Bureaucrats and the Environment in Africa: The Politics of Structural Choice in a One Party State

Two different groups in Zambia, each seeking to construct new wildlife policies, faced a difficult institutional environment in the 1980s. Financially, the government of Zambia could not support a new, expensive conservation effort. Its revenues had dried up with the relentless fall in the price of copper, the country's chief foreign exchange earner. Yet without such an effort many wildlife populations faced uncertain futures. Illegal hunting had mushroomed in the 1970s, due to the government's decreasing ability to enforce its laws and the increasing value of wildlife products. The political environment possessed its own uncertainties. The incentives generated by Zambia's one party state forced all interest groups to contend with the president, Kenneth Kaunda. While generally supportive of conservation efforts, Kaunda also consistently interfered in the activities of government agencies. His favor could prove decisive for an agency; his disfavor could destroy an agency and end civil servants' careers. The members of the two conservation groups understood the incentives generated by Zambia's political system. Each created similar institutional solutions to deal with the country's particular pattern of political uncertainty. But the two groups' strategies also differed in one crucial respect. One group, composed of individuals from the Zambian conservation community and European donors, actively sought the support of President Kaunda. The other group, composed of officers from Zambia's National Parks and Wildlife Service, went to great lengths to avoid Kaunda. In explaining the strategies of these two groups, this study addresses important questions in the study of comparative politics in general and of bureaucracy in particular. First, can bureaucratic behavior be modeled? Scholars have attempted to make general propositions about bureaucrats' actions for a century; recent efforts using economic theory have added useful insights to counter conventional Wilsonian models and to improve our understanding of politicized bureaucrats. Second, do bureaucrats act similarly under different systems of government? Contemporary scholarship indicates that bureaucrats may face different incentives and therefore make different choices under alternative governmental arrangements. Does a one party system influence bureaucrats in systematic ways? The centralization of power in the executive might present fundamentally different choices to