Local community benefits from elephants: Can willingness to support anti‐poaching efforts be strengthened?

Abstract

Poaching of Africa's elephants has led to substantial population declines over the last decade. Local communities coexisting with elephants can play an important role in strengthening protection measures against poaching. Our paper empirically examined how the spread of costs and benefits associated with elephants, and associated ownership rights, influenced community attitudes to support anti-poaching activities. Based on surveys of 90 community members in the Zimbabwean part of the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, our results show that 92% of the respondents were unwilling to engage in conservation activities due to lack of financial gain from elephants. Local communities identified numerous benefits and costs associated with elephants. The majority (54%) of community members identified meat from the elephant as an essential benefit to their livelihoods. The most significant cost identified by the majority (60%) of respondents was crop destruction. The reported costs influenced villagers' perceptions of elephants with 71% of respondents stating that continued incurred costs has reduced their willingness to participate in conservation activities. More so, the majority (88%) of respondents indicated that these costs have led to locals supporting actions to reduce elephant numbers. Furthermore, 82% of respondents indicated a lack of remorse when an elephant was killed after destroying their crops, and 95% of community members identified that feelings of bitterness toward elephants increased as they encountered costs. Our results suggest that gaining local support for elephant conservation to be more sustainable in low income regions, the overall benefits from elephants should outweigh the costs they impose.

Community-Based Approaches to Tackling Illegal Wildlife Trade—What Works and How Is It Measured?

“…Case studies that did report livelihood benefits frequently highlighted income generation as an important factor in incentivizing communities to stop poaching. Similar results have been found elsewhere to suggest that financial benefits can significantly increase motivations for local people to participate in conservation and vice versa (Mamba et al, 2020;Ngorima et al, 2020). However, given that underlying motivations behind poaching can be diverse and extremely localized (Hübschle and Shearing, 2018;Lunstrum and Givá, 2020;Moneron et al, 2020), it is likely that non-monetary benefits to communities are also important for reducing IWT and the likelihood of ex-poachers reoffending.…”

“…However, top-down approaches, including the use of militarized tactics, often fail to account for underlying motivations behind poaching (Challender and MacMillan, 2014), and can worsen already strained people-park relations and lead to human rights abuses (Duffy et al, 2015;Massé et al, 2017). In ignoring historic costs of conservation, heavy-handed enforcement efforts can both remove incentives for local people to engage in conservation (Cooney et al, 2016;Ngorima et al, 2020) and provide incentives to engage in illegal behavior (Hübschle and Shearing, 2018;Lunstrum and Givá, 2020;Mogomotsi et al, 2020).…”

“…Generally, participatory approaches to tackling IWT where communities feel ownership of and can benefit from wildlife are necessary to build local support for conservation (Ngorima et al, 2020;Liew et al, 2021). Engagement might include involving communities in decision making and project design, implementing alternative livelihoods programs or mitigating costs from human-wildlife conflict (HWC).…”

Towards coexistence: Can people's attitudes explain their willingness to live with Sumatran elephants in Indonesia?

“…Behavioral willingness is often used as proxy for behavior as it represents openness to opportunity and readiness to engage in certain behavior under favorable conditions (Besley, Dudo, Yuan, & Lawrence, 2018; Pomery, Gibbons, Reis‐Bergan, & Gerrard, 2009). People willingness to live with wildlife is hugely influenced by the perceived benefits and costs of wildlife; when costs outweigh benefits, people will be reluctant to coexist or support conservation programs (Ngorima, Brown, Masunungure, & Biggs, 2020; Špur, Pokorny, & Šorgo, 2017).…”

Special Section on African Conservation: A periodic opportunity to highlight conservation science from Africa

“…We find that human-wildlife conflict continues to be a stark reality for communities residing in proximity to wildlife and is a critical challenge for conservation in Africa, particularly among agropastoral communities. Three of the seven papers address strategies to reduce human-wildlife conflict, ranging across a spectrum from reducing poaching (Ngorima, Brown, Masunungure, & Biggs, 2020) to rethinking the design of financial compensation schemes (Braczkowski et al, 2020) and to applying social science approaches to improve the understanding of social norms related to human behavior and conflict reduction (Perry et al, 2020). These papers suggest that there is no silver bullet for addressing human-wildlife conflict successfully.…”