the role of tourism in natural resource management in the okavango ...

are directly dependent upon the earth's resources of land, water, fauna and flora for
their livelihoods. Such resources must be considered as potentially renewable,
capable of sustaining individuals and of being sustained indefinitely. However, the
realisation of this potential is dependent upon numerous factors, including the
institutional arrangements that people choose to adopt regarding natural resource
utilisation (Gibbs and Bromley, 1989).
Natural resources are assets for the generation of human contentment or utility,
including income. However, this misleadingly narrow resource concept ignores the
interdependency of the various components of ecosystems and underestimates the
ecological importance of natural resources. According to this perspective, natural
resources are merely factors of production, they are not desirable in themselves, but
rather a means to an end in that they are valuable only to the extent that they can be
used to create goods and services - water for hydro-electric power, for example, or
fishery resources for food and recreational opportunities. This ambiguous view of
natural resources is found in most textbook and dictionary definitions. The Concise
Oxford Dictionary, for example, defines natural resources as "means of supplying a
want or stock that can be drawn upon"; and this concept may be conveniently
summarised by Zimmerman's (1951) dictum: "resources are not, they become".
Resources are culturally defined; to the North American Indians of 1800, oil and gas
were not regarded as resources; whereas they are for the contemporary North
American society. Such definitions embody the concepts of 'usefulness', now or
later, and the 'resource supply' available to be used by humans (Grima and Berkes,
1989).
Traditionally, economists have highlighted three broad categories of factors of
production: natural resources, human resources and capital. Natural resources were
regarded as 'free gifts of nature'. In reality, however, they are almost never
altogether free, and this is true for both renewable and non-renewable resources. In
the case of the former, they are free only if they can be replenished entirely without
cost. If the amount taken exceeds the natural capacity of the resource to renew
itself, then the resource will eventually disappear unless it is restored at some cost.
The over-fishing of a lake or the over-harvesting of a forest are prime examples in
this regard. Even where the level of exploitation of the resource is less than the self­
renewal capacity, one group of users may be restricting another use of the resource
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