By Richard Vigne, Executive Director of the School of Wildlife Conservation at the African Leadership University.
First published in Conservation Rising on 3 July 2026, and republished here with the author’s permission. The views expressed in this article are those of the writer.
Conservation in Africa is increasingly being judged by its ability to deliver environmental protection, economic growth and community benefit at the same time. Richard Vigne argues that achieving one at the expense of the others ultimately weakens both conservation and the economies that depend on it.
People. Planet. Profit.
The triple bottom line can sound like corporate jargon. In wildlife tourism it is not jargon. It is the whole game.
Get it right, and tourism becomes one of the most powerful engines of conservation and rural development available to Africa. Get it wrong, and tourism eats the very asset on which it depends.
Kenya should understand this better than almost anyone. We have famous wildlife landscapes, pioneering conservancies and a long record of showing that wildlife can generate jobs, foreign exchange, public revenue, local pride and global admiration.
And yet across some of our best-known conservation landscapes, we are seeing a dangerous pattern: imbalance. In some places, profit has run ahead of ecology. In others, conservation and community work have become detached from the economic engine needed to sustain them. In others, short-term financial metrics have been rewarded at the expense of wider landscape responsibility.
The lesson is simple. In wildlife conservation, no single bottom line is enough. Profit without ecological restraint destroys the product. Conservation without enterprise becomes dependent and fragile. Community benefit without a functioning wildlife economy becomes charity, not development.
The Maasai Mara remains one of the most extraordinary wildlife destinations in the world. But it is also one of Africa’s clearest examples of what happens when tourism volume outruns management discipline.
The Mara’s problem is not tourism itself. Tourism has made the Mara famous and has generated jobs, revenue and political value. The problem is that, in parts of the ecosystem, tourism has been allowed to pile on top of itself until the product deteriorates.
Too many vehicles. Too many beds. Too many operators chasing the same sightings. Too little enforcement. A lion sighting becomes a traffic jam. A cheetah hunt becomes a circus. A wilderness experience becomes a queue.
This is not merely an aesthetic problem. It is an ecological problem and a business problem. Wildlife changes behaviour. Guides are pushed to bend rules. Operators compete on access rather than quality. The visitor experience declines. The destination cheapens itself.
That is the irony of over-tourism: it often begins as a pursuit of profit, but eventually destroys profit. The Mara’s greatest asset is not the number of vehicles it can admit in a day. It is the feeling that something ancient, wild and irreplaceable still lives there. Once that feeling is gone, it cannot be rebuilt by marketing. The answer is better tourism: fewer vehicles, stronger zoning, real limits on beds, higher guiding standards, penalties that bite and pricing that rewards quality rather than volume.
Ol Pejeta presents a different lesson. It is one of Kenya’s great conservation brands and has done important work for rhinos, tourism, education and conservation enterprise. But precisely because it is important, it deserves scrutiny.
The danger at Ol Pejeta has not been a lack of business discipline. If anything, the danger has been the opposite: too narrow a definition of business success. When a conservation institution is rewarded mainly for annual profitability, it begins to see the world through the fence line of its own balance sheet. Costs outside the core property become easier to cut. Landscape obligations become negotiable. Long-term ecological functions are treated as optional extras. The institution becomes financially sharper but ecologically smaller.
This is where incentives matter. If a chief executive is rewarded primarily for profit, then profit is what the institution will pursue. The fault lies not only with management but with boards, donors and regulators who design the wrong scorecard and then act surprised when people follow it.
The wider Laikipia landscape needed Ol Pejeta to be more than a successful fenced conservancy. It needed Ol Pejeta to act as an engine of conservation across a much larger system, including connective landscapes such as Mutara and Eland Downs. Those areas mattered because connectivity is the difference between a living landscape and a collection of ecological islands.
When management presence is withdrawn from such areas, the consequences do not remain outside the fence. Wildlife movement is disrupted. Communities bear more conflict. Livestock, crops and people face greater pressure. Political tolerance for wildlife declines. Corridors narrow and a great opportunity is lost: the opportunity for a financially sophisticated conservancy to anchor conservation across the wider Laikipia ecosystem.
Profit is not the enemy. Conservation without money is sentiment. But profit must be judged against purpose. A conservancy that makes money while shrinking its ecological responsibility is moving costs onto the landscape, neighbours, communities and the future. That is not enterprise. That is under-accounting.
Lewa offers another kind of imbalance. It is rightly admired for rhino conservation, community development, education, health and security. But even successful institutions can become unbalanced. In Lewa’s case, the risk is not too much profit. The risk is too much reliance on conservation and community impact without enough attention to the wildlife economy that should sustain both.
Surely conservation and community are the point? Yes. But they cannot be the whole operating model if the money that pays for them is too heavily reliant on overseas donors. Donor funding has its place. It can be catalytic. But donor funding is scarce and stretched across a continent facing enormous conservation needs, many in places with far weaker tourism potential than Lewa.
A landscape like Lewa has a responsibility to make the wildlife economy work harder. That does not mean turning it into the Mara. It means asking whether this landscape is generating the sustainable employment, enterprise opportunity, local procurement, fiscal contribution and conservation finance that its brand, wildlife and position make possible. If the answer is no, then under-development is not restraint. It is a lost opportunity.
Behind all of this sits a less fashionable but decisive issue: governance.
Bad governance is what allows one bottom line to dominate the others. It permits over-tourism in one place, narrow profit-seeking in another and donor dependency somewhere else. It turns good intentions into institutional drift.
Boards matter. Term limits matter. Fresh scrutiny matters. Independence matters. A conservation board is not a ceremonial club. It is the guardian of purpose.
Where board members remain in place for decades, even where governing documents envisage fixed terms, institutions become vulnerable to complacency. People become too familiar with management, too invested in past decisions, too detached from present realities and too slow to ask uncomfortable questions. They stop behaving like stewards and start behaving like owners of the furniture.
This is not a small administrative issue. It goes to the heart of conservation performance. A lazy board will tolerate lazy metrics. A detached board will accept polished reports while the landscape outside deteriorates. A captured board will reward financial success even when ecological responsibility is being narrowed.
If conservation institutions manage public goods, they must meet public standards of governance. Rotation, transparency, conflict-of-interest rules, independent ecological audits and balanced executive incentives are not optional. They are the machinery of trust.
This is not just a Kenyan tourism issue. Look at the water companies in Britain. For years, privatised utilities operated in a weak regulatory environment that failed to align profit with environmental and social responsibility. Companies could reward shareholders, pay executives and underinvest in infrastructure while rivers and seas carried the cost. When regulation allows private companies to profit while degrading a public resource, the failure is systemic.
The same applies to wildlife tourism. Conservancies, reserves and national parks may have different ownership structures, but they all depend on public goods: wildlife populations, landscapes, water, community tolerance, national reputation and ecological processes that extend far beyond title deeds. No operator, lodge, conservancy or county government should be allowed to make money while degrading the asset base on which everyone else depends.
The triple bottom line will remain empty language unless it is built into regulation, licensing, concessions, board incentives and executive pay.
Governments should not simply ask: how much revenue did this area generate? They should also ask: how many sustainable jobs were created? What happened to habitat quality? Were corridors maintained? Did human-wildlife conflict rise or fall? Were visitor numbers within carrying capacity? Was the tourism product enhanced or degraded?
A CEO bonus in a conservation institution should never be based on profit alone. It should be linked to a balanced scorecard: ecological integrity, financial resilience, community benefit, staff development, visitor quality, landscape connectivity and contribution to the wider conservation estate.
Tourism licences should not be renewed automatically because fees were paid. They should depend on performance. A lodge or operator that damages habitat, overloads a fragile area, ignores guiding standards or contributes little to local economies should lose privileges. A conservancy that sits on major economic potential while relying indefinitely on donors should be challenged to explain why.
Africa does not have the luxury of treating conservation as either a museum or a charity project. Our protected and conserved areas must protect biodiversity, yes. But they must also help build economies. They must create jobs that last, generate tax revenues, support local businesses, justify land use and reduce poverty around their boundaries.
But equally, they must never destroy the ecological foundation that makes all of this possible.
That is the discipline of the triple bottom line. Not people one year, planet the next and profit when the accounts look weak. All three, all the time.
The stewards of Africa’s conservation landscapes – boards, CEOs, governments, donors, lodge owners and community leaders – need to be held to that standard. They are not simply managing land. They are managing the basis of a future economy.
People. Planet. Profit.
Not as a slogan.
As a duty.
Read the original article at Conservation Rising.