Conservation Law Enforcement: Policing Protected Areas

Abstract

This article examines how recent increases in commercial poaching of wildlife intensify the dictates that underpin conservation law and its enforcement; namely, the securing of space, punishing of transgressors, and protecting of nonhuman life. Drawing on ethnographic research with antipoaching personnel in Mozambique, I examine how rangers translate these legal and normative manifestations of conservation law enforcement on the ground and in their daily practices to police protected areas and the wildlife within them. This article makes two contributions. First, drawing on insights from the political geography and ecology of conservation with the political geography of policing, I demonstrate how territorial, sovereign, and biopolitical practices and logics coalesce to secure the spaces and the lives of the nonhuman from ostensible human threats. Second, it is rangers who are deployed as petty environmental sovereigns to achieve these objectives through often violent practices. Although many rangers might feel uncomfortable with the use of violence, their agency to commit or resist using violence is authorized, enabled, and constrained by the normative and legal structures of conservation law enforcement within which they operate. The social differentiation among rangers also means that some have more agency to navigate these structures than others. These insights help understand the actually existing operationalization of delegated and performative power over bodies, space, and the use of direct violence. I suggest that critiques of conservation violence, and the use of violence by those acting as petty sovereigns more broadly, should be primarily oriented at the broader structures within which they operate.

Resource managers' and users' perspectives on factors contributing to unauthorised hunting in western Tanzania

“…It is also said to cause behavioural disruptions and sex biases in target species (Corlatti et al, 2019). Therefore, controlling unauthorised hunting has remained at the centre of efforts to achieve sustainable conservation (Henson et al, 2016; Massé, 2020). Various approaches have been employed to deter unauthorised hunting; the most common ones include ranger patrols where wildlife rangers search and hold unauthorised hunters accountable for their illegal behaviours (Belecky et al, 2019; Henson et al, 2016; Moore et al, 2018), and integrated conservation and development interventions where conservation efforts take into account interests of local people (Harrison et al, 2015a; Jones et al, 2019).…”

Criminología verde, esfuerzo de aplicación de las regulaciones sobre vida silvestre en México entre el 2006 y 2020

“…En la ecología política, pese a analizar temas de conservación ecológica y biopolítica, la aplicación de la ley se utiliza poco, sobre todo en crímenes de vida silvestre, y de no emplearse, podría invisibilizar una comprensión crítica de las formas de poder asociadas con la vigilancia institucional (Massé, F., 2019). La ecología política se beneficiaría de la criminología verde, pues no sólo necesita interrogar críticamente y dar cuenta del privilegio de cierto conocimiento e ideas sobre la conservación, sino también debe deconstruir los discursos del crimen y la vigilancia que convergen en el crimen de conservación (White, R., 2013;McGarrell, E. y Gibbs, C., 2014;Massé, F., et al, 2020).…”

Identifying key risks to the achievement of protected area system objectives

“…Risk 8 is strongly linked with Risk 7, with clearly demarcated and enforced boundaries being considered as an important measure to reduce risks to protected areas posed by external pressures specifically (Alers et al 2007). The notion is that the first step to effective law enforcement is the need to establish protected area boundaries, which are physically delimited (Massé 2020). Massé (2020) highlights two main concerns related to protected area enforcement, namely the securing of spaces for conservation, and the second being to deter people from illegally entering protected areas and sanctioning those who do.…”