Integrated Conservation and Development Projects are central for future rural development in Southern Africa. However, the impact of benefit-sharing schemes, such as the CAMPFIRE programme in Zimbabwe, is limited by possible dilemmas in the actual design of the scheme or trade-offs inherent in linking development and conservation objectives. The objectives of this paper are to compare wildlife management and utilization under the CAMPFIRE communities and conservancy community, and to consider the possibility of wildlife tenure and institutional reforms that might replicate conservancies’ successful outcomes on communal areas implementing CAMPFIRE. Therefore, unlike previous studies, this paper seeks to establish the conditions under which a CAMPFIRE community can be incentivized to behave like the conservancy community, which is more successful in revenue generation and stewardship practice.
To achieve the objectives above, we used a bio-economic model. We developed and compared the problems for benefit-sharing arrangements under CAMPFIRE and the conservancy communities operating adjacent to Gonarezhou National Park. Firstly, the chapter demonstrated that the conservancy community is superior to the pure benefit-sharing scheme in terms of employment of effort and the long-run wildlife stock. Secondly, the chapter analysed wildlife management and utilization under the assumption that the
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communities in question are given a greater degree of autonomy so that they are able to invest in stronger CPR institutions.
The results show that the level of anti-poaching enforcement by the park agency could be lower than the social planner’s prescription. It might not be optimal for the park agency to provide anti-poaching enforcement inside the national game park and in communal areas. This result seems to support policy or institutional reforms that convey greater control of natural resources through devolution and decentralization of NRM functions, and decision- making to the community’s grass roots level, since the community incurs lower cost of monitoring and enforcement.
The social planner recommends higher levels of wildlife stock in the conservancy and on communal land, i.e., shared stock. If the conservancy community values wildlife to the same degree as does the social planner, then their level of anti-poaching enforcement achieves social optimality. This could drive the wildlife stock in the conservancy toward the social planner’s solution, starting from a lower stock level. CAMPFIRE communities exert more poaching effort than what the social planner would recommend. As a result, the size of the shared stock might diverge over time from the social planner’s prescription, starting from a lower level.
Because both the CAMPFIRE and conservancy communities are carrying out similar activities, they should potentially be able to achieve similar results. The differences in observed outcomes between them could be a result of the differences in community institutions. The results confirm that an improvement in community institutions might have significant impact on growth of the wildlife stock through its role of constraining behaviour. Resolving the problem faced by CAMPFIRE communities will necessarily not require market based instrument alone, but also institutional reforms. This study calls for three main strategies to allow campfire communities to move from a seemingly inferior outcome to one that is optimal.
Firstly, this result calls for policy instruments that will facilitate the development of sound CPR institutions that are tailored to suit local conditions and endogenous to the community. Specifically, to strengthen the incentives in CAMPFIRE communities, we propose that the
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RDC should transfer wildlife management functions and benefits to sub-district producer communities. This also implies that government policy should aim at building local level institutions that will, in turn, set the tone for community agenda on new social norms which are pro-conservation. This could be achieved through capacity building, investment in institutional building blocks such as governance structures at the local level, democracy, monitoring and enforcement, and community level trust, and funding to equip CAMPFIRE communities with much-needed resources.
Since wildlife is a fugitive resource, there is also need for CAMPFIRE communities to coordinate their effort and resources in order to supply the required habitat and effort to fight illegal harvesting of wildlife resource on a broader scale. This calls for CAMPFIRE communities to invest in collective action beyond the borders of each project or community in the form of multi-layered enterprises or organizations that are endogenous to the programme. The government should therefore allow CAMPFIRE projects to be innovative so that they can learn from each other, through their past experiences and mistakes, and to develop and experiment with different models of conservation.
Secondly, CAMPFIRE communities suffer double taxation from the premium charged by the safari operators and a significant proportion of wildlife income that remains in the hands of the Rural District Council. From a policy standpoint, CAMPFIRE communities would benefit immensely if they could learn from the model of the conservancy community and operate with the same autonomy and self-sufficiency as the conservancy because both taxes could be avoided. This could be achieved by hiring a manager or building internal capacity to match that in the conservancy community. This implies a different model or an improvement of the current benefit-sharing scheme so that CAMPFIRE communities can mimic the business model or behaviour of the conservancy community and in the process receive full benefits from conservation and pay taxes to the state and levies to the Rural District Council, instead of receiving cash transfers. Innovative policy instruments are required to assist CAMPFIRE communities in various activities of wildlife conservation so that they can integrate into the main stream economy and fully commercialize their operations.
Thirdly, designing policy instruments that increases the risk premium could decrease the effective price of the illegal off-take. Reducing the effective price of the illegal off-take
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discourages the community from poaching by eroding the incentives. It is possible to integrate the risk premium into local institutions by carefully designing policy instruments that are adapted to local conditions. We recommend that these three strategies should be deployed simultaneously for an effective and fast solution to the challenges faced by CAMPFIRE projects. This implies that policy makers should use a combination of both market-based instruments and institutional reforms since they seem to complement each other.
Result show that the employment of anti-poaching enforcement by the park agency is suboptimal. As a matter of policy, it is optimal for the park agency to withdraw anti-poaching effort from the local community and offer regulatory services. Withdrawing effort from the community will allow the park managers to use the limited resources effectively and efficiently on a relatively smaller area. The finding support policies that favour increased devolution or decentralisation of natural resource management functions, decision making and authority to the community’s grassroots level. We recommend that the park agency should leave the society to its own device so that it can develop its own solutions to the environmental problems faced.
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