The purpose of this study is to improve environmental sustainability by
identifying the most sustainable/least fragile of the three major wildlife
conservation access models—open, government, and private—under varying environmental and socioeconomic
conditions.The
private access model is the most sustainable of the three major conservation
models because it provides the best information and incentives to balance the
needs of humans and wildlife, maintain general wildlife habitat, and adapt
quickly to changing environmental and/or socioeconomic conditions.
Government-controlled access, however, can be employed as a model of last
resort if the private access model shows signs of failing to protect specific
species from local extirpation or extinction, which it is most likely to do for
migratory species, species with close commercial substitutes, and species with
no direct commercial value. Government regulators may also be needed to enforce
property rights arrangements like catch shares and to monitor resources that
remain open access in case socioeconomic or environmental conditions change
sufficiently to trigger the tragedy of the commons.Most treatments of wildlife regulation default to
various iterations of the government access model and fail even to consider the
costs and benefits of private and open access models. The analysis here instead
shows the conditions in which each conservation access model is most
appropriate: open when a resource is in high supply and low demand, private
most of the time, and government when the others fail to slow resource
depopulation/depletion.
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