During its early years, Zimbabwe's CAMPFIRE programme was a highly regarded and influential national effort to promote community-based natural resource management. Despite the programme's early promise, however, outcomes in the field over the longer term have often been disappointing. Researchers offer various explanations for the uneven results. In this article we explore the idea that CAMPFIRE could benefit from emulating more closely the spontaneously emerging, community-level collective actions described in the 'commons' literature. Scholars of the commons identify several conditions necessary for successful community self-organisation for natural resource management. We examine discrepancies between the conditions identified as critical in the commons literature and the underlying conditions found in CAMPFIRE communities. These discrepancies both clarify the obstacles local CAMPFIRE projects face and suggest that the successful community efforts described in the literature are unlikely to provide a useful model in the CAMPFIRE context. We illustrate the discussion with references to findings from our recent case study of the CAMPFIRE project in Nyaminyami Rural District.