ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the ‘flipping’ of rangelands in Zimbabwe from a livestock to a wildlife-dominated system in the mid-1980s, and the economic and institutional factors that made this possible. It addresses the problem posed by resilience theory that social ecological systems get locked into undesirable basins of attraction (for example vicious cycles of rangeland degradation and poverty associated with livestock production) and the question of how society can develop the ‘transformability’ to avoid such lock-ins (Walker et al. 2004). We observe the importance of leadership and institutional reform in the transformation of Zimbabwe’s rangelands towards wildlife-based economic systems, suggesting that transformability falls in the realm of institutions and adaptive governance. Indeed, it is argued that economic growth is related more to institutional than financial capital (Anon, 2008) because organizational energy (for example institutions, property rights and entrepreneurship) is necessary to turn relatively low-ordered raw materials, such as livestock and rangeland environments, into more highly ordered products and services (Beinhocker, 2006). The chapter uses historical data from Zimbabwe’s Midlands and Lowveld ranching areas from the late 1980s (when this transformation was occurring) to illustrate how devolving rights to wildlife (proprietorship) to landholders, coupled with improving terms of trade (price), affected land use in Zimbabwe and indeed wildlife on private land throughout southern Africa.
