Politicians and Poachers: The Political Economy of Wildlife Policy in Africa (review)

Clark C. Gibson has crafted a superb critical analysis. He captures the complexity of competition among a wide array of actors for access to wildlife resources in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Kenya and explains the similarities and differences in policies and outcomes.

Gibson frames his analysis in four questions: 1) Why did the independent governments keep colonial wildlife laws?; 2) Why did powerful presidents respond differently to a rise in poaching?; 3) Why did the administrators of these countries' wildlife programs create bureaucratic structures that frustrated some conservation goals?; and 4) Why did these same programs fail to stop illegal hunting? Gibson finds the answers in detailed analysis of the actions and motives of all the relevant actors such as national and local party and government officials, wildlife agency bureaucrats, game wardens, traditional leaders, white farmers, members of the wildlife tourism industry, indigenous and international conservationists, bilateral and multilateral donor agencies, poachers from small-scale subsistence hunters to large-scale international hunters and contraband traders. The analysis demonstrates the effect of these many contenders on policy formation and outcomes and shows how the actions and perceived agendas of various agents influenced behaviors and decisions of others in the contest to benefit from wildlife resources.

The study examines wildlife policy within the framework of new institutionalism while retaining the assumption of individual rationality. Through the lens of the politics of structural choice, the study shows how all the contenders sought to shape wildlife policy to their own advantage but did so within the framework of the existing institutional environment and their own resource endowments.

Colonial laws gave exclusive control over wildlife resources to the government. Those to whom access was denied acted to reclaim it via poaching for subsistence and cash needs. Independent governments kept the laws because they needed an economic base for political power and needed resources for promised economic and social development. The presidents reacted differently to increased poaching because there were significant differences in the way the institutions within each country changed after independence. The presidents' own ranges of choices were influenced by changes from multiparty to single party states and changes in election laws and party structures that shifted power bases variously from central to local control.

Administrators of wildlife programs created bureaucratic structures that frustrated some conservation goals for several reasons. These bureaucracies were not the sole institutional contenders for resource control. They competed most importantly with other government and party powers who depended on privileged access to wildlife and on patron-client relationships as sources of wealth and power. The first order of business for the agencies was not conservation but institutional survival; the ability to establish, legitimate, defend, and extend control over contested resources. At times, foreign conservationists and donors became the agencies' source of funding that freed them from dependency on, and subjugation to, other party and government institutions. Agencies created structures that frustrated conservation goals because the structures were designed primarily to maintain agency control over wildlife, not to enlist other actors and institutions in sharing responsibility for and benefit from those resources.

In examining conservation agencies and competing institutions and actors, the study comes to its richest historical reconstruction, its most detailed analysis, and its keenest insights. In effect, it makes a compelling case for a law of institutional inertia--agents within institutions will act to protect and expand the institution and will continue to do so until and unless acted upon by agents from other institutions with equal or opposite force. The point is not that institutions don't change quickly or easily. Rather, the study demonstrates what is necessary for individuals to effect institutional change.

Programs failed to stop illegal hunting because they offered the wrong incentives and the wrong sanctions to the wrong people. Offering communal incentives (e.g., schools and medical services) to curb individual behaviors (poaching) doesn't work, especially when there...