Although Zimbabwe’s natural resource governance structures and processes have for quite some time been “big-government” type—sectorally insular and overcentralized—recent reforms have created hierarchies that appear to address the scale problem. The country’s flagship in participatory natural resource management is the Communal Areas Management Program for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE), in which communities are empowered to manage wildlife and benefit from it. The program is based on the concept of the “producer community” as the basic unit of social organization through which communities can be empowered to manage local resources. The original idea was to focus on units at the subdistrict level as the producer communities (R. B. Martin, unpublished report) but, in terms of institutional scale, the program has been variously implemented at the levels of village development committees (VIDCOs), ward development committees (WADCOs), traditional villages, and even entire districts. VIDCOs and WADCOs are structures created under the Prime Minister’s directive of 1984, purportedly to give a democratic orientation in the process of planning for local development. However, they are demographically defined administrative units superimposed on traditional villages with which they do not correspond in terms of boundaries, membership, or roles. Although these units have each variously been assumed to represent “community,” the “communities” in which the local people have had a major stake in defining themselves and their roles and responsibilities have generally been associated with greater success, particularly where relatively small (Peterson 1991).