Can local communities afford full control over wildlife conservation? The case of Zimbabwe

Wildlife is widely becoming an important vehicle for rural development in most third-world countries across the globe. With wildlife, as with other conservation and development policies, policymakers are usually not informed about the needs and wants of poor rural households and roll out programmes that are not tailor made to suit their desires, which often results in policy failure. We use a survey-based choice experiment in this paper to investigate household preferences for various attributes of a wildlife management scheme. The survey was administered in local communities around the Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe. Respondents showed great willingness to move from the status quo to a regime that gives them full control over wildlife. Thus, our results speak to increased devolution of wildlife management from the rural district councils into the hands of sub-district producer communities. The respondents’ willingness-to-pay to take full control over wildlife conservation suggests that full devolution doubles the value of CAMPFIRE to the producer communities. Furthermore, our results support the idea that government programmes and development projects should not be imposed on local communities but should be informed by programme beneficiaries through research in order to capture their needs and wants. Finally, our results demonstrate that poachers and those who are generally good at extracting resources from the environment will oppose change. •Our results demonstrate demand for an improved CAMPFIRE by project beneficiaries.•The beneficiaries also expressed their need to take full control over wildlife conservation.•Full devolution improves the value of CAMPFIRE to the producer communities.•Conservation projects should be informed by its beneficiaries through research in order to capture their needs and wants.•Households that heavily depend on the natural resources and those with expertise in extraction are likely to oppose change.