Abstract
In southern Africa, there are now 10,000 to 14,000 private ranchers that promote wildlife enterprises alone or in some in combination with domestic livestock. An important conservation success, this new bio-experience economy also creates social well-being through economic growth and job creation. It is an economic sector that needs to be taken seriously, not least because it pioneers policies that inform the valorization and sustainable management of ecosystem services. The article describes the historical emergence of a sustainable use approach to wildlife conservation since the Arusha Conference in 1963. It suggests that indigenous multi-species systems may have ecological advantages over modern livestock production systems, but these are difficult to quantify in complex dryland ecosystems and are trumped by economics and political processes. However, wildlife provides the foundation for a bio-experience economy that has a decided comparative economic advantage over agro-extractive commodity production (like beef) in drylands. We describe how new policy approaches, especially the valorization of wildlife and the devolution of proprietorship to landholders and communities, have allowed wildlife's economic advantages to be reflected in land use decisions through both ‘game ranching’ and ‘community-based natural resource management’. Institutional changes have modified the economics of wildlife in drylands, promoting both conservation and development by allocating environmental raw materials to higher-order goods and services. A further goal of the paper is to describe practical economic methods for assessing and explaining the wildlife sector to policy makers in terms of its profitability, both to individual landholders and to society through jobs and economic growth. The paper covers a 50-year period between the PhD studies of the four authors and takes a trans disciplinary approach which values the knowledge of practitioners as much as the academic literature.
Highlights
This provides a review of the economic evolution of the private wildlife sector in southern Africa since the 1960s
We evaluate the economics of wildlife using the private sector experience for methodological reasons, this economy is smaller than the wildlife economy based on Africa's protected areas, less scalable to Africa's extensive drylands than community-based wildlife management, and under political scrutiny because of its racial history
Stronger property rights and a gradual shift from administrative to free-market competitive pricing mean that pricing is less distorted and economic evaluation is more reliable on private land
Summary
This provides a review of the economic evolution of the private wildlife sector in southern Africa since the 1960s. If we change the ways that we govern them and if we can place landholders and rural communities at the junction of benefit and management, wild resources can pay for themselves and simultaneously address rural poverty and environmental injustice At the time these ideas were introduced, they were radical, encompassing three major conceptual strands (Hulme and Murphree 2001): that the state should devolve proprietorship, including the responsibility for and benefits from managing wild resources, to the landholders and the communities that live with them; that natural resources should be exploited sustainably and as profitably as possible to achieve both conservation and development goals; and that the neo-liberal concepts of markets, property, and exchange should play a greater role in shaping incentives for conservation and allocating resources to their highest valued uses. The opening comments of the conference proceedings emphasize: Only by the planned utilization of wildlife as a renewable natural resources, either for protein or as a recreational attraction, can its conservation and development be
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