Conservation has historically emphasized protected area management including protecting land, fencing, local enforcement and rangers’ patrols within parks. And indeed, decades of protected area management have demonstrated that strong local protection matters enormously. But there is a weakness in this logic that we rarely confront directly. Protected areas can suppress poaching within their boundaries and in neighboring patrolled zones, but they cannot dismantle the criminal networks that finance, organize and replenish wildlife crime from the outside, which impact inside the protected areas as well as landscapes more broadly. As long as those networks remain intact, they will keep recruiting poachers, corrupting officials and — when conditions change (i.e. increased ivory prices, corruption in ranger units, etc.) — resuming operations. Focusing conservation investment exclusively on protected area protection, while ignoring the organized crime infrastructure surrounding it, is a little like trying to stop drug use in a neighborhood without ever addressing the criminal organizations supplying it. The pressure does not disappear. It persists and finds new ways. Golden lion tamarins rescued from the illegal wildlife trade in Togo. Image courtesy of EAGLE Network. The threat that lives outside the fence Wildlife trafficking is not a disorganized or opportunistic activity. It is a structured criminal enterprise, operating with hierarchy, logistics and, critically, access to high-level corruption within the institutions meant to stop it. When analyzing across more than 3,000 prosecuted cases in Africa undertaken by our team at EAGLE Network, a clear pattern emerges: Trafficking networks do not merely exploit weak enforcement…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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