ABSTRACT
Southern Africa is one of the two places on the planet where wildlife has increased in the past 50 years. Starting in the 1960s, wildlife administrators began to question the survival of public wildlife living outside parks on private and communal land. Recognising that wildlife is a private good with common pool properties, they reversed conventional conservation wisdom by devolving ownership of wildlife to landholders and communities, and increasing its price in the marketplace. This chapter explains the institutional history of private conservation and, later, community-based natural resource management in Southern Africa, as the “sustainable governance approach,” which incorporates governance and economics. It suggests that this is a complementary and much-needed paradigm for the governance of wildlife, especially in Africa’s drylands and forests. The chapter provides a synthesis of a vast oral and grey literature residing in communities of practice and field sites that this author has been visiting over the past 30 years.
