Field Studies in Environmental Criminology

Ben Stickle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032146331
• eBook ISBN: 9781000564839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book includes fieldwork from five continents and demonstrates the breadth of techniques used by environmental criminologists to understand crime.

Environmental criminologists seek to understand crime within the physical, and even digital, contexts where it occurs – believing that crime occurs when people converge in time and space and that the environment impacts the opportunity for crime. Understanding the environment aids the researcher in answering an essential question: what can be done to alter the place to prevent or reduce crime? However, to understand complex environmental influences, researchers need to engage in fieldwork. Fieldwork involves researchers entering the environment they are studying to observe, listen, and experience the surroundings in a way that influences their understanding of the place and people in the environment.

This book highlights the broad array of crime types – from package theft in the suburbs to poaching in the Nile basin – that environmental criminology is well suited to address. Finally, it advances methods and techniques, tests established protocols, and offers reflections on experiences during fieldwork, demonstrating the value of the techniques for environmental criminology and offering solutions to crime problems.

The chapters in this book were originally published in special issues of Criminal Justice Studies.

Provoked poachers? Applying a situational precipitator framework to examine the nexus between human-wildlife conflict, retaliatory killings, and poaching

William D. Moreto

ABSTRACT

The poaching of wildlife has received substantial interest from criminologists in recent years. In particular, prior research has attempted to better understand the factors that drive individuals to engage in such behavior. One driver that has been acknowledged is human-wildlife conflict. To date, however, there has been little research examining the situational factors that link human-wildlife conflict, retaliatory killings, and poaching. Moreover, there are few studies that have attempted to theoretically explain such convergence. Based on fieldwork in Uganda, and drawn from data collected from formal interviews, participant observation, and informal conversations with rangers, the present study demonstrates the utility of viewing the intersection between human-wildlife conflict, retaliatory killings, and poaching from a situational precipitator framework. Findings suggest that human-wildlife conflict can prompt, pressure, permit, and provoke individuals to engage in both retaliatory killings and poaching. Additionally, it was found that human-wildlife conflict directly influences community-ranger relations in Uganda.

Implications for theory, practice, and prevention are discussed.

Introduction

It has been proposed that the world is entering its sixth mass extinction (Ceballos, García, & Ehrlich, 2010). Concerns from the scientific community and the public (see Hilton-Taylor et al., 2009) have drawn attention to the ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel & Webber, 1973) of declining global biodiversity and increasing extinction rates. Historically, the study of environmental issues has tended to operate from a natural sciences orientation, however, scholars have recently called for the integration of the social sciences to better account for the human dimensions of environmental matters. In an article by Bennett and colleagues (2017), the authors identified 18 distinct conservation social science orientations, including environmental sociology, human-environment geography, and environmental economics, considered to be useful in such an endeavour. Notably missing from this list, unfortunately, is the role of criminology.

Although still relatively new in criminology, the study of environment-related topics has generated considerable interest from researchers in the last two decades. Specifically, criminologists have examined a variety of topics, including illegal wildlife markets (Moreto & Lemieux, 2015a; van Uhm, 2016; Wyatt, 2009), illegal fishing (Petrossian & Clarke, 2014), climate change (White, 2018), and wildlife law enforcement (Cowan, Burton, & Moreto, 2019; Moreto, Cowan, & Burton, 2018). In addition to these areas, one line of research that has received substantial consideration from criminologists is the poaching – or the illegal taking – of wildlife species. Indeed, poaching has received a considerable amount of attention of researchers from a variety of disciplines. Prior studies on poaching have largely focused on three main areas: examining the commission of the act itself (Moreto & Lemieux, 2015b; Warchol & Harrington, 2016), the framing of such activities and the associated harms that surpass the limitations of a purely legalistic perspective (White, 2008), and the driving factors and motivations that result in individuals committing such acts (Bell, Hampshire, & Topalidou, 2007; Forsyth & Marckese, 1993; Muth & Bowe, 1998; Von Essen, Hansen, Kallstrom, Peterson, & Peterson, 2014; Wyatt, 2013).

Based on fieldwork conducted in 2014, which resulted in 89 face-to-face interviews with law enforcement and community conservation rangers, this research contributes to the criminological study of human-wildlife conflict (HWC) and wildlife crime by examining the situational factors that influence both in Uganda. Using a situational precipitator framework, the present study assesses how HWC can prompt, pressure, permit, and provoke individuals to poach or illegally kill wildlife species. Additionally, this study examines how HWC influences community-ranger relations to further understand the immediate context in which anti-poaching initiatives are designed and implemented. Implications for theory and practice of both environmental criminology and conservation science are also addressed.

Poaching and poachers: a contested designation

From a purely legal standpoint, the terms ‘poacher’ and ‘poaching’ broadly refers to hunting or harvesting practices that contravene or violate local, national, regional, and international laws. The hunting or harvesting of endangered fauna and flora species, the hunting or harvesting of wildlife in protected or private land without prior authorization, and illegal hunting practices during legal hunting seasons (i.e. ‘spotlighting’ or the use of high-powered lights to identify and blind wildlife at night) are examples of what would constitute as poaching based on this definition.

However, the act of poaching and the resulting label of poacher to individuals who engage in such activities is controversial (Von Essen et al., 2014). This is especially the case for traditional hunting practices that have been deemed illegal, or when laws and regulations disproportionately impact indigenous populations. The social construction of poaching as a crime also contributes to this controversy. Scholars have noted that despite the illegality of such actions, poaching may not be deviant within specific sub-cultures. Such actions are deemed to be relatively harmless and do not ‘tarnish the identity of those who commit them’ (Phillips, Mitchell, & Murrell, 2014, p. 283). For example, Forsyth and colleagues (1998) conducted interviews with both poachers and game wardens in Louisiana, USA, and found support that poaching was viewed as a folk crime that had both instrumental (i.e. for survival) and affective (i.e. traditional practices) purposes.

Given the contested conceptualization and designation of poaching, it is not surprising that prior research attempting to develop poacher typologies has led to the identification of a wide variation of individuals and their rationale for poaching. Previous scholars have found that individuals are motivated to poach due to subsistence and personal use resulting from poverty, for commercial gain and profit, for recreation or thrill seeking, and for the attainment of pets and trophies (Leberatto, 2016; Moreto & Lemieux, 2015b; Muth & Bower, 1998; Warchol, 2004; Wyatt, 2013). Other researchers have found support for broader macro-level factors influencing poaching behaviors, including political economy forces such as capitalism and colonialism (Gibson, 1999), political rebellion (Bell et al., 2007), and longstanding cultural and traditional practices, such as the use of traditional Asian medicine (Schneider, 2012) or the consumption of bushmeat (Brasheres et al., 2004).

Prior assessments have also identified HWC as a main contributor to wildlife crime. Shepherd and Magnus (2004), for instance, found that retaliatory killings – or the killing of wildlife species as a direct result of HWC – were attributed to human-tiger conflict, and that such killings contributed to the inclusion of tiger products into the illegal market. HWC is one of the central problems facing conservation today and is likely to become an enduring issue given the growth of human populations and ongoing competition over land, water, and other resources between people and wildlife (see Campbell, Gichohi, Mwangi, & Chege, 2000).

Understanding the proximal, situational elements of human-wildlife conflict: implications for poaching and its prevention

Most of the drivers described in the previous section are distal correlates of poaching. Such factors tend to be enduring, multi-faceted, and very difficult to solve. Conversely, examining proximal correlates – or factors that are more situational and are explicitly linked to specific problems in a particular time and space (Ekblom, 1994) – provides an opportunity to develop strategies, including situational crime prevention (SCP), that can have an immediate impact in preventing or reducing human-wildlife conflict (HWC) and poaching (Moreto & Pires, 2018). As will be discussed in more detail later, by explicitly investigating the situational elements of HWC, a more comprehensive and holistic assessment of the social factors that influence such conflict can also be understood (see Dickman, 2010). While broader macro-level factors will undeniably exist, the manifestation of these influences may not necessarily be clear or immediately understood. Moreover, macro-level explanations may be limited in explaining the central situational elements that may promote or hinder HWC and subsequently retaliatory killings and poaching.

Environmental criminology concepts and theories are well-suited to assess and examine the situational elements of HWC and poaching (see Moreto & Pires, 2018). Although not explicitly operating from an environmental criminology perspective, prior scholars have assessed the role of situational characteristics in influencing HWC. For example, in their study of livestock predation by endangered African wild dogs in Botswana, Gusset and colleagues (2009) found that HWC declined as distance from protected areas (PAs) increased. Moreover, poor guardianship and place management, as indicated by ineffective husbandry practices during the day, also led to HWC. Similar results were found by Ogada, Woodroffe, Oguge, and Frank (2003) in Kenya, where the lowest livestock predation rates were associated with attentive herding during the day, and enclosure in bomas (traditional corrals) at night.

Environmental criminology approaches have also been used to examine poaching. The routine activity approach has been used to investigate trophy poaching in the United States (Eliason, 2012) and abalone poaching in South Africa (Warchol & Harrington, 2016). In a recent study by van Doormall, Lemieux, and Ruiter (2018), the rational choice perspective was utilized to examine illegal border crossings by rhino poachers in South Africa. The authors found that poachers preferred to enter and exit reserves where there were high densities of rhino. Moreover, they determined that high road densities were associated with the odds of an illegal entry. Notably, the study of poaching has also led to the extension of established frameworks as well. In their assessment of poaching in a Ugandan PA, Moreto and Lemieux (2015b) proposed that the routine activity crime triangle needed to be adjusted to account for the influence of different poaching techniques on the intersection in space and time between offenders and targets (i.e. such intersection would differ between poachers who use snares compared to those that use firearms).

From a crime prevention standpoint, researchers have also suggested the use of SCP as an alternative to traditional anti-poaching measures (e.g. ranger patrols) to prevent and reduce poaching (Kurland, Pires, McFann, & Moreto, 2017; Lemieux, 2014; Moreto & Pires, 2018; Pires & Moreto, 2011). These strategies aim to alter the immediate built and natural environment where crime occurs to make criminal activity riskier, more difficult, and less rewarding, while also removing potential excuses or provocations. The latter is particularly relevant to the current study as it provides an explanation of the link between HWC, retaliatory killings, and poaching of wildlife. Specifically, HWC events can incite individuals to engage in, or be willing to allow poaching or illegal kills of problem wildlife.

Situational precipitators: a framework to link human-wildlife conflict, retaliatory killings, and poaching

Situational precipitators are ‘any aspect of the immediate environment that creates, triggers or intensifies the motivation to commit crime’ (Wortley, 2017, p. 63). The situational precipitators of crime (SPC) conceptual framework was partly developed to address two main concerns levied against SCP during the 1990s: 1) its emphasis on target hardening strategies, and 2) its reliance on the rational choice perspective (Wortley, 1996). In a series of publications, Wortley (1997, 1998, 2001) proposed that operating from solely a bounded rational choice perspective (RCP) was inadequate in sufficiently appreciating th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Provoked poachers? Applying a situational precipitator framework to examine the nexus between human-wildlife conflict, retaliatory killings, and poaching
• 2 When a loved one is on community supervision: the crime controller strategies used by ‘PoPPs’ (parents/partners/peers of probationers and parolees)
• 3 Putting qualitative methodology in perspective: reflections on the relevance of fieldwork into the field of Environmental Criminology
• 4 Exploring the influence of daily microroutines on residential guardianship and monitoring patterns
• 5 Yelping about a good time: casino popularity and crime
• 6 Porch pirates: examining unattended package theft through crime script analysis
• 7 Fieldwork protocol as a safety inventory tool in public places
• Index