Conservation and crime convergence? Situating the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference

The 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) Conference was the fourth and biggest meeting on IWT convened at the initiative of the UK Government. Using a collaborative event ethnography, we examine the Conference as a site where key actors defined the problem of IWT as one of serious crime that needs to be addressed as such. We ask (a) how was IWT framed as serious crime, (b) how was this framing mobilized to promote particular policy responses, and (c) how did the framing and suggested responses reflect the privileging of elite voices? Answering these questions demonstrates the expanding ways in which thinking related to crime and policing are an increasingly forceful dynamic shaping conservation-related policy at the global level. We argue that the conservation-crime convergence on display at the 2018 London IWT Conference is characteristic of a conservation policy landscape that increasingly promotes and privileges responses to IWT that are based on legal and judicial reform, criminal investigations, intelligence gathering, and law enforcement technologies. Marginalized are those voices that seek to address the underlying drivers of IWT by promoting solutions rooted in sustainable livelihoods in source countries and global demand reduction. We suggest that political ecology of conservation and environmental crime would benefit from greater engagement with critical criminology, a discipline that critically interrogates the uneven power dynamics that shape ideas of crime, criminality, how they are politicized, and how they frame policy decisions. This would add further conceptual rigor to political ecological work that deconstructs conservation and environmental crime

The Black Market for Wildlife: Combating Transnational Organized Crime in the Illegal Wildlife Trade

Trade in endangered wildlife has been a concern in the global community since the dawn of international environmental law. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), one of the most successful international environmental treaties established, addresses the issue through regulation of international trade in certain wildlife species. However, the effectiveness of the treaty has been greatly undermined through illegal wildlife trading. Recently, the illegal wildlife trade has attracted the attention of organized criminal groups, whose participation in the trade have helped make the black market for wildlife the second largest in the world. Providing stricter enforcement mechanisms for CITES and for prevention of organized criminal group activities in the illegal wildlife trade has become a primary focus for the CITES Secretariat. This Note considers some of the international mechanisms needed to achieve these goals, including enactment of legislation specifically aimed at wildlife crime, clearer definitions of culpability requirements, enforcement of stricter penalties for violators of wildlife laws, and extradition agreements between states. This Note also argues that the U.N. Convention against Transnational Organized Crime is currently the best mechanism for international enforcement of CITES

A web of harms: serious and organised crime and its impact on Australian interests

Overview This report analyses serious, transnational and organised crime and the harms it causes to Australia’s interest, with the aim of reinvigorating a discussion of this critical matter amongst Australians. This web impacts on our national interests to the sum of an estimated $15 billion per year. That very conservative estimate includes costs to government through denied revenue and increased law enforcement costs. But there are also social, health and economic harms to individuals, community and business. The report poses a series of questions to be considered by the community, business and government

Unleashing the Beast: Confronting Animal Trafficking as Organized Crime in the Americas

Wildlife trafficking is a serious yet often overlooked issue across the Americas. This Note examines wildlife trafficking across the Americas, analyzing the legal frameworks and challenges facing countries like the United States, Guatemala, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, and Brazil. Three key obstacles emerge: the lack of recognition of trafficking as organized crime, limited resources for enforcement, and deficient penalties. Though the United States has laws like the Lacey Act to address importation of illegally traded wildlife, weak foreign laws constrain efficacy. Many Latin American nations do not categorize wildlife trafficking as organized crime, despite its intricate parallels with activities like drug trafficking. Resources for enforcement are inadequate, exemplified by the Petén region of Guatemala, which has just five prosecutors for 36,000 sq. km. Penalties are also often negligible and fail to deter wildlife crime rings. However, recent developments like Peru’s Law 31.622 formally recognizing wildlife trafficking as organized crime, provide hope. The pivotal solution is addressing trafficking as organized crime, encompassing enhanced penalties, resources, and global cooperation. With animal trafficking profits rivaling arms and drug trades, it is imperative for nations across the Americas to collectively tackle this issue through a harmonized, stringent legal framework before countless more species are lost

The Impossible Mission: Global Justice Movement against Transnational Organized Crime

This article argues that the best counterattack against globally oriented transnational organized crime (TOC) is by a global response. The contribution of participating states and the creation of a collective identity against TOC are both necessary. This creation would be more effective through transnational social movements. Therefore, activating the global justice movement (GJM) against TOC would be a significant achievement. This has not yet taken place for both structural and ideological reasons which are on the surface quite rational. If GJM activists create a more unified movement, however, and adhere more strictly to non-violence as have other social movements like the Libera anti-Mafia association of Italy and Flare Network of Europe, there is potential for convergence

The Evolution of Threat Networks in Latin America

The economic and political environments in Latin America have been advantageous for local, regional, and transnational threat networks. Specifically, technology, increased international trade and economic interdependence, heightened interest in natural resources for profit, synthetic drug production, economic disparities, corruption, impunity, and unstable political conditions have led to a complex web of opportunities that requires new, progressive ways to address criminal activities. The creativity of threat networks along with their entrepreneurial strategies have resulted in increasing power and influence. Despite efforts by the United States and some governments in Latin America to combat these networks, the everchanging global environment has worked in their favor. Indeed, some countries in Central and South America are in danger of transforming into what Jorge Chabat described as “criminally possessed states.” Furthermore, gangs in Central America, especially in Honduras where MS-13 has become more closely linked to drug trafficking, have reduced local extortion, become more aware of their nascent political power and have even engaged in rudimentary social welfare provision.https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/jgi_research/1003/thumbnail.jp

Wildlife Crime and Other Challenges to Resource System Resilience

Although wildlife crime has exploded in Africa over the past decade —“commercial poaching” now kills an estimated eight percent of the continent’s elephant population each year—some governments have proven more successful than others at protecting wildlife and preserving habitats. To explain this variation, this study examines how the policies of three states (Kenya, Tanzania, and Botswana) have enhanced or undermined the resilience of the continent’s elephant ecosystem. Using the social-ecological system framework, the study illustrates how each state’s changing practices have either exacerbated the stresses wrought by wildlife crime or successfully protected local populations from poaching. The study finds that monocausal explanations cannot explain social-ecological systems outcomes. Cross-level and cross-scale dynamics, including temporal, geospatial, epistemological, and institutional linkages, explain variation in system functionality. These dynamics include colonial policies, governance practices, the international conservation community, and resource use decisions

Poaching in context: a critical review of the role that corruption and criminal syndicates play in wildlife crime in South Africa, specifically in so far as it relates to the poaching of rhinoceros

Wildlife crime is a longstanding problem. People have always considered living and non-living species as resources and tradable products used for pure economic gain, which then has a negative effect on biodiversity. In addition, wildlife crime involves poachers; armed non-state actors from source nations; international crime groups; institutional corruption across global network chains and a range of players involved in demand countries, which range from organized criminal syndicates, non-state actors and legitimate authorities. States and the International community are responding to wildlife crime in the form of law enforcement and regulatory initiatives. The question therefore arises, why does wildlife crime persist and what is the driving force behind these crimes and the people involved. For example, despite the broad legislative framework, the enforcement or rather lack thereof seems to be the reason that South African rhinos are still facing destruction. This paper aims to evaluate what the relationship is between wildlife crime with rhino poaching as a focus point, corruption and organised crime. It discusses the current enforcement framework, and investigates why the enforcement framework is not supporting the legislative framework. Lastly practical and structural solutions will be discussed and evaluated

Legality, criminality and agency beyond the state: forest governance, illegal logging and associated trade

This paper examines the disconnect between the literature on and practice of legality verification (LV) in the forest sector and what would seem to be a logical extension into the literature on and responses to forest crime and, more specifically, transnational criminality associated with trade in illegally logged timber. The apparently logical overlap between these two areas of endeavour arises because both are dealing with aspects of supply chains or chains of custody involving raw timber, forest products or timber products more generally. The disconnect, I suggest here, arises because of a lack of \u27joined up thinking\u27 between the two themes that are central to forest law enforcement and governance (FLEG) - that is, enforcement on the one hand and governance on the other. The former is frequently perceived to be relevant mainly to issues of criminality and the development of coercive responses by the state, the latter to normative standards and rules for defining legality and implementing verification in which actors other than the state have assumed a substantial role. The second purpose of this paper, then, is to explore the role of \u27agents beyond the state\u27 in the spaces of transnational legality verification and forest law enforcement. It does so as an initial response to the call from Biermann et al \u27to document these various forms of governance through which actors exercise agency [beyond the state] and ... to better understand the conditions for the emergence of agency at different levels and within different architectures.\u2