Bureaucrats and the environment in Africa - The politics of structural choice in a one party state

Most work on environmental bureaucracies in developing countries fails to consider the effects of political institutions on bureaucratic behavior. Theories of structural choice contend that individuals and groups involved with environmental policy have a keen understanding of their particular institutional setting. In constructing an environmental agency, designers' strategies will vary depending on the pattern of political uncertainty generated by the system of government and designers' political resources or share of public authority. In Zambia in the early 1980s two different, competing groups sought to construct participatory wildlife programs. Because they possessed different shares of public authority, they responded with different strategies to the types of political uncertainty generated by Zambia's one party state and thus constructed different bureaucratic institutions.