Re-assertion of Elite Control in Masoka’s Wildlife Program, Zimbabwe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Local level governance is crucial in delivering benefits of conservation to communities. This paper provides a historical review of the evolution of governance and the emergence of elite capture in Masoka’s wildlife program in Zimbabwe between 2009 and 2011. Fifty-four key informant interviews and reviews of numerous secondary data sources analyzed in order to understand accountability mechanisms, collective decision-making, and the allocation of wildlife revenues into various local initiatives. The local narratives and secondary data suggested that the governance had flipped from one of impersonal and democratic rule to one based on personal rule of traditional leaders. These outcomes were in part a result of the shift in meso level structures that previously supported the program structures at community level, the shifting national politics that led to increased sense of enfranchisement and impunity among traditional leaders, and non-merit based system of appointing committee members. The results suggest that locally elected committees when left at the peril of strong and unchecked powers of traditional leaders they are bound to collapse. Second, the findings also indicate that in the absence of weak land tenure rights, locals have no “teeth” to challenge tradition-based authorities in order to demand for accountable governance. We conclude that given such condition of weak tenure and access to resource rights, local democratic institutions do not emerge naturally even if most people want them and if not protected from outside, they are bound to fail and superseded by personalized ones.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".