Corruption and Organized Crime in Conservation

Advancing Applied Research in Conservation Criminology Through the Evaluation of Corruption Prevention, Enhancing Compliance, and Reducing Recidivism

“…First, it would be advantageous for empirical corruption focused IWT research to draw on taxonomies and typologies much like is the norm in other pursuits of conservation sciences. Corruption is not a monolithic behavioral category and while no singular definition of corruption exists, delineating corruption requires attention to power and the relationship between actors (e.g., Sundström and Wyatt, 2017;van Uhm and Moreto, 2018), the diversity of the actors themselves (e.g., Wyatt et al, 2018), and the distinct behaviors leveraged for gain by those actors (e.g., Wyatt et al, 2018;Musing et al, 2019). Research on the individual motives of corruption suggests the following causes for corruption: lack of supervision, low salaries, enduring poverty, lack of appropriate training, lack of resources, which often lead to a low morale, and a limited ability to stop poachers Tunley et al, 2017).…”

“…At the broadest characterization, one should attend to the scale and relationship between actors for any given behavior (e.g., Sundström and Wyatt, 2017;Musing et al, 2019). The issue of scale can be thought of as the relative power and influence of the actors involved.…”

“…For example, bribery among actors on a large-scale or grand corruption, such as politicians and industry leadership, can influence policymakers and result in lenient and biased legislation and regulations (Sundström and Wyatt, 2017;Musing et al, 2019). Bribery at a small-scale or petty corruption, among those charged with enforcing and obeying the laws (e.g., rangers, community leaders, resource extractors), can result in illegal resource extraction and compromised effectiveness of existing legislation (Sundström and Wyatt, 2017;Musing et al, 2019). Additionally, the actors themselves may broadly fall into the private and public sectors [see Wyatt et al (2018) for a list of common actors in IWT].…”

“…Instead of treating corruption as an anomaly, given its pervasiveness across case studies in natural resource management (Robbins, 2000), corruption should be thought of as the default state that all governing systems will settle on unless norms and institutions are put in place to prevent it and those norms and institutions are enforced and upheld. The socio-cultural context, therefore, weighs heavily on judgements on the acceptability of certain behaviors, such as clientelism or nepotism, among elected or traditional leaders (Sundström and Wyatt, 2017). For example, research in the Maroantsetra region of Madagascar found that residents' conceptualizations of corruption could not wholly be captured on the dichotomy of a moral deficiency vs. a normative behavior (Gore et al, 2013).…”