First published on 08/29/2015, and last updated on 03/03/2021
The success of preventing illegal wildlife trade depends on the engagement of the Indigenous and local communities who live with the wildlife
By Rosie Cooney, Chair of CEESP/SSC Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group
Indigenous and local communities are on the frontline of the surge of wildlife crime that is devastating populations of iconic species such as elephants and rhinos, as well as a host of lesser known taxa such as timbers, pangolins, and reptiles. Communities can be powerful and positive partners in tackling wildlife crime, and recognition of their central role is slowly growing. However, there is still a major gap between policy pronouncements and practice, and a need for clear thinking on how and where community-level interventions can effectively help combat IWT, and how this relates to state-led enforcement. A group of organizations – the IUCN CEESP/SSC Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group (SULi), IIED, TRAFFIC, the Austrian Ministry of the Environment, and the Centre for Environmental Decisions at the University of Queensland— with various other partners, are pursuing initiatives to highlight and better understand these challenges. This article sketches out some of the issues around communities and combating wildlife crime, and calls for experiences and case studies from the ICCA Consortium.
Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) is a major focus of current conservation concern and policy development. Recent high level summits and conferences include the London Conference on IWT in February 2014, and conferences this year in Kasane, Botswana in March and Brazzaville, Congo in April. The London Declaration notes that: “We recognize the importance of engaging communities living with wildlife as active partners in conservation, by reducing human‐wildlife conflict and supporting community efforts to advance their rights and capacity to manage and benefit from wildlife and their habitats” (para 12), and many similar statements have now been made in international policy statements. However, despite this recognition, within international discussions the emphasis to date has been strongly on strengthening (government-led) law enforcement and reducing consumer demand for illicitly sourced wildlife commodities. Considerably less emphasis has been placed on the role of the local communities who live with wildlife.
IWT has an enormous impact on local communities, who are affected by insecurity and the depletion of important livelihood and economic assets, while often being excluded from the benefits of conservation. They can also be very negatively affected by heavy-handed, militarized responses to wildlife crime, that frequently make little distinction between the illegal activities driven by large scale profits (crimes of greed) versus those driven by poverty (crimes of need). Most fundamentally, however, the long term survival of wildlife populations, and in particular the success of interventions to combat IWT, will depend to a large extent on engagement of the local communities who live with wildlife populations. Where the economic and social value of wildlife populations for local people is positive, they will be more motivated to support and engage in efforts to combat and manage poaching and illicit trade.
But where local people do not play a role in wildlife governance and management and where it generates no benefits for them, strong incentives for illegal use are likely to exist. Even the most focused and well-resourced enforcement efforts (which few countries can afford or have the political will to implement) will struggle to effectively control wildlife crime in the face of strong incentives for complicity by local people. An emerging, and worrying, dynamic is that responses to IWT often focus on tightening restrictions on sustainable use of wild resources. This can backfire, decreasing the tangible value of wild resources to people, engendering hostility or resentment toward conservation and conservation authorities/organizations, and removing legitimate livelihood options, so increasing the appeal of poaching.
However, there are good examples from around the world of governance models that empower local communities to manage wildlife sustainably and generate social and economic benefits. In a number of cases, these approaches have been successful in reducing illegal wildlife use – sometimes dramatically – and incentivizing strong community engagement in enforcement efforts. An international symposium earlier this year convened by SULi and partners explored whether and under what circumstances community-based interventions are likely to achieve success in combating current patterns of illegal use and trade of wildlife. The symposium– generously supported by GIZ, USAID, and the Austrian Ministry of the Environment (please follow this link)– brought together and examined case studies of frontline experiences across Africa, Latin America and Asia from communities on the sharp end of the illegal wildlife trade chain.
The symposium also convened innovative researchers from around the world dedicated to a diverse range of subjects, from the economics of the illegal wildlife trade, to using criminology theory to understand what drivers trigger wildlife crime. A key focus was to examine the potential of community-based approaches in the real-world context of rising profits from illicit trade, increased access to firearms by community members, worsening poverty in many areas, erosion of traditional governance systems, rapid urbanization and changing community value systems, and large-scale threats from climate change combined with progressive habitat erosion affecting subsistence agriculture.
Key messages from the symposium included the need to support and uphold community rights and responsibilities for managing wildlife and addressing the illegal wildlife trade (including recognition of the distinction between illegal, unsustainable trade and the legitimate, sustainable use of wild resources); strengthening community voices in the international debate on the illegal wildlife trade; strengthening partnerships between communities, state and private law enforcement agencies, and conservation NGOs; and increasing knowledge and understanding of the wide range of motivations and drivers behind the illegal wildlife trade, and evaluating the effectiveness of different types of responses across diverse contexts.
Do you have experience to share on these issues?
SULi and partners are taking this work forward through regional workshops to gather experiences and lessons learnt; engagement with key policymaking audiences; and development of a “Theory of Change” to understand and guide community-level approaches to IWT. We would like to hear from ICCA Consortium members from all regions of the world with experience and knowledge of these issues at the frontline, to be part of this effort and feed their experiences into the thinking, activities and outputs on this subject. One option under discussion at the moment is a policy brief with the ICCA Consortium highlighting the relevance and importance of ICCAs in this context, so please do highlight any ICCA-related experiences.
Please contact SULi Chair rosie.cooney at gmail dot com to get in touch. Look forward to hearing from you!
Featured image: Indigenous peoples and local communities contribute hugely to biodiversity by conserving their collective lands and territories of life. In this photo, Indigenous rangers in Dhimurru Aboriginal Area on the Arafura sea take care of a sea turtle. Photo: Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend
