Weak Governance
The Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) instituted a program to award communities a significant share of wildlife revenues earned through the licensed and legal hunting of wild animals. To receive these funds, recipient communities were required to elect representative leaders to manage the funds for the benefit of all community residents and to help support efforts to protect wildlife in their area. Acting as patrons, traditional leaders (or chiefs) contributed to these efforts as customary leaders of these communities.
Challenges existed to maintain accountability of these funds and full compliance of their intended use. The intention was to build a co-management partnership for wildlife protection between the ZAWA and the communities who resided in areas where the wildlife resources were found. While the principle of revenue sharing was sound to promote increased local responsibility for wildlife resources, it assumed the benefits derived from the legal use of wildlife would filter down to the individual household to encourage the right land use practices that would lead to improved wildlife protection.
Implementing this approach of community development, which was intended to help reinforce wildlife conservation, also assumed there was enough wildlife revenue to benefit most all people in the community, especially in ways that maximized its value at the household level. This assumption was not correct, nor were there effective procedures in place to facilitate a transparent and effective transfer of funds from ZAWA to the community with subsequent controls to validate that funds used were targeting the needs of the most needy, or those most likely to be a threat to wildlife.
Lacking were effective systems to monitor the flow and use of wildlife revenues to recipient communities. Also lacking were compelling incentives that motivated community leaders to focus their investment on the poor and least food secure that would add value to wildlife by enabling people to gain increased market access for supporting basis household needs. Instead, community leaders preferred to build schools and clinics, which provided important services, but failed to address some of the underlying reasons why poor people were forced to degrade their natural resources.
These issues represented complex problems, whose solutions required careful planning and a long-term commitment to structuring communities in ways that could link legal market opportunities to the needs of poor while rewarding communities for developing these opportunities around sound land use plans and conservation guidelines.
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