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Objective: While trust is proposed as a key concept to understand people's compliance in natural resource governance, research would benefit from being more precise. Our aim is to test whether more specific survey measures of people's tendency to violate rules and the degree to which law enforcing rangers are seen as corrupt trumps more commonly used items on intra‐personal trust and trust in institutions. Methods: We analyze an original survey of residents within the boundaries of the Great Limpopo Park, straddling Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Results: While general trust items predict compliance intentions in a first model, these effects largely disappear when we introduce more specific measures. We find consistent negative effects from perceived corruption among rangers. We also report negative effects from perceptions of other people's noncompliant behavior. Conclusion: Compliance to natural resource regulations hinges on specific perceptions of how rule enforcing agents and other resource users act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rulers of weak states face a predicament. They lack capacity to monitor crime and need citizens to partake in intelligence-sharing. Yet, agents of such authorities are seldom trusted, raising doubts about whether locals will provide information. The case of wildlife poaching in African countries illustrates this tension, where rangers are few and offenders on good terms with locals. Why do some locals choose to assist rangers and report on poachers, while others refrain from doing so? We surveyed 2300 residents in and near the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. We find that people that are afraid of rangers and perceive them as corruptible are less willing to assist in information-sharing. Seeing poaching as condemnable also matters. In contrast, individuals' stakes in conservation and perceptions of wildlife as threatened do not predict our outcome. For effective community policing, policy needs to change how officials are seen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent and how do men and women differ in their attitudes about poaching? Although research suggests that women can be more concerned about environmental degradation than men, inquiries about communities in protected areas are ambiguous: women are disproportionately affected by anti‐poaching laws and can have greater motivations to violate rules. We conducted a large‐scale survey in communities within the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe and explored attitudes regarding; concern about resources, rule compliance, poaching, and anti‐poaching activities. Although women's attitudes generally are not divergent from men's, we find some differences among nonelectrified households and those with a dependence on resources; these women are less likely to condemn commercial poaching and less willing to engage in anti‐poaching activities. Men in poorer households are more likely to know a poacher. We identify a need of further understanding the causes behind gender differences in conservation attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local communities' perceptions of protected areas are important determinants of the success of conservation efforts in Southern Africa, as these perceptions affect people's attitudes and behaviour with respect to conservation. As a result, the involvement of local communities in transboundary wildlife conservation is now viewed as an integral part of regional development initiatives. Building on unique survey data and applying regression analysis, this paper investigates the determinants of the perceptions of local communities around the Great Limpopo Trans-frontier Conservation Area in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Our results illustrate that people perceiving the park as well-managed tend to have more positive perceptions regarding the benefits from the park, rules governing the park, and wildlife conservation in general. Household expertise on resource extraction, in turn, tends to make people more likely to perceive environmental crime as morally acceptable. Furthermore, the results indicate that if people perceive the rules of the park in a negative way, then they are less likely to conserve wildlife. Receiving benefits from the park has a positive impact on people's perceptions of the rules governing the park, as well as on their perception of wildlife conservation in general, but not on perceptions about environmental crime. Surprisingly, perceived high levels of corruption is positively associated with people's perception of wildlife benefits and with perceptions of that environmental crime is morally justified. There is also evidence of the role of socioeconomic variables on people's perceptions towards wildlife. However, unobservable contextual factors could be responsible for explaining part of the variation in people's perceptions. Our results speak to the literature on large-scale collective action since perceptions of wildlife benefits, corruption, environmental crime, park management and rules governing the parks, all affect local communities' ability and willingness to self organize. These variables are interesting because they can be influenced by policy through training and awareness campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although previously sharing many ecological and institutional conditions, the fisheries reform processes undertaken in South Africa and Namibia in the early 1990s have produced highly different institutional trajectories. In Namibia, the institutional arrangements governing fisheries management have turned Namibia into a regional success case with relatively low degrees of illegal fishing and poaching, but in South Africa, the institutional arrangements are generally considered to be weak and characterized by noncompliance – and poaching is widespread. The overall objective of this article is to provide an institutional perspective on how to understand the dynamics of these different trajectories. In particular, the article concludes that the notion of path dependence, historical legacies, and distributional struggles provide important insights to the observed developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although subsistence poaching is a large threat to wildlife conservation in Southern Africa, this behavior is seldom researched. Our understanding of individual and community level factors that drive such behavior is limited because of both lack of data and the literature's predominant focus on commercial poaching. The main objective of this study is to contribute to this scanty literature by examining the factors that are correlated to subsistence poaching in the Great Limpopo, a transfrontier reserve spanning across Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. We use collected primary data from a sample of 2282 respondents and 85 villages that are part of the transfrontier conservation area. We focus on two features, reported subsistence poaching incidences in the community and the previous hunting of individuals, a behavior that is now forbidden in this area. We find through multivariate regression analysis that the likelihood for reported poaching incidences was higher in communities with a larger proportion of young men, plenty of wildlife, and experiencing wildlife conflict. In addition, our survey results illustrate that there is less poaching in communities where local people trust each other, respect institutions, perceive that the management of the park is good, and view wildlife as an asset. Some of these variables can be influenced by appropriate interventions; our findings suggest that capacity building in local institutions, use of community-based crime prevention approaches, training related to wildlife management, and public awareness campaigns could be used by policy makers to affect individuals' perceptions and behaviors in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]