TROPHY HUNTING - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 170

hunts as a conservation strategy are those of the British economists Timothy Swanson
and Edward Barbier, and it is worth quoting them.
According to Swanson, “the problem of biodiversity conservation is to determine poli-
cies that will effectively transfer value that exists in the developed world (i.e., funds) to
those developing countries that harbour substantial quantities of diversity, and to do so
in such a manner as will create incentives to maintain these reserves into the foreseeable
future.” 5
Swanson argued for what he termed a “dynamic incentive structure” that would func-
tion to reward actions that tend to conserve, and punish actions that tend to waste, wildlife
resources. Under conditions in which poaching or unrestricted exploitation of natural habi-
tats are ineffectively controlled by government authorities despite clear policies and legal
authority to do so, a possible solution, according to Swanson, lies in “wildlife management
areas . . . managed by the local communities exclusively for the wildlife products that they
generate” that would require both “demand side” and “supply side” management, as well as
external controls on “free riders” (opportunists whose presence would tend to undermine the
system because they obtain benefits without paying any of the costs). Demand-side manage-
ment would be needed to “maximize rents potentially appropriable by the managers of the
resource.” 6 The higher the income available from the use of wildlife, the better the dynamic
incentive structure would function.
In short, the concept of sustainable use as a means to conserve vulnerable wildlife
resources is that “use” creates incentives toward “sustainability.” Conservation is thus
ensured despite the deliberate loss of individual members of the wildlife population,
because the population and its required habitat must be protected adequately to allow
indefinite persistence of both. Hunting focal species of high value is one possible avenue
such sustainable use can take.
This is not to imply that only harvestable species are of interest. In fact,
the maximization of the revenues from the consumptive use of wildlife resources
is important precisely because so much of the value of wildlife is nonconsumptive
in nature. . . . When these products come jointly [species valued in both consump-
tive and nonconsumptive ways], but it is only possible to price one of the two
goods, . . . it can be the optimal “second best” policy to provide price supports
to the tangible good in order to foster the incentives to invest sufficiently in the
habitat which supplies both. 7
However, Swanson also points out that creation of revenues, while a necessary condition
to the creation of a dynamic incentive structure, would not by itself conserve wildlife. There
must, in addition, be a return to the manager that is linked to the provision of the resource, that
is, supply-side management. Supply-side management, in turn, would require two elements:
the “vesting of rents . . . with the local communities who are most able to constructively use
and manage the resource,” and the creation of “a scheme for the protection of any rents that
[consumers] intend to create from being appropriated by opportunists who do not share the
ability or incentive to protect the resource.”