Property Rights, Wildlife, and Business in Namibia: A Success Story

I am very pleased to announce another excellent paper in the Mercatus Policy Series. Karol Boudreaux recently finished a policy piece based on her work in Namibia (see here). She shows that African people can protect their environment and, at the same time, develop strong businesses that help diversify their livelihoods and alleviate poverty. This has been made possible through the development of community-based natural resource management, which has helped Namibians develop conservancies to manage wildlife and benefit from tourism.

Conservancies are fundamentally based on the development of property rights at the community level. And whenever property rights are better defined and enforced somewhere (and it doesn’t necessarily have to be the government who does the job), good things happen. In Namibia, wildlife numbers are rising, ecosystems are rebounding, and conservancies-related businesses are popping up like flowers in the spring. The system is not perfect and policy improvements can be found—Karol proposes a few. But overall while the private property order has been recently destroyed in some parts of Africa (e.g. Zimbabwe) it has improved in Namibia to the benefit of the people who live there.