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- Title
The conservation movement in Zimbabwe: an early experiment in devolved community based regulation.
- Authors
Child, Graham; Child, Brian
- Abstract
This paper describes how the Zimbabwe Natural Resources Act of 1941 nurtured a civic landholder-based conservation movement, the Intensive Conservation Area movement (ICA). This is not recorded in the published literature. It provides a rare insight into the efficacy of environmental regulation that legally devolves use rights and regulatory responsibility to communities of landholders, and favours democratic processes above top-down regulation. Themainmessage is that natural resource governance is effective when (a) landholders are genuinely empowered with the rights to use and manage natural resources provided, and (b) this occurs within a framework of devolved and collective self-regulation through structures built democratically fromthe bottomup.The effectiveness of these structures is surprisingly sensitive to any reduction in democratic control. The ICA movement anticipates, and is aligned with, the emerging theories of common property, scale, management, systems thinking and new institutional economics. These have common roots in the principle that human affairs and complexity are best managed where hierarchies of nested institutions serve the bottom layers, not the top. This suggests that entitling landholders, including communities,with full choice to use andmanagement natural resources,and relying on local collective action to control environmental abuses or externalities, will strengthen future approaches for natural resource governance, including for wildlife and southern Africa.
- Subjects
ZIMBABWE; WILDLIFE conservation; NATURE reserves; LANDOWNERS; SELF regulation; EXTERNALITIES
- Publication
African Journal of Wildlife Research, 2015, Vol 45, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2410-7220
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3957/056.045.0103