Protecting wildlife with local solutions: putting learning into practice

Before projects are designed, it is fundamental to recognise community rights to make decisions about, and benefit from, wildlife. While this is well-recognised, a lack of rights over resources and land remains a barrier to effective community-based wildlife management, and can incentivise engagement in IWT.

This means it is important to explore factors that motivate local people to participate in IWT – which can be varied and misunderstood. For example, human-wildlife conflict can drive negative attitudes towards wildlife, leading to retaliatory killings and collusion with poachers. Interventions must therefore ensure that they increase benefits and reduce costs from wildlife to incentivise support for, and participation in, conservation efforts.

The design of any intervention should start by listening to local needs and priorities. This is to understand and adapt approaches based on the local context, so that they respect and incorporate existing community structures and norms, building on them wherever possible.

Longer-term projects are also more likely to lead to trusted relationships between conservation practitioners and Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs), which should be developed over time from low key, but frequent, engagement.

Supportive partnerships that harness expertise from across different sectors are a key factor for success. However, community-based organisations and the people they represent should have overall responsibility for project design and implementation, with wildlife management structures devolved to the lowest level.

Although there is broad agreement that to be successful anti-IWT interventions must engage IPLCs, more needs to be done to ensure that the wellbeing and human rights of local people are not compromised, either by project activities or through a lack of government will to protect environmental defenders.

Conservation organisations must also acknowledge that past and present grievances, for example due to dispossession of traditional lands or the use of militarised conservation tactics, are likely to result in deep-rooted mistrust.

The final lesson – which is important for funders in particular – is to better recognise and support locally-led action to reduce IWT by removing the barriers that inhibit IPLC participation and to develop mechanisms for getting money down to the local level.

Same story, different ending? 

It is important to highlight that many of these lessons are not new, nor can they be considered specific to IWT, but instead reflect broader lessons from community-based conservation approaches. Many have also been highlighted in different ways throughout the LeAP project – for example the importance of decreasing the costs of living with wildlife at the IIED-hosted webinar on human-wildlife conflict, and as a key message from the National Dialogue on Communities and IWT held by our partners TNRF in Tanzania.

Similarly, ensuring local rights and ownership over wildlife, and a say in management decisions, were key themes discussed at both our ‘Community Voices’ events in London and in Lima, and also at the National Consultative Dialogue hosted by Zambia CBNRM Forum.

The need to build trusting relationships was illustrated throughout the examples presented at our webinar on community rangers, and finally in March this year a Q&A with Zakaria Faustin (TNRF) and Rodgers Lubilo (Zambia CBNRM Forum), showed the importance of multi-stakeholder partnerships.

But what still remains is for these messages to be fully integrated into the funding, design and implementation of future anti-IWT interventions, as well as into policymaking. This is because despite commitments made at international and national level, local solutions to tackling IWT remain overlooked and under-resourced.

We have the evidence of what does, and doesn’t work, and why. So it’s time to take these lessons on board and put what we now know about the value and effectiveness of community-driven approaches to tackling wildlife crime into practice.