ABSTRACT

This paper relates the key findings of the optimal economic enforcement literature to practical issues of enforcing forest and wildlife management access restrictions in developing countries. Our experiences, particularly from Tanzania and eastern India, provide detail of the key pragmatic issues facing those responsible for protecting natural resources. We identify large gaps in the theoretical literature that limit its ability to inform practical management, including issues of limited funding and cost recovery, multiple tiers of enforcement and the incentives facing enforcement officers, and conflict between protected area managers and rural people's needs.

Notes

1.

Without limits to the amount that an individual can be punished, any desired pattern of deterrence ‘could be achieved at minimal cost by combining arbitrarily low monitoring with sufficiently steep penalties’ (Mookherjee & Png, 1994, p. 1049), as proscribed by Becker (1968).

2.

This point is reiterated in the literature. For example, Milner-Gulland and Leader-Williams (1992) predict that fines proportionate to the number of elephant kills are more effective than fixed fines.

3.

That is, incomplete enforcement is an equilibrium under a broad range of parameters, either because marginal costs exceed the marginal benefits of moving towards full enforcement, or because of the need for marginal deterrence to prevent criminals from committing worse crimes. As Helsley and Strange (1994, p. 293) demonstrate: if ‘marginal exclusion costs are positive, then there is always some illegal use in a subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium’; that is, it is ‘uneconomical to exclude all free riders unless marginal exclusion costs are zero’.

4.

In parallel, general poaching is reported to have been reduced by 90%.

5.

Cost recovery is an increasing reality in developing countries in many areas, as government agencies are being required to function as revenue-seeking parastatals rather than relying on externally determined and granted budgets (Nolan & Turbat, 1995; Robinson, 2008).

6.

The viability of such trophy hunting is also influenced by international conventions such as CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) and individual country laws, such as the US Endangered Species Act that has recently been relaxed to permit the import of endangered species (Mbaria & Kelley, 2005).

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