Potential for informal guardianship in community-based wildlife crime prevention: Insights from Vietnam

Abstract

The notion that indigenous people and local communities can effectively prevent conservation crime rests upon the assumption that they are informal guardians of natural resources. Although informal guardianship is a concept typically applied to “traditional” crimes, urban contexts, and the global North, it has great potential to be combined with formal guardianship (such as ranger patrols) to better protect wildlife, incentivize community participation in conservation, and address the limitations of formal enforcement in the global South. Proactive crime prevention is especially important for illegal snare hunting, a practice that has led to pernicious defaunation and which has proved difficult to control due to its broad scope. This paper uses interview data with community members in protected areas in Viet Nam where illegal snare hunting is commonplace to 1) analyze the conditions for informal guardianship in the study locations; 2) explore how community members can become more effective informal guardians; and 3) examine how formal and informal guardianship mechanisms can be linked to maximize deterrence and limit displacement of illegal snaring. Results indicate that conditions for informal guardianship exist but that respondent willingness to intervene depends upon the location, offender activity, and type of offender (outsider versus community member). While respondents generated numerous strategies for wildlife crime prevention, they also listed crime displacement mechanism offenders used to avoid detection. We discuss how informal guardianship can be integrated with formal guardianship into an overall model of situational crime prevention to protect wildlife and incentivize community-led deterrence of illegal snaring.

Addressing the Southeast Asian snaring crisis: impact of 11 years of snare removal in a biodiversity hotspot

“…Although this is not unexpected, since snare removal does not address the fundamental drivers behind snaring, our results provide strong empirical evidence that a multifaceted approach is needed that combines short-term immediate responses within protected areas, such as snare removal, with long-term approaches in rural and urban areas (Figure 2). Such long-term responses could include demand reduction for illegal wildlife products (Shairp et al, 2016), strengthened legislation that penalizes the possession of wire material inside protected areas (Belecky & Gray, 2020), community engagement that promotes local guardianship (Viollaz et al, 2022), improved law enforcement coordination and capacity (Dudley et al, 2013), and engagement with local judicial authorities to ensure appropriate prosecution and sentencing (Nurse & Nurse, 2015). Simultaneously, actions which support inclusive governance of protected areas and nature-based and nature-positive development opportunities for buffer zone communities are required to offset potential losses of income, ensure equitable benefit sharing, and harmonize both economic advancement and biodiversity management and protection (Borrini et al, 2004; Andrade & Rhodes, 2012).…”

“…Although several conservation actions have been proposed to counter snaring – including general demand reduction and shifting of consumer preferences (Wilkie & Carpenter, 1999), legislative reform combined with adequate prosecution and conviction of offenders (Gray et al, 2021), and supporting informal community guardianship mechanisms to maximize deterrence (Viollaz et al, 2022) – snare removal remains the primary strategy employed in Southeast Asia (Belecky & Gray, 2020). Snare removal is popular because it is straightforward and non-controversial compared to other responses such as arrest and prosecution (Belecky & Gray, 2020), and it will likely continue to prevail as the main approach to address snaring across most protected areas.…”

Perceptions of the COVID‐19 pandemic's impact on communities and wildlife trade: Preliminary qualitative analysis from hunters in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos

“…In Laos, hunters were interviewed around Nam Et‐Phou Louey National Protected Area, in Houaphan Province (Figure 2). Sites were chosen according to where the research team in each country had previously conducted research and built connections and trust (e.g., Davis et al, 2019; Viollaz et al, 2022), as well as the communities' proximity to protected areas. All study villages were within 20 km of a protected area in Laos: in Cambodia, all villages were within protected area boundaries; and in Vietnam, all villages were within 10 km of a protected area.…”

Using a crime prevention framework to evaluate tiger counter-poaching in a Southeast Asian rainforest

“…This evaluation covers eight years from January 2015-January 2023, in which we compare Baseline years (2015( ) with Treatment years (2018 following the implementation of the revised strategy. We examine the COVID-19 pandemic years (2020-2021) and post-COVID years (2022) separately. We use EMMIE (Johnson et al, 2015) as our overarching framework and have structured the methods and results accordingly (Figure 3).…”