ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how a critical juncture of circumstances and personalities led southern Africa to adopt a new governance paradigm for wildlife after 1960. Large areas of land were rewilded, and wildlife recovered rapidly, unlike the rest of Africa, which maintained outdated colonial public governance regimes, as illustrated by the Kenyan counter-factual which lost nearly two-thirds of its wild animals. Wildlife administrators in southern Africa recognised, intuitively, that wildlife was subtractable and excludable, and would only survive outside parks if it was valuable to landholders. They devolved ownership of wildlife to landholders and, later, communities, with Zimbabwe also demonstrating the effectiveness of utilising local collective action to manage the externalities associated with wildlife, forests, soil, grazing, and so on. Combining proprietorship with the deliberate encouragement of wildlife markets corrected profit curves and wildlife expanded at a rate of 6% annually after being reinserted into the market. Although southern Africa is a policy outlier when it comes to wildlife, these policies have much in common with classic liberalism (rights of person, property, self-determination, and markets) that led Europe out of the Dark Ages.
