Welfare and Distribution in State-Led Wildlife Management

The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation calls for the treatment of wildlife as a public resource and entrusts states as the primary management authority. As such and dating back to colonial law, states provide their residents with privileged access to hunting and fishing opportunities in the form of higher quotas and lower license prices. The implied value of these resident harvest privileges to state decision-makers is revealed in the tradeoff between foregone revenue-increasing opportunities from nonresident consumers and the preservation of access for resident consumers. We present the first natural capital valuation of the forgone welfare of such policies by recovering net present values for Wyoming’s iconic Jackson elk herd. Herd population dynamics and the legal and institutional context surrounding management and hunting behavior reveal three key findings: (i) the net present value of the Jackson herd is $207.5 million of which 76% benefits the State of Wyoming, (ii) resident hunting privileges result in a welfare loss of $11.8 million and (iii) a reoccurring policy proposal to increase “state protectionism of elk" by changing resident hunting quotas from 80 to 90% would forego an additional $7.8 million in welfare, but would increase the herd’s value to the state. While regional in its application, our use of policy simulations provides a generalizable approach to assessing the distributional impacts of current, not necessarily optimal, resource management tendencies.