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INTRODUCTION

Africa's wildlife fascinates citizens of industrialized countries. They watch scores of television documentaries about the continent's animals. They spend large sums of money to go on safaris in Africa. They remove ivory and spotted furs from their wardrobes to help conserve African wildlife. They include Africa's fauna in curricula to teach their children the value of protecting these species. And they contribute millions of dollars to international conservation organizations who claim that - but for lack of funding - Africa's magnificent animals could be saved from destruction.

Given this intense interest in Africa's wildlife, it is surprising that we know so little about its importance to the individuals and governments of Africa itself. Although hundreds of studies have addressed the biological and ecological aspects of African fauna, relatively little research has examined the many and important roles wildlife plays in the political economy of African countries. We know little about the relationship between Africans and wildlife, about how different people and groups in Africa possess varying ideas about what constitutes good wildlife policy, about how African governments construct or change their wildlife policies, or about how political and economic institutions can shape these policies over time.

The previous chapter demonstrated that political institutions provided incentives for politicians and civil servants in ‘Zambia to maintain a wildlife policy that advanced individuals’ political and economic goals, but failed to conserve animals. The political logic of an economically crippled one-party state thwarted those individuals and groups who wanted to augment wildlife policy in Zambia - President Kenneth Kaunda, the Zambian National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), international donors, and local conservationists.

These actors employed new strategies after 1982 to circumvent the impediments presented by members of the party and government. NPWS officers created the Administrative Management Design for Game Management Areas (ADMADE), a new program of “community-based” wildlife management primarily financed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). European conservationists, backed by President Kaunda, established the Luangwa Integrated Resource Development Project (LIRDP), a new public agency supported by the Norwegian Agency for International Development (NORAD).

Both LIRDP and ADMADE sought to conserve wild animals by incorporating rural residents in decisions over and benefits from wildlife resources.

The Cambridge series on the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions is built around attempts to answer two central questions: How do institutions evolve in response to individual incentives, strategies, and choices, and how do institutions affect the performance of political and economic systems? The scope of the series is comparative and historical rather than international or specifically American, and the focus is positive rather than normative.

In an illuminating work deeply rooted in the institutionalism, Clark Gibson analyzes the politics of wildlife policy in several African countries. The history of these policies is disappointing. Nationalist governments failed to keep their pre-independence promises to eliminate colonial wildlife laws. Bureaucracies created policies frustrating some conservation goals, while other policies designed to create animal-conserving incentives failed to stop illegal hunting. The reasons are complex. A constant theme is that individuals and groups sought to create policies advantageous to themselves. Their strategies reflected incentives created by current institutions. As institutions changed, so did strategies and policies, but not in ways necessarily conducive to conservation.

The analysis is an important follow-on to Elinor Ostrom's pathbreaking work on the problems of managing a common-pool resource against free-riding incentives to poach. It is a very institutional analysis of that problem as well, doing a convincing job of analyzing decisions at the local level, where most of the important ones were actually taken. It is an exciting empirical application of rational choice theory that gives imaginative and compelling explanations while offering general lessons about the political economy of conservation policy.

Contrary to promises made by future President Kenneth Kaunda and other Zambian nationalists during Zambia's independence movement, the government of the ruling United National Independence party (UNIP) did not revoke the much-despised wildlife policy they inherited from their British predecessors. In fact, immediately after independence in October 1964 Kaunda began to make radio broadcasts and public speeches about the need to protect wild animals as an integral part of Zambian history. His government submitted a new wildlife bill to the National Assembly in 1968 that closely followed the proscriptions of the colonial ordinances while conferring even more authority over wildlife on the central government. By the end of 1971 the UNIP government had declared eight statutory instruments that detailed the laws regarding trophies, hunting license requirements, protected animals, and legal methods of hunting. That same year President Kaunda signed an order that created thirty-two game management areas, and his minister of lands and natural resources introduced a motion into the National Assembly to declare a system of eighteen national parks within Zambia. Like their colonial predecessors, the new government's administrators shunted aside calls for granting locals access to wildlife. Despite the widespread dislike for their similar colonial-style wildlife conservation policies, politicians in Kenya and Zimbabwe also chose to maintain the status quo.

A growing number of conservationists and development specialists in the 1970s and 1980s, including the administrators of ADMADE and LIRDP, argued that the inclusion of local communities in wildlife management was indispensable for successful conservation. These experts charged that because conventional policies excluded rural residents from the economic benefits of wildlife, they had no incentive to stop illegal hunting. And because the wildlife departments of many African governments were woefully underfunded, locals killed animals with impunity.

To close what had become an open-access wildlife commons in Zambia, ADMADE and LIRDP each offered an array of benefits designed to encourage locals to protect rather than hunt animals. A number of rural residents gained employment as wildlife scouts and general laborers. Certain traditional leaders received control over the revenue that the programs apportioned to local communities. ADMADE and LIRDP revenue built schools, health clinics, roads, bridges, and other communitylevel projects. And both programs intended to foster cooperation between scouts and residents.

Yet, even with ADMADE and LIRDP in place, rural residents continued to kill, consume, and trade wild animals illegally. Although wildlife scouts made more arrests for poaching-related activities, and although both programs seemed to stem the killing of large mammals, locals kept hunting - at rates comparable to those of the days before ADMADE and LIRDP's operations.

Evans-Pritchard's experiences with wildlife in the Sudan encapsulate many of this book's central issues: wildlife's value, the different actors who seek its benefits, their contestation over access to wildlife, and the particular strategies they choose to advantage themselves. Evans-Pritchard lost control over the wildlife he killed - he had few institutions to back his claims while in the field and, as an anthropologist, chose not to use force of arms. In contrast, the history of wildlife policy in Zambia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe includes both institutions and force. This study has explored how and why individuals and groups competed to shape the content, continuity, and change of wildlife policy in Zambia from 1964 to 1991. It has compared the detailed analysis of Zambia with more preliminary investigations of events in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Throughout, the investigation of policy is grounded in the study of political institutions.

THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE CHAPTERS

Four empirical questions have framed this examination of wildlife policy.

The institutional environment of Zambia's First Republic did not last long. Threatened by the electoral gains of opposition parties, Kenneth Kaunda declared a one-party state in Zambia in 1972, concentrating power in the office of the president. Along with this dramatic change in political institutions, a fall in the price of copper significantly decreased the Zambian government's revenues in 1975. Subsequent government policies and a growing international demand for wildlife products increased wildlife's value for most Zambians, and a wave of poaching swept through the country.

Kaunda responded to the upsurge in poaching with a broad array of actions, including the introduction of stronger antipoaching legislation to the National Assembly. Unlike in Zambia's First Republic, however, President Kaunda faced active opposition to his wildlife policy during the early years of the Second Republic: Members of both the party and the government sabotaged his calls for stiffer penalties and broader regulation.

In this chapter, I explain how the incentives generated by the new political institutions encouraged politicians to oppose Kaunda's preferred wildlife policy.