Property rights and natural resource conservation: a bio-economic model with numerical illustrations from the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem

This paper examines under what conditions a community based management system results in higher wildlife abundance and more conservation. It concludes that community property rights as well as other incentives are needed.

The paper analyses a community based management system where the local people have been given the full property rights of the wildlife (they control and obtain the whole benefit stream from the wildlife when it is outside the protected area) compared to a scheme of having no property rights. The findings challenge the assumption that when property rights are handed over to the local people, they have incentives to invest in the wildlife stock, and take the stock size into account when hunting.

Main findings include:

• wildlife conservation depends critically on the difference between the benefit and cost of living with wildlife. Only when the nuisance from the roaming wildlife is small and the marginal benefit exceeds the cost, community based management increases the wildlife stock compared to the scenario of no property rights
• relying on local property rights alone as a tool in wildlife conservation may not work as the nuisance from the wildlife may dominate the benefit, and hence, local property rights may give incentives to deplete the roaming stock of wildebeest
• a better conservation strategy than handling the property rights over to the local people is probably to protect crop production by supporting fencing or take other types of control measures to reduce the damage caused by the roaming wildlife
• the numerical simulations also demonstrate that an increased crop price or higher crop productivity, for example through improved fertiliser and pesticides use, may lead the local people to channel more effort towards agricultural production, which will also work in the direction of more wildlife conservation

[Adapted from author]