How Zambia’s Game Management Areas Work, And Why They Matter for Conservation

There are easier places to operate.

National parks with clear boundaries. Private reserves with controlled access. Landscapes where wildlife exists behind fences, separated from the pressures of surrounding communities. These are simpler environments to manage, simpler to explain, and simpler to defend.

Zambia’s Game Management Areas are not those places. They are working landscapes — complicated, contested, and in constant negotiation between wildlife, communities, agriculture, and time. Chiefs govern them. Farmers plant at their edges. The pressures are real and continuous.

These are also the landscapes where the long-term outcome for wildlife is actually decided.

What a GMA Is — and What It Isn’t

Zambia’s Game Management Areas were established as buffer zones around national parks — legally designated mixed-use areas where wildlife and human settlement coexist under a framework governed by the Department of National Parks and Wildlife. They are not parks. Hunting is permitted. Farming is permitted. Communities live within them, and their elected Community Resource Boards co-manage natural resources alongside DNPW and traditional Chiefs.

The GMA system is one of Zambia’s most important conservation tools. These areas protect wildlife corridors that the parks alone cannot sustain. A national park without functional buffer zones is an island — and isolated wildlife populations are, over time, declining ones.

But the GMA system only works if the areas within it are actively managed. Left to passive protection — rules on paper, obligations unmet — GMAs transition. Habitat fragments. Wildlife densities decline. Human-wildlife conflict increases as communities expand toward the rivers and lagoons that wildlife depends on. The economic logic that should make wildlife competitive with alternative land uses breaks down.

This is not a theoretical risk. It is a documented pattern across Africa wherever wildlife loses its economic connection to the people living alongside it.

How These Landscapes Are Governed

GMAs in Zambia operate through a layered governance system. DNPW sets and allocates hunting quotas, issues permits, and enforces wildlife law. Traditional leadership holds customary authority over land and community. Community Resource Boards, elected by local communities, co-manage natural resources and receive a legally mandated share of revenue generated by hunting concessions. Licensed operators hold Hunting Concession Agreements directly with government, with community obligations negotiated and signed before any concession is granted.

Conservation organizations working in these landscapes contribute scientific capacity, anti-poaching coordination, and community development support alongside the commercial and regulatory actors. In Mumbwa West, that includes Musekese Conservation and African Parks. In Chifunda, Frankfurt Zoological Society has been present in the North Luangwa ecosystem for 38 years.

Epic Safaris holds marketing rights associated with hunting quotas in two GMA areas — Mumbwa West and Chifunda. The licensed operators, Nedzo Safaris and Kovango Safaris, hold the Hunting Concession Agreements and conduct all operations under DNPW’s regulatory framework. Epic participates as a commercial and conservation partner, working alongside those operators and within the governance structures that DNPW, community leadership, and traditional authority have established.

Why Hunting, Why Here

In Zambia’s remote GMAs — areas with limited infrastructure, no established photographic tourism circuits, and communities far from urban economic alternatives — regulated hunting is one of the few models capable of generating consistent revenue from wildlife at the scale required to sustain conservation.

That is not an argument for hunting as the only tool. Photographic tourism, carbon finance, and community enterprise all have roles. But in areas where those alternatives do not yet function at the required scale, removing hunting revenue does not produce a conservation alternative. It produces a vacuum — and vacuums in working landscapes are filled by whatever generates the next-best economic return.

Wildlife must compete with other land uses. If it does not generate real, tangible value for the people who live alongside it, it loses that competition — not dramatically, not all at once, but steadily. A well-run hunting concession in a Zambian GMA is not a compromise between conservation and commerce. At its best, it is the mechanism that keeps those interests aligned.

Where Epic Fits

Holding marketing rights associated with hunting quotas in these two areas means working closely with the operators on which clients come and which professional hunters guide them — with a consistent emphasis on selectivity and long-term sustainability. It also means having an incentive to invest in the landscape beyond what any short-term commercial arrangement would motivate.

In both Mumbwa West and Chifunda, that investment takes practical forms: supporting community infrastructure, participating in the governance frameworks that bring operators, conservation organizations, government, and communities to the same table, and contributing to on-the-ground work that the operators and their conservation partners are already committed to.

The two concessionaires chose to work with Epic in part because of a shared interest in conservation outcomes. That alignment — between commercial partner, licensed operator, conservation NGOs, communities, and government — is what makes these areas function. It is also what this series documents.

All concession activity in Mumbwa West GMA and Chifunda GMA is conducted under Hunting Concession Agreements held by the licensed operators, Nedzo Safaris and Kovango Safaris respectively, and within the regulatory framework of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife of Zambia. Epic Safaris holds marketing rights associated with hunting quotas and participates as a conservation and community partner in support of those structures.