Karol Boudreaux on Wildlife, Property, and Poverty in Africa 09/22/2008

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.

“what he did was set up a community game guard system which paid local Namibians to identify poachers and bring them to justice in the court system”

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.

“the South African controlled Namibian government had given white farmers legal rights to manage wildlife starting in the late 1960s”

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.

“by 1996 the government passed an amendment to a previous piece of legislation that actually gave local people in Namibia the right to create something called a conservation Conservancy if they met four criteria”

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.

“the Ministry of Environment and tourism still sets the quotas for hunting particular kinds of animals so some animals the government will only let the Conservancy issue permits to hunt so for example in the case of leopards”

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.

“because communities are created on government titled land conservancies do not have the right to exclude they may not keep people out”

Allowing controlled, quota-limited hunting paradoxically supports wildlife preservation: because the community owns the resource, it has an incentive to limit harvest to a sustainable level rather than over-hunt, just as a timber owner harvests a sustainable yield rather than clear-cutting.

“now there's an incentive to reduce the amount of hunting to a level that would sustain the population or ideally let it grow which again seems paradoxical but certainly as possible”

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.

“wildlife has typically been seen as not a not a not a communal resource but rather as an open access resource so a resource that's in legal terms rest nullius no one oh it's a thing that nobody owns so very much like the whales because nobody owns it nobody has the incentives to conserve it”

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.

“we get a pretty thick bundle of rights when we have freehold property including the right the important rights to exclude people to use resources to benefit from the use of those resources but also to sell and bequeath property which is typically not one of the sticks in the bundle that people hold when they have communal property”

There is a paradox that the more humans there are, the more chickens there are, because property rights allow people to own, raise, profit from, and sell chickens, whereas whales cannot be easily owned or fenced, so they are subject to overhunting and extinction risk.

“man is the only animal then when you get more of him you can get more of something that he hunts whereas with chicken Hawks the more chicken Hawks you have you the fewer chickens but with man the more people there are the more chickens”

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.

“it gave them the incentives to be stewards of that property because it's a valuable asset make sure that the population didn't shrink”

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.

“the people in the ministry in Namibia in 1990 thought well so we give the we give control this to the local people it's not worth anything anyway”

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.

“the very success of their conservation program puts a very central piece of the environmentalist message for the last ten years the need to have constricted restricted trade in endangered species it puts that kind of in the crosshairs”

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.

“you're going to give us a particular percentage of your bed night levies and that'll be our main source of income and by the way at the end of a twenty or thirty year period this Lodge will be ours we will own it not you”

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.

“people who are not PhD political scientists but who have managed over the past 12 years to create 50 of these conservancies it's really an amazing phenomenon”

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.

“those benefits which started at a level you know really started at zero before the conservancies existed then went up to six hundred thousand a million dollars in the late in 1997 are up this year to almost 40 million Namibian dollars”

Wildlife populations across Namibia have recovered dramatically since the reforms: elephant numbers have more than doubled since the early 1980s, and zebras, giraffes, ostriches, antelopes, and predators including endangered desert lions and leopards have all increased.

“elephants elephant numbers have doubled since since the early 1980s there are more than doubling in terms of different kinds of antelopes zebras are up giraffe numbers ostrich numbers pretty much any number that you look at is up in namibia including predators”

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.

“some of the poachers were local government officials”

Yellowstone was historically managed badly by the federal government, which eliminated wolves because they were scary, producing an overabundance of elk that overgrazed grass and caused erosion; reintroducing wolves later improved the ecosystem.

“the way they ruined it was they made sure there weren't any wolves because wolves were a little bit scary and one of the advantages of getting rid of wolves is that you get a lot of elk and elk or numerous ez2c... but unfortunately elk just eat the heck out of grass and create erosion”

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.

“there is virtually no poaching on Conservancy land in Namibia but there is poaching on non Conservancy lands still today”

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.

“in Zimbabwe the locus of control was at a district council level not at a village level not at a local community level and that District Council had a political element to it whereas in Namibia the organization that controls the wildlife is a non-political local governance structure”

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.

“the lesson of Namibia is that local people can do a fine job if given the right incentives if given the correct legal framework they can do a tremendous job at protecting their resources”

Requiring lodges to train local people produces spillover human-capital benefits: workers acquire skills and later leave to start local businesses (bakeries, tire shops, internet cafes), developing entrepreneurial capacity that did not exist before the lodges arrived.

“they'll develop some human capital by working in the tourist lodges and then take that human capital that augmented capital go out into the local communities and open bakeries open tire shops”

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.

“more and more women are taking control of these management committees because women are seen as being more careful with financial resources than men are”

People near subsistence become tolerant of the profit motive in conservation when large money flows in, because tangible benefits like surviving childhood, improved schools, and community ambulances outweigh ideological objections to profit.

“if you're near subsistence and you see an enormous amount of money coming into your community you get pretty tolerant of it because your kids live beyond the age of three”

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.

“this annual general meeting process and having to explain to local people how are we using the benefits and having local people have to vote on the future course of action is creating a kind of it's almost like a toque villian experiment”