Professor Rosaleen Duffy · First, a little bit about my background and research. I have been conducting research on the conservation landscapes and comme\൲cial poaching in Mozambique
Wildlife crime as serious crime• UN Resolution 2015,
Production of the idea of wildlife crime as global threat
The everyday
• Not always the spectacular, or armed
• Use of tech, eg drones, robotic sniffers, RealtimePlatform
What is the effect?• Re emergence of more
violent and forceful approaches
• Two way trialling and learning for conservation and for warfare
What are the problems with militarisation of conservation?
Defining militarised conservation
1. More forceful or armed forms of conservation
2. The development and application of military style approaches such as the development of informant networks, and counterinsurgency-like strategies
3. The use and applications of technologies originally developed by the military
Misunderstanding poaching and its drivers
• Colonial histories of defining poaching• Failure to understand structural context of
poaching• Militarisation treats symptoms not causes
Experiences of local communities• Mirror and recreate past injustices• Documented incidences of torture, rapes, abductions
and extra judicial killings• But communities can also welcome enhanced
security from conservation if it protects them from militias
Addressing ranger experiences• Ranger as hero can trap rangers – doesn’t
map well onto their experiences• Effect of surveillance tech on ‘working
day/working practices’• Rising rates of workplace stress and PTSD
Conservation in conflict zones• Partnering with military actors can deepen conflict dynamics• Claims about ivory/IWT funding terrorism poorly evidenced
but drive calls for militarised responses• Working with UNPKOS, national armies and PMCs carires risk
– taking sides, cannot assume they have a clean record in human rights and environmental protection
Political Economy of militarisation• Militarisation not necessarily driven by conservation
needs, but by seeking greater profits and new markets
• Intelligence- led approaches taken up by NGOs –risks to investigators and informants because they are not properly trained in handling sensitive data
Researching Anti-Poaching in Mozambique & South Africa
“currently the most critical piece of land on
the planet for rhino conservation. It is all
that stands between the worlds highest
concentrations of rhino and the world’s highest concentration of rhino poaching syndicates”
(IAPF).
GLC
Presenter
Presentation Notes
First, a little bit about my background and research. I have been conducting research on the conservation landscapes and commercial poaching in Mozambique and South Africa since 2012. For my PhD I specifically researched the responses to commercial rhino poaching in the Mozambique-South Africa borderlands, and to a lesser extent commercial elephant poaching in the Niassa National Reserve. Over 5 years I spent over 2 years in Mozambique and South Africa. In 2015-2016, I conducted an ethnography of anti-poaching. This included almost 6 straight months of living with and observing an anti-poaching unit in a private reserve adjacent Kruger in what is known as the Greater Lebombo Conservancy. The APU was managed by an anti-poaching NGO. I also interacted with state anti-poaching conservation law enforcement including Mozambique’s border patrol, environmental police, and Kruger National Park’s rangers in cross-border collaborations. I also visited Kruger, the Limpopo National Park, and spent a combination of 8 months in the town of Massingir, and surrounding villages, one of the centres of the region’s rhino poaching economy. This includes multiple visits and ongoing research with Massingir Velho that was forcefully removed from the LNP to outside of the Park. Anti-poaching efforts have intensified in this area of Mozambique because while Kruger is the most important site of rhino conservation and rhino poaching in the world, the large majority of rhino poachers come from the Mozambican borderlands crossing through the GLC. Indeed, it has been dubbed “currently the most critical piece of land on the planet for rhino conservation. It is all that stands between the worlds highest concentrations of rhino and the world’s highest concentration of rhino poaching syndicates” (IAPF). The majority of people in the villages and towns in the borderlands rely on subsistence agriculture and migrant labour to South Africa’s mines and plantations. The development of wildlife conservation based on exclusionary protected areas in the Mozambican borderlands over the past two decades (and arguably longer) has resulted in the voluntary and involuntary resettlement of villages and the curtailment of access to land, resources, and livelihood activities, including hunting and farming. Resettlement continues today, in part as an anti-poaching strategy, and is accompanied by increasingly paramilitarized efforts to combat the illegal hunting of rhino in Kruger and the GLC. Within this context, rhino poaching presents a lucrative opportunity with crime syndicates recruiting impoverished, vulnerable, and largely disenfranchised young men who can make several thousand dollars in two days’ work if they succeed in obtaining a rhino horn.
Militarization as Compromising Conservation’s Social and Ecological
Integrity
Militarization as Compromising Conservation’s Social and Ecological
IntegrityTo protect rhino (species), or to neutralise poachers?
Taking a Friend or Enemy Approach
• Community anti-poaching & conservation gone awry• Can’t do CBNRM and Militarization at same time in same place
The question at the core of this concern is what is the objective of anti-poaching? Protect rhino (species) or neutralize poachers? They may overlap but what you take as your starting point really matters for how you do anti-poaching and conservation. A military approach, and the bringing in of military personnel to lead anti-poaching, effectively turns anti-poaching into counter-poaching. That means it is less about protection the rhino, in this case, and more on catching and neutralizing the poacher. So, for example, we see APUs not organized around where rhinos are, but where poachers are suspected to be setting up ambushes etc which sets up a situation for direct conflict between the two groups. They are following the poachers, not the rhino or elephant. The expectation under military leadership is to shoot or otherwise neutralize. Despite what anyone says and what the laws on paper are, these areas are operating on model of shooting suspected poachers and are doing so under the command of military professionals. For example, in one incident in Mozambique, a ranger failed to shoot a poacher leaving the reserve and who walked past the ambush they had set. The ranger was formally reprimanded and was chastised by his colleagues and superiors for failing to shoot. This happened several times. The primary strategy of anti-poaching under this system thus sets rangers up to engage in direct conflict with suspected poachers. The use of violence in pursuit of neutralizing and punishing poachers is normalised leading to a ratcheting up of violence. Rangers beat and shoot suspected poachers, people retaliate and attack rangers, rangers then channel their anger and retaliate and vice versa.
Community Anti-Poaching & CBNRM gone awry?
Right-hand militarized orientation, left-hand community orientation - doesn’t
work
“The militaristic approach is eroding years of work in trying to build more positive relations between the reserve and the communities and to get people on the side
of conservation” (Conservation Manager, Mozambique, 2016).
• Focus on specific species, counter-poaching at the expense of broad conservation mandates– Shift in resources, attention, training
• Rangers trained in counter-insurgency, paramilitary technique, not ecology, biology, monitoring, conservation
• In Kruger, 90% of rangers’ time dedicate specifically to anti-poaching
• Whither the conservation ranger?
Presenter
Presentation Notes
While these social implication of militarization have arguably received quite a bit of attention, what gets less talked about is the impact militarization has on the ecological integrity of protected areas. The militarization of conservation is having real impacts on the ecological integrity of protected areas now, and is likely to undermine this integrity in the future. Of specific concern is how the increasing visibility and normalization of a nature under threat that requires a militarized or enforcement-first response not only serves to reproduce itself, but risks hi-jacking and undermining broader ecological and mundane conservation mandates and priorities required for the effective management of biodiversity in protected areas. This is exacerbated when military and former military professionals with limited conservation backgrounds are given responsibility to verse protected areas, rangers, and are increasingly influential decision makers in conservation. What was made evidently clear by many conversations I had with managers of protected areas is how conservation efforts in areas of poaching become increasingly focused on protecting a singular species, such as the rhino, from a particular brand of poacher using specific tactics rather than focusing on broader ecosystem health, functioning, and management. If not invisible, then at the very minimum they become marginalized along with other conservation priorities. A consistent theme in conversations with conservation practitioners was the need for funding for conservation activities that are not related to anti-poaching, but that are still vital. Rangers, conservation managers, and ecologists confirm how a focus on militarized anti-poaching, and the hiring of (former) military personnel, is having concerning impacts on ecological monitoring and assessments (Interviews 2016). They desperately described how they are not doing the mundane yet essential monitoring and maintenance work required to sustain the functional and ecological integrity of protected areas because the funding they receive is earmarked for anti-poaching. On-the-ground, conservation managers explain how if they ask for money for community development programs or ecological monitoring they hear nothing, but money for boots and guns for rangers is abundant (Interviews, 2015; 2016). One manager explained: “Before no one would go near equipping rangers, especially in terms of providing funding for firearms and ammunition. Now that is the easiest thing to support” (Interview, 2016). Recent research by SANParks officials, for example, demonstrates that over 90% of ranger’s time is dedicated specifically to anti-poaching and hunting poachers. Gen. Jooste, has repeated this figure. Put simply, rangers are no longer doing landscape and vegetation assessments, invasive species monitoring, ecological monitoring and so forth. As one official in Kruger National Park explained, now booking a helicopter to conduct what he calls “conservation” work such as “landscape assessments” and “vegetation condition assessment” is difficult as the helicopter has been largely monopolized for anti-poaching surveillance and the deployment of reaction teams. He explained, “someone had resources, they have control over the helicopters, and we ended up not doing [vegetation assessments]” (Interview, 2016). Another Kruger conservation official and ecologist explained how the park now has four helicopters but that “It’s very hard for me to get a helicopter to go catch a rhino [for biological studies]” (Interview, 2016). Frustrated by the lack of attention and resources for non-anti-poaching conservation activities, a conservation manager of a reserve in Mozambique has created a foundation to help private reserves in Mozambique pay for the everyday and mundane maintenance and conservation activities that are overlooked with the focus on the spectacular aspects of poaching and anti-poaching, yet are paramount to the health of conservation landscapes. The move away from conservation and ecology towards a more narrowly focused anti-poaching extends to the training and specific work of rangers as well. The same Kruger official quoted above explained how rangers “think their job is to wake up and look for poachers” (Interview, 2016). When asked if rangers are trained in “conservation,” he answered: “It’s not an emphasis from the organization [SANParks] that you must report biological observation out there. I mean, I said to them map up your water, because there’s a relationship between water and the rhino concentration. Very few came up with that.” I observed how the IAPF, among others, funds the training of rangers in paramilitary counter-poaching and the tracking, detecting, and neutralization of poachers with very little if any training on broad conservation management mandates and ecological monitoring. Effectively, rangers in many protected areas are now tasked almost exclusively with anti-poaching at the expense of broader ecological health of conservation landscapes. As donors and funders, I think it is important to remember that conservation is about much more than just anti-poaching. And that an unbalanced focused on the poaching issue risks creating more long-term damage to the ecological integrity of protected areas
• Focus on specific species, counter-poaching at the expense of broad conservation mandates– Shift in resources, attention, training
• Rangers trained in counter-insurgency, paramilitary technique, not ecology, biology, monitoring, conservation
• In Kruger, 90% of rangers’ time dedicate specifically to anti-poaching
• Whither the conservation ranger?
Presenter
Presentation Notes
While these social implication of militarization have arguably received quite a bit of attention, what gets less talked about is the impact militarization has on the ecological integrity of protected areas. The militarization of conservation is having real impacts on the ecological integrity of protected areas now, and is likely to undermine this integrity in the future. Of specific concern is how the increasing visibility and normalization of a nature under threat that requires a militarized or enforcement-first response not only serves to reproduce itself, but risks hi-jacking and undermining broader ecological and mundane conservation mandates and priorities required for the effective management of biodiversity in protected areas. This is exacerbated when military and former military professionals with limited conservation backgrounds are given responsibility to verse protected areas, rangers, and are increasingly influential decision makers in conservation. What was made evidently clear by many conversations I had with managers of protected areas is how conservation efforts in areas of poaching become increasingly focused on protecting a singular species, such as the rhino, from a particular brand of poacher using specific tactics rather than focusing on broader ecosystem health, functioning, and management. If not invisible, then at the very minimum they become marginalized along with other conservation priorities. A consistent theme in conversations with conservation practitioners was the need for funding for conservation activities that are not related to anti-poaching, but that are still vital. Rangers, conservation managers, and ecologists confirm how a focus on militarized anti-poaching, and the hiring of (former) military personnel, is having concerning impacts on ecological monitoring and assessments (Interviews 2016). They desperately described how they are not doing the mundane yet essential monitoring and maintenance work required to sustain the functional and ecological integrity of protected areas because the funding they receive is earmarked for anti-poaching. On-the-ground, conservation managers explain how if they ask for money for community development programs or ecological monitoring they hear nothing, but money for boots and guns for rangers is abundant (Interviews, 2015; 2016). One manager explained: “Before no one would go near equipping rangers, especially in terms of providing funding for firearms and ammunition. Now that is the easiest thing to support” (Interview, 2016). Recent research by SANParks officials, for example, demonstrates that over 90% of ranger’s time is dedicated specifically to anti-poaching and hunting poachers. Gen. Jooste, has repeated this figure. Put simply, rangers are no longer doing landscape and vegetation assessments, invasive species monitoring, ecological monitoring and so forth. As one official in Kruger National Park explained, now booking a helicopter to conduct what he calls “conservation” work such as “landscape assessments” and “vegetation condition assessment” is difficult as the helicopter has been largely monopolized for anti-poaching surveillance and the deployment of reaction teams. He explained, “someone had resources, they have control over the helicopters, and we ended up not doing [vegetation assessments]” (Interview, 2016). Another Kruger conservation official and ecologist explained how the park now has four helicopters but that “It’s very hard for me to get a helicopter to go catch a rhino [for biological studies]” (Interview, 2016). Frustrated by the lack of attention and resources for non-anti-poaching conservation activities, a conservation manager of a reserve in Mozambique has created a foundation to help private reserves in Mozambique pay for the everyday and mundane maintenance and conservation activities that are overlooked with the focus on the spectacular aspects of poaching and anti-poaching, yet are paramount to the health of conservation landscapes. The move away from conservation and ecology towards a more narrowly focused anti-poaching extends to the training and specific work of rangers as well. The same Kruger official quoted above explained how rangers “think their job is to wake up and look for poachers” (Interview, 2016). When asked if rangers are trained in “conservation,” he answered: “It’s not an emphasis from the organization [SANParks] that you must report biological observation out there. I mean, I said to them map up your water, because there’s a relationship between water and the rhino concentration. Very few came up with that.” I observed how the IAPF, among others, funds the training of rangers in paramilitary counter-poaching and the tracking, detecting, and neutralization of poachers with very little if any training on broad conservation management mandates and ecological monitoring. Effectively, rangers in many protected areas are now tasked almost exclusively with anti-poaching at the expense of broader ecological health of conservation landscapes. As donors and funders, I think it is important to remember that conservation is about much more than just anti-poaching. And that an unbalanced focused on the poaching issue risks creating more long-term damage to the ecological integrity of protected areas
Alternatives• Enforcement Side
– Invest in rangers– Invest in capacity to investigate and prosecute
• Formal law enforcement, not militarization
• Strengthen social integrity of conservation & protected areas– Actual ownership of and decision-making over wildlife and conservation– Not handouts to stay away– Hold those who use violence accountable
An urgency to think carefully and seriously about what militarized conservation can achieve and what it means for the social and ecological integrity of protected areas, conservation
landscapes and related long-term sustainability.
Presenter
Presentation Notes
I want to end by putting forward some ideas about alternatives to a militarized approach. These are ideas that are not simply mine, but are coming from rangers, conservation practitioners, and managers on the ground in Mozambique and South Africa. Some have even published ideas to this extent as a pushback against militarization and the use of violence. First, while people can be critical of an enforcement approach to poaching, and which in many ways I am, I acknowledge that a certain level of anti-poaching or law enforcement is necessary and that it is not going away. So from an enforcement perspective some key issues that I see might be helpful and that people on the ground are asking for are Invest in rangers The large majority of rangers are not acting out of heroic altruism, but are there because of a job. Improve their working and living conditions. Invest in capability to investigate and prosecute. This is necessary so that rangers do not feel they need to resort to direct physical violence. Allow due process. Hold security, anti-poaching, and law enforcement personnel responsible. Conservation and anti-poaching needs to be seen as legitimate, right now it is not because it is itself acting outside of the rule of law. And I think more long-term, governments, NGOs, and other organizations need to strengthen the social integrity of conservation and protected areas. This includes investing in ownership and management of wildlife and conservation for and by people within and adjacent protected areas. Not handouts to simply stay away from PAs and not hunt And I think it bears repeating: Hold security, anti-poaching, and law enforcement personnel responsible. Conservation and anti-poaching needs to be seen as legitimate and now as something that exists outside of the rule of law and a violent practice. Think carefully and seriously about what militarized conservation can achieve and what it means for the social and ecological integrity of protected areas, conservation landscapes and related long-term sustainability.
Conclusion
Finally….• It is vitally important to reflect on militarised actions
and interventions. • Failure to do so, especially in urgent situations, may
lead to a greatly enhanced willingness to use violence, with counter productive outcomes for people and for wildlife.
