Combating the surge of illegal wildlife trade (IWT) devastating wildlife populations is an urgent global priority for conservation. There are increasing policy commitments to take action at the local ...community level as part of effective responses. However, there is scarce evidence that in practice such interventions are being pursued and there is scant understanding regarding how they can help. Here we set out a conceptual framework to guide efforts to effectively combat IWT through actions at community level. This framework is based on articulating the net costs and benefits involved in supporting conservation versus supporting IWT, and how these incentives are shaped by anti‐IWT interventions. Using this framework highlights the limitations of an exclusive focus on "top‐down," enforcement‐led responses to IWT. These responses can distract from a range of other approaches that shift incentives for local people toward supporting conservation rather than IWT, as well as in some cases actually decrease the net incentives in favor of wildlife conservation.
Games as Tools to Address Conservation Conflicts Redpath, Steve M.; Keane, Aidan; Andrén, Henrik ...
Trends in ecology & evolution (Amsterdam),
06/2018, Letnik:
33, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Conservation conflicts represent complex multilayered problems that are challenging to study. We explore the utility of theoretical, experimental, and constructivist approaches to games to help to ...understand and manage these challenges. We show how these approaches can help to develop theory, understand patterns in conflict, and highlight potentially effective management solutions. The choice of approach should be guided by the research question and by whether the focus is on testing hypotheses, predicting behaviour, or engaging stakeholders. Games provide an exciting opportunity to help to unravel the complexity in conflicts, while researchers need an awareness of the limitations and ethical constraints involved. Given the opportunities, this field will benefit from greater investment and development.
An integrated understanding of both social and ecological aspects of environmental issues is essential to address pressing sustainability challenges. An integrated social-ecological systems ...perspective is purported to provide a better understanding of the complex relationships between humans and nature. Despite a threefold increase in the amount of social-ecological research published between 2010 and 2015, it is unclear whether these approaches have been truly integrative. We conducted a systematic literature review to investigate the conceptual, methodological, disciplinary, and functional aspects of social-ecological integration. In general, we found that overall integration is still lacking in social-ecological research. Some social variables deemed important for addressing sustainability challenges are underrepresented in social-ecological studies, e.g., culture, politics, and power. Disciplines such as ecology, urban studies, and geography are better integrated than others, e.g., sociology, biology, and public administration. In addition to ecology and urban studies, biodiversity conservation plays a key brokerage role in integrating other disciplines into social-ecological research. Studies founded on systems theory have the highest rates of integration. Highly integrative studies combine different types of tools, involve stakeholders at appropriate stages, and tend to deliver practical recommendations. Better social-ecological integration must underpin sustainability science. To achieve this potential, future social-ecological research will require greater attention to the following: the interdisciplinary composition of project teams, strategic stakeholder involvement, application of multiple tools, incorporation of both social and ecological variables, consideration of bidirectional relationships between variables, and identification of implications and articulation of clear policy recommendations.
Conflicts between biodiversity conservation and other human activities are multifaceted. Understanding farmer preferences for various conflict mitigation strategies is therefore critical. We ...developed a novel interactive game around farmer land management decisions across 18 villages in Gabon to examine responses to three elephant conflict mitigation options: use of elephant deterrent methods, flat-rate subsidy, and agglomeration payments rewarding coordinated action for setting land aside for elephants. We found that all three policies significantly reduced participants' inclinations to engage in lethal control. Use of deterrents and agglomeration payments were also more likely to reduce decisions to kill elephants in situations where levels of social equity were higher. Only the two monetary incentives increased farmers' predisposition to provide habitats for elephants, suggesting that incentive-based instruments were conducive to pro-conservation behavior; different subsidy levels did not affect responses. Likewise, neither participants' socioeconomic characteristics nor their real-life experiences of crop damage by elephants affected game decisions. Killing behavior in the games was 64% lower in villages influenced by protected areas than in villages surrounded by logging concessions, highlighting the need to address conservation conflicts beyond protected areas. Our study shows the importance of addressing underlying social conflicts, specifically equity attitudes, prior to, or alongside addressing material losses.
Wildlife crime in protected areas remains a major challenge to conservation. However, little is known about the role of local communities in providing information on illegal activities to help ...improve law enforcement efforts in protected areas. As an initial exploration of this complex topic, we aimed to understand the perceptions of law enforcement authorities working directly with local communities on the conditions under which local people provide information to park rangers, using Murchison Falls Protected Area in Uganda as a case study. We used semi‐structured interviews and questionnaires to understand the perceptions of staff from the Uganda Wildlife Authority and nongovernmental organizations. There was consensus among participants that people who provide information are those who have trusted relationships with rangers; interact regularly with community outreach rangers (either formally through community programs or informal socializing); and believe that the protected area benefits them and their community. All respondents believed that information provided by local people can enable the success of wildlife crime investigations, but that associated ethical issues must be addressed. This study indicates that engaging communities in protected area conservation is crucial for law enforcement efforts to be effective in addressing wildlife crime.
Developing interventions to change human behaviour at scale is critical to achieving the new Global Biodiversity Framework goals. One strategy that conservation practitioners can adopt in pursuing ...this ambition is to look for lessons from other fields engaged in sustainable development, such as development economics and behavioural science. Over the past twenty years, these fields have generated a large and growing evidence-base of strategies for improving key sustainability indicators in areas such as health, livelihoods and education. This empirical revolution has been accelerated by rapid advances in understanding the social and psychological foundations of human behaviour. In this paper, we identify three areas that can help conservation to bring behaviour change programmes to scale. First, conservation practitioners should develop expertise in human behaviour developed in the social and cognitive sciences. Second, conservation researchers should adopt empirical methods widely practiced in development economics to rigorously identify whether, how and why interventions work. Third, conservation should integrate with the policy institutions and systems to facilitate learning and scaling.
•Conservation should look to learn lessons from other fields of public policy.•Interventions must take account of the psychological foundations of behaviour.•Conservation policymaking should be informed by a rigorous evidence base.•New institutions and systems are required to achieve change at scale.•An ethical approach to adopting conservation behavioural programmes is required.
Not all group incentives are created equally Salk, Carl; Travers, Henry
Conservation letters,
January/February 2018, 2018-01-00, 20180101, 2018, Letnik:
11, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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How incentives are structured not only determines how much individual resource users can be influenced, but also impacts wider cobenefits, such as building the capacity of local institutions or ...changing social norms. The authors find that individual payments performed better in their experiment and note that previous studies draw the opposite conclusion, attributing this to cultural, political, and experimental factors. While Gatiso, Vollan, Vimal, and Kühl ( ) distinguish between payouts given directly to individuals or to a shared resource (a school), both Salk, Lopez, and Wong ( ) and Travers, Clements, Keane, and Milner‐Gulland ( ) focus on whose performance is evaluated: the group's or the individual's. ...the “equity‐based individual payment” (EBIP) treatment in Gatiso et al. ( ) is a group treatment under the Travers/Salk definition since payouts depend on aggregate group behavior.
In conservation understanding the drivers of behavior and developing robust interventions to promote behavioral change is challenging and requires a multifaceted approach. This is particularly true ...for efforts to address illegal wildlife use, where pervasive—and sometimes simplistic—narratives often obscure complex realities. We used an indirect questioning approach, the unmatched count technique, to investigate the drivers and prevalence of wildlife crime in communities surrounding 2 national parks in Uganda and combined scenario interviews and a choice experiment to predict the performance of potential interventions designed to tackle these crimes. Although poverty is often assumed to be a key driver of wildlife crime, we found that better‐off households and those subject to human–wildlife conflict and those that do not receive any benefits from the parks’ tourism revenue sharing were more likely to be involved in certain types of wildlife crime, especially illegal hunting. The interventions predicted to have the greatest impact on reducing local participation in wildlife crime were those that directly addressed the drivers including, mitigating damage caused by wildlife and generating financial benefits for park‐adjacent households. Our triangulated approach provided insights into complex and hard‐to‐access behaviors and highlighted the importance of going beyond single‐driver narratives.
Comprensión de los Conductores Complejos de los Delitos con Vida Silvestre para Diseñar Intervenciones Efectivas de Conservación
Resumen
En la conservación, la comprensión de los conductores del comportamiento y el desarrollo de intervenciones sólidas para promover cambios en el comportamiento es un reto que requiere de una estrategia multifacética. Esto es particularmente cierto para los esfuerzos que se realizan para tratar el uso ilegal de la fauna, en donde las narrativas generalizadas – y en algunas ocasiones simples – comúnmente ocultan las realidades complejas. Usamos una estrategia de cuestionamiento indirecto, la técnica de conteo sin par, para investigar los conductores y la prevalencia de los delitos con fauna en las comunidades que rodean a dos parques naciones en Uganda, así como entrevistas de escenario combinado y un experimento de elección para predecir el desempeño de las intervenciones potenciales diseñadas para acabar con estos delitos. Aunque frecuentemente se asume a la pobreza como un conductor importante de los delitos con fauna, encontramos que los hogares con mayor probabilidad de estar involucrados en ciertos tipos de delitos, especialmente la cacería ilegal, son los que se encuentran en mejores condiciones, están sujetos al conflicto humano‐fauna y los que no reciben beneficio alguno de las ganancias del turismo en los parques. Las intervenciones que se pronosticó tendrían el mayor impacto en la reducción de la participación local dentro del delito con fauna fueron aquellas que trataron directamente con los conductores, incluyendo la mitigación del daño causado por la fauna y la generación de beneficios económicos para los hogares circundantes al parque. Nuestra estrategia triangulada proporcionó percepciones hacia los comportamientos complejos y de difícil acceso y resaltó la importancia de ir más allá de las narrativas unifactoriales.
摘要
在保护中理解行为背后的驱动力并发展有力的干预措施以促进行为转变是一项重大的挑战, 需要采取多方面的方法来应对, 而在野生动物的非法利用问题上尤其如是。然而, 目前流行且有时甚至过于简单的方法, 往往会掩盖复杂的事实。我们用一种间接询问 （即不匹配计数） 的方法, 调查了乌干达两个国家公园周围社区的野生动物犯罪驱动力和发生率, 并结合情景访谈和选择实验预测了旨在应对这些犯罪的潜在干预措施的效果。结果表明, 虽然贫穷常常被认为是驱动野生动物犯罪的关键因素, 但实际上比较富裕的家庭、遭受人兽冲突的家庭和那些没有从国家公园的旅游收入中获益的家庭才最有可能参与特定类型的野生动物犯罪, 特别是非法捕猎。因此, 那些预计能最大程度减少当地野生动物犯罪的干预措施, 应直接针对那些引起野生动物犯罪的驱动因素, 包括减轻野生动物造成的破坏、为毗邻国家公园的家庭创造经济利益等等。我们的三边分析方法有助于深入理解复杂且难以获知的行为, 同时强调了在理解这些问题时采用超越单一驱动力分析的重要性。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】
Article impact statement: Interventions to reduce wildlife crime are most effective when addressing the underlying motivations of people involved in those crimes.
Community-based interventions are an important strategy to reduce bushmeat hunting, one of the key threats to African wildlife. However, understanding the possible effects of such programs prior to ...implementation is vital, in order to ensure that scarce funds are correctly directed. Here we used scenario-based interviews to explore the potential effects of seven programs on proxies for bushmeat hunting and consumption, including the provision of alternative protein sources, the provision of alternative incomes, and the harvesting of natural resources from protected areas. We conducted 250 interviews with respondents living around four protected areas in Malawi, and investigated how time budgets, household and village meat availability, and perceptions of fairness would change under each program. Respondents were most likely to substitute their current activities (including illegal hunting) under alternative income projects such as microenterprise and skills-training programs. All programs except increased enforcement were likely to increase the availability of meat in both households and villages. However, the effect of the scenarios on meat availability was perceived to be greater at village level than household level. Projects that provided long-term benefits such as a microenterprise program or skills training, were preferred over, and seen to be fairer than, programs relating to resource use, such as regulated hunting or park-based resource harvesting schemes. These results illustrate that programs that can harness development goals, while linking back to conservation rules, may successfully reduce bushmeat hunting and consumption around protected areas.
Tropical forest landscapes are undergoing rapid transition. Rural development aspirations are rising, and land use change is contributing to deforestation, degradation, and biodiversity loss, which ...threaten the future of tropical forests. Conservation initiatives must deal with complex social, political, and ecological decisions involving trade-offs between the extent of protected areas and quality of conservation. In Cambodia, smallholders and industrial economic land concessions drive deforestation and forest degradation. Rural economic benefits have not kept pace with development aspirations and smallholders are gradually expanding agriculture into protected forests. We examine the drivers and effects of rural forest landscape transitions in Cambodia to identify trade-offs between conservation and development. Using historical trends analysis and information gathered through key informant interviews, we describe how local communities perceive social and ecological changes, and examine the implications of local development aspirations for conservation. We explore three scenarios for the future of conservation in Cambodia, each with different conservation and community development outcomes. We contend that conservation efforts should focus on strengthening governance to meet social and environmental requirements for sustainable forest landscapes. We suggest potential entry points for governance improvements, including working with local decision-makers and fostering collaboration between stakeholders. There is a need for realistic priority setting in contested tropical forest landscapes. Prosperous rural economies are a necessary but not sufficient condition for conservation.
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