What's Special About Wildlife Management In Forests?: Concepts And Models Of Rights-Based Management, With Recent Evidence From West-Central Africa

Wildlife consumption is an integral part of the livelihood and trade patterns of many peoples in the developing world, and highly valued by them. Yet to date the dominant models of wildlife management in areas of high – and allegedly unsustainable – consumptive use have favoured the exclusion of the users from the resource and the denial of its local values. This gives little incentive to rural dwellers to manage wildlife sustainably. Innovative strategies are required to enhance the rights of the resource users and to increase their entitlements to appropriate the benefits of wildlife for themselves. There has been little success in devising these outside areas with high tourist potential, but experience in other natural resource sectors may provide useful pointers.Policy conclusions: Strategies of wildlife management differ according to the nature of the threat to the resource, the two main threats being habitat conversion and unsustainable off-take. Where the threat is from unsustainable off-take, there are strong arguments not to apply blanket preservationist controls. The solutions to the problem of unsustainable offtake have more to do with management than public education or awareness-raising. Devising policies for the sustainable management of wildlife is a complex and challenging task with many unknowns; where the considerable additional transaction costs of managing wildlife cannot be offset against new benefits (from sport hunting and tourism, for example), alternative management strategies have to be adopted which explicitly promote equity and sustainability. Conventional solutions to the problem of excessive use, such as privatisation of tenure and the reinstatement of traditional control systems are very uncertain routes to poverty alleviation. Rights-based management systems, enabling people to negotiate access and assert their entitlement to resources, are an important tool to broker better development opportunities. Examples of such regulatory systems from other natural resource sectors, such as inshore fisheries, may provide useful models to regulate the offtake and enable the poor to define their rights to wildlife resources in communal management regimes. [author]