As wildlife resources and revenues grew dramatically by the late 1990s and 2000s, there is now risk of increased government involvement seeking the larger rents available on communal properties.

Local elite capture is restrained by the annual general meeting accountability process: leaders must report on benefit use and members vote on future actions, functioning like a Tocquevillian local-governance experiment that holds people accountable and votes underperformers out.

Joint-venture lodge contracts (pioneered by the Torra Conservancy) require outside safari companies to hire and train local people, pay a percentage of bed-night levies to the conservancy, and transfer ownership of the lodge to the community after a 20-30 year period.

White farmers in Namibia were granted legal rights to manage wildlife from the late 1960s, and demonstrated that shifting from cattle ranching to wildlife/game reserves and selling trophy hunting and photo safaris was highly profitable, which created the political demand at independence for extending the same rights to poor black rural citizens.

Garth Owen Smith initiated change in the early 1980s through suasion and a community game guard system that paid local Namibians to identify poachers, producing an informal shift in social norms toward conservation years before any formal legal rights or financial benefits existed.

Namibia's 1996 legislation let local people create a conservancy if they met four criteria: identify a defined membership, define a boundary, write a constitution including provisions for managing wildlife and distributing benefits, and create a representative management committee.

The conservancy reform survived politically partly because at independence (1990) there was little wildlife left and thus little of value to protect, so ministry officials adopted a wait-and-see stance rather than fight a politically risky battle to retain control over a worthless resource.

Namibia's conservation success threatens the mainstream environmentalist message of restricted trade in endangered species, because thriving elephant populations lead Namibians to ask why they cannot cull animals and sell ivory; traditional command-and-control elitist conservationists resist local control partly because rising populations undermine agreements like CITES.

Before the reforms, wildlife in Namibia was legally treated as res nullius (open-access), meaning no one owned it, so no one had an incentive to conserve it and people had incentives to poach for meat, a problem compounded by animals roaming over large territories that cannot be fenced.

The Zimbabwe campfire program and the Namibian conservancy program differ critically because in Zimbabwe the locus of control was at a politicized district council level, whereas in Namibia control rests at a non-political local community governance structure.

Freehold property confers a thick bundle of rights (exclude, use, benefit, sell, bequeath), whereas communal property is still private but typically has fewer 'sticks' in the bundle, and CBNRM provides an intermediate, somewhat lesser form of secured rights.

Poaching persisted because legislation protecting wildlife was not effectively enforced: some poachers were local government officials, monitoring was costly, and the affected areas were remote thousands of kilometers from the controlling authority in Pretoria.

Despite low formal education, rural Namibians created 50 conservancies over roughly 12 years, with NGOs (IRDNC, Namibian Nature Foundation) and USAID-funded WWF providing institutional capacity-building support at fairly low cost.

Conservancy revenue rose from under $100,000 USD (about 600,000-1 million Namibian dollars) in 1997 to almost 40 million Namibian dollars in 2007, and in the northwest corner of the country per capita income rose more than 30 percent (inflation-corrected) as a result of conservancy activities.

Granting freehold-style rights (including exclusion and the right to benefit) gives property holders the incentive to be stewards of wildlife as a valuable asset, ensuring populations stay healthy and thrive rather than being depleted.

Hunting quotas are split between government and community: the Ministry sets quotas for high-value/endangered species like leopards (e.g., zero or one per year), while communities themselves determine 'own use' harvest levels of antelope species like kudu and oryx for food and tourism viewing.

Because conservancies sit on government-titled communal land, they lack the right to exclude outsiders, which is a troubling missing stick in the bundle: they can pursue local poachers through social networks but cannot keep out tourists or disruptive groups from elsewhere.

There is virtually no poaching on conservancy land in Namibia while poaching persists on non-conservancy land, achieved through low-tech monitoring (jeep patrols) plus strong community social norms against poaching by fellow members.

Control of conservancy management committees is increasingly shifting from younger, better-educated men toward older married women, who are seen as more careful and stable stewards of both wildlife and the financial benefits; women now hold around 37 percent of committee positions.

U.S. wildlife management could borrow from Namibia by involving local communities near wild areas (e.g., the Great Plains or communities around Yellowstone) in managing wildlife so they bear costs and reap benefits, though much iconic American wildlife lives in national parks where people don't live.