Waging war to save the peace parks: A study of militarization of wildlife management

Recent decades have witnessed an increasing militarization of wildlife and biodiversity conservation.

This trend has been most profound in African countries, where state agencies have responded to heavily armed poachers by providing rangers with more sophisticated and lethal weapons as well as more rigorous military training.

The consequences of applying militarized forms of conservation measures have, however, rarely been evaluated in empirical research.

The overall objective of this project is to investigate how military style wildlife management affect the effectiveness and legitimacy of conservation efforts in southern Africa.

It focuses on the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA) – a collaboration that includes five countries that show great variation in terms of the extent to which their conservation policies rely on military approaches – and will conduct in-depth interviews with managers and park rangers as well as implement a large-scale survey questionnaire among local communities and resource users.

This unique data, focusing on questions related to perceptions about enforcement frameworks and willingness to comply among local communities, has the potential to generate findings of both theoretical and real-world importance.

The project builds on the project participants’ experience of pilot-studies in the KAZA area and a memorandum of understanding with the park authorities is already established.