Shall We Gather 'Round the Campfire'?: Zimbabwe's Approach to Conserving Indigenous Wildlife

This 4-page article summarises a more technical research paper that examines a nationwide programme in Zimbabwe called CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources). CAMPFIRE was designed to give greater ownership, control, and benefits of wildlife to the local community. As detailed here, under CAMPFIRE's programme, local communities are authorised to negotiate with tourism operators for a reasonable share of income.

The article is premised on the observation that recent conservation efforts have focused not only on enforcement of trade restrictions, such as bans on ivory, but also on supporting initiatives to promote and share the economic benefits of wildlife conservation with local communities.

The CAMPFIRE programme in Zimbabwe, which was launched in 1989, directs shares of the profits from hunting and benign tourism toward the local community, in part to offer direct compensation for the nuisance suffered from wildlife and in part to induce anti-poaching effort. CAMPFIRE gives communities co-ownership of natural resources, which generate income through trophy hunting concessions, natural resources harvesting, tourism, live animal sales, and raising animals for meat.

To understand both the successes and the shortcomings of the programme, researchers from Resources for the Future (RFF) analysed how community income and conservation incentives respond to resource profit sharing in a typical rural area in Zimbabwe where wildlife is abundant. They employed a bioeconomic model to study poaching by outsiders, anti-poaching efforts of local communities, and interactions between park managers, the communities, and the poachers.

Selected findings from this research highlight the relevance of community perceptions, the structure of the benefits being shared, and the park agency's response to changes in revenues and in community actions. In short, these findings "reveal the importance of the park agency's management strategy and its interaction with the community. If less poaching merely translates into more licenses - and the community knows this - the incentives to resist poaching then derive primarily from the hunting revenues. If, on the other hand, additional licenses do not completely crowd out reductions in poaching, the community will expend more effort against poaching (or at least collaborate less) to the extent that it receives more revenues from tourism."

In concluding, researchers learned that "[t]he details of program design are important: one of CAMPFIRE's major benefits may be that it showed how a resource management program involved local people not only in benefit sharing but also in decisionmaking. If allowed to evolve, these kinds of institutions could open up avenues for correcting problems in the design of wildlife conservation programs and ensuring that the application of benefit sharing lives up to its laudable intentions."

Notes:

• Citation:

Fischer, C., E. Muchapondwa, and T. Sterner (2005) "Shall We Gather ’round the Campfire? Zimbabwe's Approach to Conserving Indigenous Wildlife" Resources, Summer (158): 12-15.