Settlement planning:  

Planning settlements to promote tourism development and increased investments

The College has a long history of working closely with communities to understand  how settlements are traditionally or culturally planned and how settlements may adversely impact on a community's chances of benefiting from the tourism industry.  While lessons-learned may seem obvious, they are not always adhered to by community leaders, often because of over-riding concerns for food production and income generation.  Such opposing needs usually require flexibility to compromise, plan and to invest wisely in ways that will reduced these conflicts.  Through advanced resource management courses offered by the College, such skills are becoming more widely used in Zambia's Game Management Areas.

Some of the important lessons or guiding principles that are used to help guide community planning of new settlements are as follows:

1. unspoiled landscapes supporting abundant wildlife populations will attract tourism and increase opportunities for investments, thus increasing CBNRM revenues and job opportunities.
2. settlements that are unplanned are more likely to conflict with these investments and reduce the commercial value of communal lands used by tourists.
3. commercial development of land, such as through tourism enterprises, will attract more people to an area noted for its 'wildlands' quality, but if not controlled or well-regulated may ultimately destroy the very qualities that make it a tourist attraction.
4. communal land should not be sold to commercial investors to attract their investments.  This leads to permanent loss of land to the communal land owners and will likely lead to lowered opportunities to benefit financially from the same land for the community.  Instead, communities should negotiate leases that allow investors sufficient time to invest and make a profit return with terms in the agreement that require assets to be returned to the community after the lease and to ensure a certain level of training and employment from within the community.
5. as statutory bodies recognized in the Act, CRB's (Community Resource Boards) together with their traditional rulers or Patrons, have sufficient authority to plan and enforce ways to avoid settlements or unwanted migration of new settlers that might increase conflicts with their natural resources.
6. having fewer, bigger villages as opposed to many smaller villages can improve the coordination and communication of CBNRM activities, making it easier to distribute food security inputs, monitor land use disturbances, etc.

KEY Lesson:  A successful CBNRM program will assist local leaders in finding improved ways to plan future settlements and regulate unwanted immigration into their area.  Though complex and often very difficult, administering these skills successfully will have far-reaching effects on future land uses and how households will benefit from potential investments through tourism-based enterprises.

KEY Lesson: Communal land areas are often too large for local leaders to manage settlements without  the use of maps.  Communities often lack the skills to update important spatial information on these maps that would help show where people live, work and seek resource use benefits from their land .  Such information is very useful to help identify potential conflicts with resources the community may regard as too valuable to disturb.