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The periphery of the world economy is integrated into global production networks (GPNs) by 'gateways'. These are intermediary places from where transnational corporations organise their business activities in close cooperation with corporate service providers. Gateways may also serve as logistics nodes as well as sites of industrial processing and knowledge generation. While some claim that gateways are engines of growth, others argue that they prosper at the expense of peripheral places. The article applies these thoughts to Mauritius, oil and gas GPNs, and the gateway's impact upon sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis indicates that Mauritius holds a certain potential for logistics and corporate control. The island serves as a hub of service provision already today. Only its status as a tax haven has a negative effect on resource peripheries. Against the backdrop of these findings, the authors discuss whether gateways should be seen as drivers or obstacles of peripheral development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to wildlife conservation, Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) programmes aim to foster regional development. To achieve this, communal areas couple to tourism Global Production Networks (GPN). In this paper, we conceptualise Namibian communal Conservancies as Social-Ecological Systems (SES) and combine the SES and GPN approaches to benefit from the SESF's explanatory power for ecological and social relationships at a local level as well as from the GPN grasp of global linkages. We analyse the impact of trophy hunting on three communal conservancies in Namibia: King Nehale, Nyae Nyae, and Ehi-Rovipuka. Although wildlife numbers in these conservancies have increased, positive economic impacts are often insufficient, unevenly distributed across regions, and parts of the population are excluded. At the same time, findings indicate that in some areas, where revenues are larger and population is smaller, benefits from hunting can be significant and can contribute to SES sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]