Introduction

Recolonisation of native species typically represents an institutional change and reflects society's changing attitude to the species cost and benefit streams. When successful, recolonisation often influences the ecology and may come into conflict with existing economic activity. Such conflict may be particularly controversial and severe when the recolonised species are large carnivores, like wolves and grizzlies, which kill livestock and prey species with hunting and meat values. Recolonised animals may also induce conflicts with existing economic activities, like agriculture, including eating up crops and pastures and causing browsing damage. However, recolonised native species may also create hunting and trapping value or other types of consumptive values, in addition to non-consumptive values like existence value, tourist value and so forth (see Freeman 2003 for a general overview and Nunes and van den Bergh 2001 for a critical discussion of species valuation). In addition to ecology, these cost and benefit components and wildlife conflicts depend on the economic and institutional setting and there are obvious differences between, say, an East African region where people are located near wildlife with living conditions closely related to agricultural activities and, say, a region in Europe or North America where most people experience wildlife only through non-consumptive uses (Swanson 1994). The management goal will also generally differ. For these and other reasons it may seem difficult to formulate a general analytical model for studying economic impacts of species recolonisation. Nevertheless, this is actually what this chapter will attempt to do.