Green militarization

The steep increase in the poaching of charismatic megafauna – rhino, tiger and elephant - since 2005 has led to conservationists desperately seeking effective responses to disrupt illegal hunting of endangered species. One set of proposed responses relates to the implementation of military and security measures, including the use of military and para-military actors, strategies and technologies (Duffy et al. 2019, Lunstrum 2014). So-called “green militarization” often involves a mutually beneficial partnership between conservation actors, the military, private military companies or security companies (Dutta 2020, Ybarra 2018). Supporters of this approach argue that militarization is a necessary evil in order to deter armed and dangerous organized criminals from killing endangered wildlife and to prevent others from taking up poaching (Shaw and Rademeyer 2016, Hill 2018, Hübschle and Jooste 2017).

Beyond militarizing anti-poaching responses, scholars have argued that “green violence” reaffirms fortress conservation and uses the language of violence and war (“war on poaching”) to designate friends and enemies (Büscher and Ramutsindela 2016). The impact and consequences of militarized responses are far reaching. Other than elevating poaching to a national security threat and/or organized crime, there are long-term impacts on conservation practises, rhetoric, policy and interactions between conservation actors and other stakeholders (Duffy et al. 2019). Local communities have reported severe human rights infringements and overt violence by anti-poaching personnel, even murder, rape and torture (Hübschle and Shearing 2021).

Also compare with Section “Green violence and militarization at Kruger National Park” in Module 3.

Case study: Community game guards and rhino monitors in Namibia’s community conservancies

This case study describes the community game guard system initiated by community elders in Namibia’s Kunene region. A group of local traditional leaders instituted the auxiliary game guard system to curb widespread poaching in the northwestern regions of Namibia in 1983. At the time, they appointed six community members in key wildlife areas, who were to provide regular reports on human and wildlife movements within a 25 kilometer radius of their villages. The system relied on local knowledge and experience of the local population for the benefit of conservation while also providing a basic income to local families who had been affected by a severe drought (Owen-Smith 1984). The system of game guards was co-opted, adapted and rolled out by the NGO Save the Rhino Trust of Namibia, which piloted the community game guard system on black rhinos in the Kunene region (Uiseb 2007). Assisted by local leaders and community members, Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation (IRDNC), a Namibian NGO, created a network of community game guards who monitor rhino stocks and established a pilot project to bring tourism revenue to communities as an incentive for wildlife conservation (Jones 1999). Community game guards are locally hired, trained and deployed on patrols in each registered community conservancy. Incentive-driven conservation has created ‘allies on the ground’ and ‘eyes and ears’ in community conservancies.

This idea was further rolled out when Namibia’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism established the Rhino Custodianship Programme in 2005, which relocated black rhinos to their historical rangelands in community conservancies. The innovative programme achieved biological management while also providing local communities with income from rhino-related tourism activities. In 2011, Namibia’s Communal Rhino Custodianship Programmeasked for help to raise the rhino-monitoring capacity of community rangers. More conservancy rhino rangers have since been appointed. These rhino rangers have been given training and monitoring equipment and receive performance-based bonus incentives. This has led to an improvement in the quantity and quality of conservancy-led rhino patrols (Muntifering 2016). A notable innovation here was to combine rhino ranging with rhino-tracking tourism activities, whereby local trackers demonstrate their animal-tracking skills and local knowledge to tourists while helping save rhinos in the process. Rhino poaching decreased by 80 percent during the first five years of the roll-out of the Communal Rhino Custodianship Programme while rhino sightings have increased fivefold (People not poaching database 2018).

Case study: Amazon river turtles

In the Santa Sofia Indigenous Reserve, almost 40km from Leticia, Colombia, there is a local initiative aimed at involving indigenous communities in Colombia and Peru in the conservation of three Amazon River turtle species. Initiated by the Curuinsi Huasi Indigenous Association and facilitated by the BioDiversa Foundation, the programme recruits, trains and incentivizes local people as guardians to protect the turtles nesting on river beaches (endangered due to local consumption and through commercial trade). Between the programme’s inception in 2008 and 2019, the guardians have protected 470 nests and prevented the killing of 540 female turtles and 12 000 nestlings. This is done, for example, through monitoring main nesting beaches during nesting season from July to September. During the night, monitors protect nesting females from being removed and nests from being poached by fishers. Additionally, the nesting female tracks were erased to make it difficult for poachers to find the nests during the day, or if it was impossible to erase them, the nests were relocated within the beach area. From September to December, the turtle guardians continued monitoring beaches for hatching to start. When the turtles hatch, they record information and help hatchlings to get to the Amazon River safely. In 2012, 60 of the nests of the three turtle species were protected until they hatched; only three nests were lost due to human influence. Altogether, 1247 hatchlings reached the river safely. The guardians have a voice in regional discussions on illegal wildlife trade and nature conservation. The programme strengthens disincentives for illegal behaviour, including by paying salaries to community scouts, offering performance-based payments for patrolling or guarding, positions as unpaid (voluntary) community scouts, and in-kind payments to community scouts. Community members have also been raising community awareness about wildlife crime penalties and sanctions and strengthened and supported traditional norms and sanctions against wildlife trafficking.

Case study based on a case from the People not poaching database. For more information, visit the website of the Biodiversa Foundation.

Case study: How easy is it to get rid of criminal stigma? The case of the Pardhi in India

This case shows historical continuities of legal frameworks and that discontinuation or denotification does not undo colonial wrongs nor does it eliminate social stigma.

Pardhi literally translates to “hunter.” They claim their roots to the hinterlands of the central Indian jungles going back hundreds of years. Acknowledged for their exceptional skills in handling wildlife and their knowledge of India’s jungles, the Pardhis assisted in royal tiger hunts and trained the now-extinct Asian cheetahs, which they kept as pets and hunting companions. Archival records also show that the Pardhis hunted deer, boars, crocodiles and rabbit. The British colonial government labelled the Pardhis, along with 150 other tribes, as a “criminal tribe” through the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 (Sharma 2020).

The criminalisation sparked stigmatisation and marginalisation of the Pardhi community, whose members were also considered low caste. Only when the Criminal Tribes Act was repealed in 1952 were the Pardhis decriminalised and denotified.

Over the 80-year period in which the Criminal Tribes Act was in place, however, the Pardhis had been ousted from the forests and were often living in terrible conditions in camps on the fringes. They were legally prohibited from hunting and not provided with other skills training. Legal denotification did not lead to the erasure of the stigma associated with their criminalisation and the Pardhis, once a nomadic hunting tribe, were reduced to being settled without any rehabilitation measures. This also led to them being commonly implicated as offenders in nearby poaching incidences.

Deprived of their traditional livelihoods, there are reports of Pardhis engaging in illegal wildlife hunting (Wall 2014) but also the counter narrative of Pardhis being used for anti-poaching activities by authorities. To fight tiger poaching, conservation organizations have set up schools and training programmes, provided alternative livelihoods and put the Pardhis’ knowledge of wildlife to use. For example, some Pardhis have been recruited into anti-poaching units. This can lead to conflict within clans, however, as they may have to investigate and track their own family members; in such cases, protectors might be stigmatized as traitors and sell-outs. Becoming either a poacher or a protector is not a linear or a simple phenomenon that happens overnight. Rather, it is critical that this is situated within historical processes and contexts of moral boundary drawing.

Case study: The Bishnoi - Protests in support of endangered species protection

This case study shows how communities can exert pressure in support of the protection of endangered species. The Bishnoi community of India has historically protected forests and wildlife, and more recently, the community led a long-term protest which resulted in the conviction of a famous Bollywood actor named Salman Khan who had shot two black bucks.

The Bishnoi community follows 29 rules laid down by Guru Jambheswar; many of these rules are dedicated to environment and nature. The Bishnoi are also known as victims of the Kherjarli massacre in September 1730 ,during which 363 community members were killed while trying to peacefully protect a grove of Khejri trees. Soldiers had been sent by the Maharaja of Marwar Abhai Singh to cut the trees in the village of Khejarli to provide wood for a new palace. September 11 has been declared the National Forest Martyr Day in India to commemorate the Khejarli massacre.

For the Bishnoi, nature is sacred. In 1998, a local Bishnoi community member claimed that he had witnessed Bollywood actor Salman Khan shoot two black bucks. The Bishnoi pursued the case for 20 years to ensure that the actor received punishment for his actions. Ultimately, Salman Khan was sentenced to five years in prison (Economic Times 2018). However, the sentence was suspended pending an appeal in 2019. The Bishnoi said that they would continue to fight the case and no effort would be spared (Joshi 2019).

In 2007, they created the Bishnoi Tiger Force (BTF), an NGO for mobilisation and coordination. They have staged protests to protect trees along the road near Jodhpur after the Indian government announced it would cut them to make space for electricity lines. The BTF sat in protest and eventually saved the trees along the 30-km stretch of road (Parveen Rahman 2020). The Bishnoi are able to quickly respond to hunting and poaching incidents in their territory using their mobile phones and almost every family has a motorbike. Lawyers from the Bishnoi community come forward to help whenever there are poaching cases (Joshi 2019). It has been said that for Bishnoi conservation is a way of life (Parveen Rahman 2020).

Case study: Black Mambas and Akashinga

The case study of the South African Black Mambas is an example of local community members joining existing security and anti-poaching structures in a private game reserve. The case study on the ranger corps Akashinga shows how community members are recruited as park rangers. The case studies have been grouped together for one reason: both groups are all-women teams.

By bestowing its Champions of the Earth award to the Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit, the UN Environment Programme catapulted the unconventional anti-poaching initiative into the international limelight. With young rural women making up the vast majority of team members, the Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit is the first of its kind. Conceived by the warden of Balule Nature Reserve, Craig Spencer, the initiative was born out of the need to engage impoverished communities in and around the reserve. Although the unit’s members wear camouflage uniforms, they do not carry weapons. Their weapons of choice are notepads and pencils, which they use to document suspicious vehicles, people or activities. The primary function of the Black Mambas is therefore visible policing, as well as outreach and awareness-raising in their communities. The vision is to encourage communities to understand that their benefits will be greater through rhino conservation than through poaching.

The Black Mambas form part of a broader anti-poaching strategy deployed by the 40,000-hectare nature reserve in the Limpopo province of South Africa. Although Balule Nature Reserve has not achieved a zero-rhino poaching rate, the Black Mambas have been successful. For example, they have identified and demolished poachers’ camps and kitchens for preparing bush meat, and reduced snaring and poisoning activities substantially. Members of the unit also teach primary-school children about the environment and conservation through an environmental education programme. The Mambas’ pay is subsidized by the South African government’s Extended Public Works Programme; the reserve carries all additional costs and relies heavily on donations.

This anti-poaching unit has received its fair share of criticism. For one, there have been concerns over ‘unarmed women facing dangerous animals and poachers.’ Several conservation and community members felt that the Mambas’ role in visible policing and education undermined the role of women in rural communities. The functions of the Black Mambas are not confrontational, as the armed response element of the reserve’s anti-poaching operations is contracted to a private security company. The Black Mambas do, however, receive training in paramilitary anti-poaching methods, self-defence and arrest procedures.

Inspired by the Black Mambas, the International Anti-Poaching Foundation is testing a new community-driven conservation model called ‘Akashinga’ (Shona for the ‘Brave Ones’) in Zimbabwe. Although the model aims to build an alternative approach to fortress conservation and militarized anti-poaching responses, the women-only team receives the same law enforcement training as male rangers. The model aims to replace income from trophy hunting by empowering marginalized rural women through employment and direct benefits from conservation areas. The thinking is that trophy hunting is becoming less economically viable due to public perception, activism, constraints on hunting specific iconic species, import restrictions and reduced wildlife populations. This in turn may lead to lesser benefits from hunting to communities to motivate biodiversity conservation (compare with the case study on CAMPFIRE). Akashinga’s objective is ‘working with rather than against the local population.’ Unemployed single mothers, abandoned wives, sex workers, survivors of sexual and physical abuse, wives of poachers in prison, widows and orphans were selected into the initial team of 26 women.

What is remarkable about these models is the identification of women as a powerful and influential force within local communities. Although customary rules and traditional patriarchal cultural values in some communities may not advance women’s rights, rural women in southern Africa are inherently active citizens with clout and influence.

Case study based on Hübschle and Shearing (2018) and www.blackmambas.org and www.iapf.org