ABSTRACT
Starting in the 1980s, southern Africa emerged as an important crucible for devolved wildlife and natural resource governance. These so-called community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes sought to devolve the authority to use, benefit from, sell and manage wildlife to local communities, following the hypothesis that ‘people seek to manage the environment when the benefits of management are perceived to exceed its costs’ (Murphree, 1991, p. 12). The primary challenge was perceived as convincing central wildlife agencies to let go of their control over wildlife and its benefits, and to transfer these to local people. CBNRM programmes in Zimbabwe and Namibia, where devolution was legislated in the primary wildlife legislation in 1982 and 1996 respectively, did achieve some success; however, in Botswana, where communities were granted land leases, and in Zambia, where contestation over who gets the benefits from wildlife has been an ongoing issue, they have been less successful.
