Hunting in times of change: Uncovering indigenous strategies in the Colombian amazon using a role-playing game

Despite growing industrialization, the shift to a cash economy and natural resource overexploitation, indigenous people of the Amazon region hunt and trade wildlife in order to meet their livelihood requirements. Individual strategies, shaped by the hunters' values and expectations, are changing in response to the region's economic development, but they still face the contrasting challenges of poverty and overhunting. For conservation initiatives to be implemented effectively, it is crucial to take into account people's strategies with their underlying drivers and their adaptive capabilities within a transforming socio-economic environment. To uncover hunting strategies in the Colombian Amazon and their evolution under the current transition, we co-designed a role-playing game together with the local stakeholders. The game revolves around the tension between ecological sustainability and food security—hunters' current main concern. It simulates the mosaic of activities that indigenous people perform in the wet and dry season, while also allowing for specific hunting strategies. Socio-economic conditions change while the game unfolds, opening up to emerging alternative potential scenarios suggested by the stakeholders themselves. Do hunters give up hunting when given the opportunity of an alternative income and protein source? Do institutional changes affect their livelihoods? We played the game between October and December 2016 with 39 players—all of them hunters—from 9 different communities within the Ticoya reserve. Our results show that providing alternatives would decrease overall hunting effort, but impacts are not spatially homogenous. Legalizing trade could lead to overhunting except when market rules and competition come into place. When it comes to coupled human-nature systems, the best way forward to produce socially just and resilient conservation strategies might be to trigger an adaptive process of experiential learning and scenario exploration. The use of games as “boundary objects” can guide stakeholders through the process, eliciting the plurality of their strategies, their drivers and how outside change affects them

Hunters, poachers, stewards. What's in a name? Understanding the drivers of hunting through participatory modelling

Hunting is a widespread practice in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. It plays a key role in the food and income security as well as the cultural identity of millions of people. Together with habitat fragmentation and loss, however, hunting has been identified as a major driver of biodiversity loss with cascading effects on entire ecosystems. The decline in wildlife poses a dual challenge for both forests and the people whose livelihoods depend on them. In the Amazon basin, most rural and Indigenous communities rely on wildmeat consumption and commercialization for their sustenance. Although cultural identities and Indigenous rights over land and political autonomy are increasingly acknowledged, centralized approaches that alienate local resource users are still prevalent. Hunters are subjected to ambiguous law enforcement that disregard local interests and necessities and that often portrays them as criminals. The stigmatization of hunters and their practices hampers our ability to understand what drives their decisions and strategies. This ultimately risks jeopardizing people’ livelihoods while hindering the development of sustainable wildlife management practices. The current global biodiversity crisis and coronavirus pandemics are likely to further undermine Indigenous hunting habits by reinforcing the general negative perceptions. The aim of this thesis is to go beyond the status quo and provide a deeper understanding of hunters’ strategies, their drivers, and their adaptive capabilities in the face of uncertain futures. To simultaneously embrace the complex nature of the hunting socio-ecological system and its exogenous and endogenous drivers, I used a participatory modelling approach and examine the system through three different entry points. After a general introduction (chapter 1), in chapter 2 I examined hunters’ strategic response to socio-economic changes. Providing hunters with alternative sources of protein and income can decrease overall hunting effort but might focus it on smaller, more vulnerable areas. On the other hand, legalizing trade might encourage hunters to harvest wildlife for commercial purposes, aggravating the impact on the wildlife, unless competition and taxation come into play. In chapter 3 I looked at the factors motivating people to break the rules and enter protected areas. To achieve voluntary compliance, communication between different sets of stakeholders as well as a resource-abundant landscape are key. Past violations of the protected area and resources’ abundance within its borders can further encourage transgression. Transgression is a multi-dimensional concept. Relying on enforcement to achieve compliance can be both ineffective and counterproductive. In chapter 4 I moved to the ecological dimension of hunting and to the need of closing the gap between modelers and the decision-makers to whom our models are directed. In this method-focused chapter, I outlined the process of building an agent-based model on animal population dynamics while enhancing the participation of the local stakeholders. The overarching aim is to illustrate how to build a tool that hunters will be able to use to negotiate wildlife management strategies and their implications. Finally, in chapter 5, I bring all these dimensions back together and I provide an outlook on the current global stance on hunting