The performance of CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe: 1989–2006

Zimbabwe’s Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) pioneered CBNRM in southern Africa. It was conceived some 30 years ago in the northern Sebungwe region where the environmental impacts of tsetse eradication programmes and associated in-migration of people onto marginal agricultural land threatened the potential comparative economic advantage of wildlife, which was still abundant in the region (Child, G., 1995). Although initially driven by a conservation agenda, it was quickly appreciated by those involved in developing the programme that a people-centred approach was needed, as were devolved governance and rural democratization processes. A number of important principles for community conservation emerged, including economic benefit, devolution and collective proprietorship for a common pool resource, wildlife (Jones and Murphree, 2001), which have been put into practice with varying degrees of success and indeed failure, and the programme continues to evolve adaptively and experimentally, with stakeholders. This chapter summarizes the progress of CAMPFIRE since its formal introduction in 1986, providing as complete an assessment as is possible with incomplete data, using several key variables to measure conservation, social benefit and governance outcomes.1