'CAMPFIRE is not for Ndebele Migrants': The Impact of Excluding Outsiders from CAMPFIRE in the Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe

Abstract

In wildlife management in developing countries, it is widely accepted that limiting the benefits of wildlife to 'producer communities' - those communities who share territory with wildlife - ensures conservation at the local level. In southern Africa, governments have taken on board this principle, and have organised their wildlife management programmes around it. This is the case with Zimbabwe's Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources or CAMPFIRE. Using a case study of CAMPFIRE, this article examines both the effects of concentrating benefits in producer communities, and of excluding outsiders from community-based natural resource management programmes. It argues that the monopoly on benefits held by the producer community serves to antagonise non-members and, in some cases, spurs them on to seek the destruction of what they may come to regard as a costly wildlife management programme.