more land use conflict because grazing lands close to the fence became cropland, where few livestock keeping households with large herds moved to the unfenced site, (ii) restricted access to resources (livestock grazing, thatch grass, water) within the reserve, despite the illegality of their use. We conclude that conservation fencing can strongly benefit farmers near PAs while protecting wildlife, particularly along hard boundaries, but also risks leakage effects (unwanted spillover into nearby areas). Implementing conservation fencing, therefore, requires careful consideration of the larger socio-ecological landscape, for instance, by accounting for current land uses and changes in the spatial availability of resources resulting from fencing.