The CAMPFIRE program in Zimbabwe is one of a 'new breed' of strategies designed to tackle environmental management at the grassroots level. CAMPFIRE aims to help communities to manage resources, especially wildlife, for their own local developments. The program;s central pbjectives is to alleviate rural poverty by giving rural communities autonomy over resource management and to demonstrate to them that wildlife is not necessarily a hindrance to arable agriculture, "but a resource that could be managed and 'cultivated' to provide income and food". In this paper, we assess two importance elements of CAMPFIRE: poverty alleviation and local empowerment and comment on the program's performance in achieving these highly interconnected objectives. We analyze the program's achievements in poverty alleviation by exploring tenurial patterns, resource ownership adn the allocation of proceeds from resource exploitation; and its progress in local empowerment by examining its adminstrative and decision making structures. We conclude that the program cannot effectively achieve the goal of poverty alleviation wuihout first addressing the administrative and legal strictires that the country;s political ecology. ?? 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.