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Dr Moren Tibabo Stone has been awarded a research grant to participate in the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Programme from January to October 2022. The Fulbright Visiting Scholar Programme is a flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the US government.

It is designed to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States of America and the people of other countries.” Fulbright Research Grants are awarded to researchers and scholars of foreign nationals to conduct research in the United States of America for six to nine months at US universities or other appropriate institutions. The selection to participate in this programme is open to the public and very competitive. It is done on the basis of quality and feasibility of the candidate’s proposal as described in the Statement of Grant Purpose as well as academic or professional record.

It also takes into account personal qualifications, a productive scholarly record, and whose projects relate directly to their on-going teaching and/or research responsibilities. Another factor is the extent to which the candidate and the project will help to advance the Fulbright aim of promoting mutual understanding among nations through engagement in the host community, among other activities. During his stay in the USA, Dr Stone will be bi-hosted by the Department of Environmental Sciences and the Centre for African Studies under the auspices of the University of Florida. The University of Florida’s Centre for African Studies supports a large and comprehensive multi and interdisciplinary programme in African Studies.

The Centre is one of the only 10 currently funded US Department of Education “National Resource Centres for Africa,” and one of the major African Studies programmes in the US. While in the USA, Dr Stone will be able to make at least three formal presentations of his research, and will be invited to participate fully in an extensive programme of talks, seminars and conferences. Dr Stone’s main research in the USA will focus on the relationship between protected areas, community livelihoods and tourism relationships. His research is triggered by the consequential outcomes of encounters engulffing the conservation and development nexus, challenging science to find interventions to natural resources conservation and to improve community livelihoods through the adoption of tourism as a livelihood option.

Revealing the ambiguities in environmental discourses and the realities of what is actually happening on the ground is subject to how the conservation and development movement is perceived from different standpoints made available by different research frameworks. Thoughtfulness to the various interests of stakeholders is indispensable in meeting the difficult challenges facing protected areas, community livelihoods and tourism efforts in Botswana and elsewhere. Therefore, in view of the challenges of community-based tourism (CBT), it is contentious whether the development of CBT is positive for participant communities or whether it could negatively and irreversibly transform them.

From this standpoint, it is important to understand why there is such variance in terms of community participation and benefit from tourism between the global south and global north. Tackling such knowledge gaps necessitates more empirical-contextual inquiries and longitudinal case studies, rather than relying on theoretical-normative debates.

Therefore, Dr Stone’s research is geared towards comparing experiences of the global South with those of the global North to benchmark, with the aim to assist the global South to discern processes and possibly planning which the global North engages in to effectively participate in tourism that benefits communities. The Yellowstone National Park and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) in the USA and the Chobe National Park and Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana will provide the cases to test Dr Stone research.