Summary
This chapter is about establishing mechanisms that price wildlife, how these mechanisms work and how they can be valuable for promoting economic development and conservation simultaneously. It uses several examples, mainly from Zimbabwe, to describe how wildlife was converted from a public good with little or even a negative value to landholders, into a private good which landholders or communities have a positive incentive to produce. It explains why wildlife has a comparative economic advantage and is often a better use of agriculturally marginal savannahs than more conventional livestock monocultures, and provides data from the private ranching sector in Zimbabwe to support this argument. The central assertion in the chapter is that both wildlife conservation and economic development are best served in much of savanna Africa by converting wildlife into a commercial asset. This is achieved by modifying macro-economic institutions and legislation so that mechanisms develop to ensure prices more closely reflect scarcity or value, and resources are allocated more efficiently. This would ensure that where wildlife has a comparative advantage, it would be reflected in incentive structures and landholders would produce wildlife rather than livestock which owes much of its past prominence to fiscal and environmental subsidisation.
This chapter describes a set of such changes that have converted wildlife’s inherent advantage into a real financial advantage on private land in Zimbabwe and how these mechanisms were extended to communal land (through the CAMPFIRE programme) where institutional complexities and poverty were significant hurdles. The final section uses a simple model to describe how each step in the evolution of wildlife pricing, changed its value relative to other land uses and therefore, the probability of wildlife remaining on land outside parks. It also identifies some of the distortions and subsidies that remain a serious threat to wildlife conservation and economic efficiency in non-agricultural areas.
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Child, B. (2000). Making Wildlife Pay: Converting Wildlife’s Comparative Advantage Into Real Incentives for Having Wildlife in African Savannas, Case Studies from Zimbabwe and Zambia. In: Prins, H.H.T., Grootenhuis, J.G., Dolan, T.T. (eds) Wildlife Conservation by Sustainable Use. Conservation Biology Series, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4012-6_17
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