Despite a decade of rhetoric on community conservation, current trends in Tanzania reflect a disturbing process of reconsolidation of state control over wildlife resources and increased rent-seeking behaviour, combined with dispossession of communities. Whereas the 1998 Wildlife Policy promoted community participation and local benefits, the subsequent policy of 2007 and the Wildlife Conservation Act of 2009 returned control over wildlife and over income from sport hunting and safari tourism to central government. These trends, which sometimes include the use of state violence and often take place in the name of ‘community-based’ conservation, are not, however, occurring without resistance from communities. This article draws on in-depth studies of wildlife management practices at three locations in northern Tanzania to illustrate these trends. The authors argue that this outcome is more than just the result of the neoliberalization of conservation. It reflects old patterns of state patrimony and rent seeking, combined with colonial narratives of conservation, all enhanced through neoliberal reforms of the past two decades. At the same time, much of the rhetoric of neoliberal reforms is being pushed back by the state in order to capture rent and interact with villagers in new and oppressive ways.Benjaminsen, Minwary and Maganga received funding from the Norwegian Programme for Development, Research and Education (NUFU), while Goldman acknowledges funding from the National Science Foundation's International Research Fellowship Postdoctoral Grant #0602034 as well as grant #0921507