The role of institutions in community wildlife conservation in Zimbabwe

Institutions play a significant role in stabilising large-scale cooperation in common pool resource management. Without restrictions to govern human behaviour, most natural resources are vulnerable to overexploitation. This study used a sample size of 336 households and community-level data from 30 communities around Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe, to analyse the relationship between institutions and biodiversity outcomes in community-based wildlife conservation. Our results suggest a much stronger effect of institutions on biodiversity outcomes via the intermediacy of cooperation. Overall, the performance of most communities was below the desired level of institutional attributes that matter for conservation. Good institutions are an important ingredient for cooperation in the respective communities. Disaggregating the metric measure of institutions into its components shows that governance, monitoring and enforcement are more important for increased cooperation, while fairness of institutions seems to work against cooperation. Cooperation increases with trust and group size, and is also higher in communities that have endogenised punishment as opposed to communities that still rely on external enforcement of rules and regulations. Cooperation declines as we move from communal areas into the resettlement schemes and with increasing size of the resource system. A very strong positive relationship exists between cooperation and biodiversity outcomes implying that communities with elevated levels of cooperation are associated with a healthy wildlife population. Biodiversity outcomes are more successful in communities that either received wildlife management training, share information or those that are located far away from urban areas and are not very close to the boundary of the game park. Erecting an electric fence, the household head's age, the number of years in school and number of years living in the area negatively affect biodiversity outcomes. One policy implication of this study is to increase autonomy in CAMPFIRE communities so that they are able to invest in good institutions, which allows them to self-organise and to manage wildlife sustainably.