The sleeping policeman: understanding issues of enforcement and compliance in conservation

Abstract

Rules governing human behaviour are at the heart of every system of natural resource management. Without compliance, however, rules are meaningless so effective enforcement is essential if conservation is to be successful. There is a large body of theory concerning enforcement and compliance with rules spread over several disciplines, including psychology, economics and sociology. However, there have been few attempts to extend this theory to conservation applications and there is little practical guidance for managers and conservation planners on the optimal design of enforcement programmes. We review approaches to understanding why individuals break rules and how optimal policy choices can reduce rule-breaking, highlighting research which has specifically dealt with natural resources. Because of the difficulty of studying rule-breaking behaviour directly, modelling approaches have been particularly important and have been used to explore behaviour at the individual, group and institutional levels. We illustrate the application of models of enforcement and compliance to conservation using the African elephant Loxodonta africana as a case study. Further work is needed to create practical tools which can be applied to the design of enforcement measures in conservation. Particular challenges include understanding the importance of violations of rationality assumptions and incorporating intertemporal choice in models of decision making. In conclusion, we argue that a new field of robust theory and practice is urgently needed to ensure that issues of enforcement and compliance do not undermine conservation initiatives.

National Parks in Northern Sweden as Refuges for Illegal Killing of Large Carnivores

“…Efficient law enforcement is necessary for all natural resource management (Keane et al 2008). However, law enforcement measures often lead to the criticism that PAs are created by and for an elitist few, in conflict with local community interests (Wittemyer et al 2008).…”

Evaluating the protection of wildlife in parks: the case of African buffalo in Serengeti

“…Declines in the numbers of large herbivores were attributed to cessation of anti-poaching activities during a period of economic decline. Analysis of the trends in the buffalo population over the whole area has suggested that population change was primarily due to illegal hunting, and that enforcement of wildlife laws reduced the illegal offtake (Hilborn et al 2006) a conclusion also reached for other areas (Hilborn et al 2006;Jachmann and Billiouw 1997;Keane et al 2008;Leader-Williams and Milner-Gulland 1993). Using 50 years of buffalo census data, Hilborn et al (2006) established that illegal hunting and enforcement activities could account for the overall trends in buffalo population yet examination of the buffalo total counts indicated variation in the buffalo population recovery; some areas have almost completely recovered from the population low of 1994 and other areas have failed to recover.…”

Modelling the effect of individual strategic behaviour on community-level outcomes of conservation interventions

“…Models of enforcement and compliance have generally assumed that individuals are influenced by their perceptions of the risk of punishment and the potential rewards (Garoupa 1997;Keane et al 2008). Few of these models have incorporated heterogeneity in individual characteristics, but the aggregate effect of individual differences in behaviour may have important consequences for conservation outcomes.…”

“…Rules are ubiquitous in conservation and resource management, and essential for their success (Ostrom 1990;Gibson et al 2005;Keane et al 2008), yet the question of how best to design and enforce systems of rules governing local-level resource use has been particularly neglected in conservation research (Robinson et al 2010). To predict the effects of an enforcement regime, it is not only necessary to understand how an intervention affects the choices of potential rule breakers, but also how it influences the behaviour of those responsible for monitoring non-compliance, and how these decisions interact (Akella & Canon 2004).…”

“…Models provide a powerful tool for exploring the implications of assumptions about how people behave, informing the development of hypotheses and fieldbased data collection (Keane et al 2008). Here we use an individual-based model (IBM) of a community-based conservation project to examine how the incentives faced by potential rule breakers and monitors are affected by payments and sanctions, and how their behaviours interact to determine levels of compliance.…”