Boundless Southern Africa integration: the lived regional economy and what comes next

September 10, 2021

A guide working a safari circuit that crosses from Botswana into Namibia's Zambezi Region already lives the "boundless" idea SADC ministers put a name to in June: the wildlife does not stop at the border, staff rotate across camps on both sides, and the local communities supplying food, labour and craft goods to lodges do not organise their livelihoods around a national boundary line either. The Boundless Southern Africa Programme, agreed in principle this year, is an attempt to build formal regional policy around an informal regional economy that, on the ground, already exists.

For readers interested in the lived, everyday economy of the region rather than its policy architecture, the thesis is that the commercial and livelihood value of this integration effort will be judged, ultimately, at the level of individual guides, lodge staff, craft producers and small tour operators, whether formal regional coordination improves their earnings and mobility, or whether it remains a ministerial-level exercise that changes little for people already working across these borders informally.

Ministers' actual June decision, commissioning a feasibility study and roadmap, and moving to close the Regional Tourism Organisation of Southern Africa, operates several institutional layers above that lived economy, and nothing in it yet specifies how community-level tourism livelihoods factor into the programme's design.

Guides, staff and the informal cross-border workforce

Tourism staff working transfrontier conservation areas often already move between camps in neighbouring countries informally, following seasonal demand and employer relationships that predate any regional programme. Work permit and labour-mobility arrangements for that workforce vary by member-state pair and are not standardised across the conservation areas Boundless Southern Africa would cover.

A programme genuinely built around the lived regional economy would need to address that labour-mobility patchwork directly; SADC's account of the June decision does not mention workforce mobility as part of the feasibility study's scope, leaving it, for now, an open question rather than a confirmed priority.

Community-level supply chains into lodges

Lodges operating inside or adjacent to transfrontier conservation areas typically source food, craft goods, building materials and casual labour from surrounding communities, often communities that themselves straddle the same international boundary the conservation area crosses. Strengthening those local supply chains, rather than only marketing the destination internationally, is where regional integration could translate most directly into local livelihoods.

No community-supply-chain component has been confirmed as part of Boundless Southern Africa's design so far [TK], though the programme's stated aim of contributing to community livelihoods alongside conservation suggests it is a plausible, if unconfirmed, feature of the eventual roadmap. Community conservancies bordering several of the region's transfrontier conservation areas already run their own small enterprises supplying lodges directly, arrangements built without reference to any regional programme and worth documenting as a baseline against which future integration efforts can be measured.

Conservation revenue and who actually captures it

Transfrontier conservation areas generate revenue through park fees, conservancy levies and tourism concessions, revenue streams that different member states and community conservancies currently capture and allocate under different formulas. A genuinely regional programme raises the question of whether those formulas would be harmonised, and if so, whether harmonisation benefits community conservancies or shifts revenue toward central government treasuries instead.

That allocation question sits at the heart of whether "boundless" integration improves or erodes local capture of conservation tourism revenue, and it is not one the June decision, focused on institutional hosting rather than revenue-sharing mechanics, has yet addressed.

Aviation and the mobility bottleneck

Much of the region's international tourism arrives by air into a handful of regional hub airports before connecting onward, often on light-aircraft charter services, to remote conservation-area airstrips. Charter aviation capacity, airstrip maintenance and cross-border overflight permissions all shape how easily a visitor experiences a genuinely multi-country circuit, independent of any tourism-marketing brand layered on top.

A joint approach to charter aviation access and airstrip standards across the conservation areas Boundless Southern Africa covers would meaningfully ease multi-country mobility; nothing in ministers' June decision specifies aviation as within the feasibility study's remit. Industry bodies tracking the region, including the World Tourism Organization's Africa coverage, have flagged aviation connectivity as a persistent constraint on the continent's tourism recovery more broadly.

Conservation outcomes as the tourism product itself

For the lived regional economy, conservation success is not a backdrop to the tourism product; it is the product. Wildlife populations, habitat condition and anti-poaching effectiveness across the region's transfrontier conservation areas directly determine what a guide can show a visitor and, ultimately, what a lodge can charge. Community members employed as scouts, monitors or rangers already form part of this economy's backbone, often on terms set by individual conservancy agreements rather than any national or regional tourism policy.

A programme that markets shared conservation landscapes without visibly reinforcing the anti-poaching and habitat-management funding that sustains them risks selling an experience the underlying conservation economics cannot keep pace with. How Boundless Southern Africa's eventual roadmap treats conservation financing, alongside marketing, will say as much about its seriousness as any visitor number it eventually publishes.

What comes next

The lived-economy test to watch is whether the feasibility study, once published, engages at all with workforce mobility, community supply chains and conservation-revenue allocation, or whether it remains confined to institutional hosting and marketing questions, leaving the informal cross-border economy already operating in these landscapes to continue much as it has.

Lodge operators, conservancies and community trusts already working across these borders have standing, and arguably better on-the-ground evidence than any ministry, to make the case for including those lived-economy questions in the roadmap before it is finalised. Their existing arrangements, workforce rotations, local supply contracts and revenue-sharing agreements with conservancies, are the closest thing the region has to a working prototype of what Boundless Southern Africa is meant to formalise, and a feasibility study that consults them directly stands a better chance of producing a roadmap that reflects how this economy already functions on the ground.