Designing Integrated Conservation and Development Projects: Hunting Incentives and Human Welfare with Numerical Illustrations from Serengeti

Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) attempt to link conservation of natural resources in protected areas to economic development in the surrounding communities. Such projects have been introduced in many parts of Africa, but their performance has so far been hampered by numerous difficulties. This paper develops a hunter-agrarian household model to explore the effect on wildlife conservation and the welfare of the local people of the most common instruments of existing ICDPs. It is demonstrated that stimulating working opportunities in the formal sector has the potential of promoting conservation and welfare, while money transfers and distribution of game from managed culling fail in conserving wildlife, if not explicitly linked to the conservation objective. In contrast, the analysis shows that such links, modelled as a risk of being excluded from the project components if caught in illegal hunting, may be a more durable mean for ICDPs to reach its goal of improved wildlife conservation and local welfare. The model is illustrated by numerical calculations with data from Serengeti.