ABSTRACT
In nature conservation, interorganizational governance structures, which are typically referred to as collaborative management, have gained increasing importance in recent years. This paper deals with the assessment of the efficiency of such governance structures, taking wildlife conservation in Kenya as an example. The paper starts with theoretical considerations on allocative and organizational efficiency in nature conservation, and goes on to discuss the problems of calculating production and transaction costs and benefits in this field. Using empirical data from two wildlife community sanctuaries in Kenya, the paper then estimates the production and transaction costs of conservation and assesses the factors influencing their magnitude and distribution. To calculate interorganizational efficiency, a benefit–costs analysis of different collaborative governance structures is carried out, both from the landowners' perspective (financial analysis) and from the society's perspective (economic analysis). The paper shows that valuation problems and the variety of factors influencing the costs and benefits of nature conservation constitute a major challenge for calculating interorganizational efficiency in this field.
8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Ökumenisches Studienwerk e.V (Bochum) for this research. We are also grateful to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the stakeholders of the two community wildlife sanctuaries for making this research possible and providing us with both primary and secondary data. We would like to thank Heidi Wittmer for useful comments on an earlier draft of the paper. Any errors or omissions are solely the responsibility of the authors.