Chapter 1 Politics, Institutions, and Animals: Explaining the Content

Chapter 1 Politics, Institutions, and Animals: Explaining the Content, Continuity, and Change of African Wildlife Policy "It cannot be too strongly emphasized that in a country where vast rural areas carry small populations, the wild life in one shape or another is a main economic force just as much as the soil or the water supply." T.G.C. Vaughan-Jones, Director of Game and Tsetse Control, Northern Rhodesia, 19481 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 more 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 wildlife’s importance to the individuals and governments of Africa itself. While 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 2 about how political and economic institutions can shape these policies over time. Consequently, the average contributor to a conservation organization has little knowledge about the multiple and complex dimensions of wildlife’s significance in Africa. And yet wildlife is and has been important to millions of Africans. Before European domination, Africans distributed wildlife to solidify economic and political networks. As outside contacts with Europe widened, so did the distribution of wildlife. The ivory trade was enmeshed with the slave trade. Game meat subsidized the activities of European explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators. Today, African farmers in rural areas still compete with wild animals over land and crops. Urban dwellers purchase game meat on shadow markets. Safari and tourism business owners lobby governments for measures to ensure high quality animals for their industries. Rural dwellers hunt animals to augment their diets, incomes, and prestige. Before, during, and after the arrival of Europeans, wildlife has enhanced wealth, threatened lives, destroyed crops, provided patronage resources, cemented relationships, and inspired social protest in Africa. Wildlife’s significance makes it a political commodity. Like other political commodities, such as the power to tax and discretion over the locating infrastructure, politicians can use wildlife to discriminate between allies and enemies. At the national level, politicians construct wildlife policies that must contend with the pressures caused by constituents and friends seeking greater access to wildlife resources, and international organizations intent on limiting such access. At the bureaucratic level, officials deploy thousands of enforcement officers and spend millions of dollars to enforce conservation policies. And at the local level, rural residents challenge these policies as they struggle to gain rights to wildlife resources. Since the wildlife 3 policies of African governments attempt to be quite comprehensive -- affecting how individuals interact with wildlife, who owns wild animals, who hunts, when they hunt, what weapons and equipment they use, which species they kill, how they exchange wildlife products, which parts of wild animals they must surrender to the government, and which they may import or export -- the conflict over wildlife policy reflects basic questions about access to public authority, about whose preferences over wildlife institutions will dictate policy, and, consequently, about who will gain and who will lose. African wildlife policies change over time. As individuals and groups pressure the governments to modify policy, alterations occur to such things as the boundaries of a country's protected areas, the types of species protected by law, the punishments for violating such laws, hunting license fees, and wildlife departments’ enforcement levels and budgets. As these aspects of policies change, they produce different outcomes. Some policies increase the protection of certain species. Others promote the destruction of particular animals. Some generate revenues for governments. Others impose significant costs. Some enrich individuals. Others strip away income and food from the already impoverished. But what explains the origin and change of African wildlife policies? In Zambia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, a number of empirical puzzles confront those studying wildlife policy. For example, the same politicians who had decried the punitive and exclusionary nature of colonial wildlife policy passed laws to strengthen and broaden it after their country’s independence. But while this response was general across the three countries, they differed greatly in their reactions to a wave of poaching that swept across Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. More apparent anomalies face those who think that African politics is the purview only of strong, single leaders: 4 Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda was an ardent conservationist, and yet his one-party parliament failed at times to pass his preferred wildlife legislation -- despite the fact that he wielded the strong centralized powers of a one-party president. Kenya’s president Daniel arap Moi and his allies, on the other hand, had far less affection for wildlife conservation but they eventually created costly policies to insure adequate wildlife populations. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and his government, instead of allowing a flourishing trade in illegal wildlife products as happened in Zambia and Kenya, enforced their wildlife laws and kept their wildlife estate relatively protected. And in all three countries, efforts to create community-level wildlife programs had different origins and outcomes. This book explores these and other puzzles that surround the politics of wildlife policy in Africa. It does so by examining the content, continuity, and change of wildlife policy in Zambia in the post-colonial period. It then compares the Zambian case with selected cases from Kenya and Zimbabwe. Four empirical questions frame this study. First, why did the first independent governments of Zambia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe keep colonial wildlife laws intact, despite prior promises by nationalists to reverse such exclusionary measures? Second, why did these powerful African presidents respond in different ways to the rise of poaching? Third, why did the administrators of these countries’ wildlife programs in the 1980s create bureaucratic structures that frustrated certain conservation goals? And fourth, why did these same programs, designed to offer incentives to so that they would conserve animals, fail to stop illegal hunting? This book argues that because wildlife is an important economic and political resource in each of these three countries, individuals and groups have sought to structure policy to secure wildlife's benefits for themselves. These actors operate in an arena composed of numerous 5 institutions that affect their strategies and choices.2 The outcome of their efforts is wildlife policies that do not necessarily protect animals; in fact, many policies generated poor conservation results in Zambia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. Rather, wildlife policies and their outcomes reflect attempts by individuals and groups to gain private advantage. Wildlife and Africa It is impossible to deny the importance of wildlife to past and present-day Africa. Almost all African societies hunted as part of their subsistence strategies; even those that did not normally eat game would consume it during times of famine or use it for other social practices.3 Animal products were part of tribute systems within and between different African communities.4 These products, especially ivory, were central to the centuries of trade that tied Africa to the rest of the world before European expansion.5 Later, ivory became closely connected to the slave trade.6 Ivory and meat subsidized early European explorers, fed colonial troops, and accounted for a significant portion of the household budget of early settlers and colonial administrators.7 Wildlife also affected -- and continues to influence -- the decisions and activities of African and European farmers. Subsistence and commercial farmers contend with animals that damage their crops during and after growing seasons.8 Larger animals such as buffalo, hippopotamus, and elephant can ruin fields over the course of a few hours although, on average, the constant onslaught of smaller animals such as birds, rodents, baboons, and wild pigs accounts for an even higher percentage of crop loss.9 Carnivores like lion, leopard, crocodile, hyena, and wild dog threaten domesticated stock owned by African and European alike. Certain species, 6 acting as hosts to the trypanosomiasis-carrying tsetse fly, prevent the raising of certain domesticated animals in parts of Africa altogether.10 In addition to the costs and benefits it imposes on activities related

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