Modern Adverse Trends Which Affect Wildlife Management Efforts

Abstract

In this chapter I will reach beyond the conventional in wildlife management and ask some inconvenient questions which have plagued wildlife and biodiversity ecologists for some time now, with unfortunately few answers so far. Many of us, as we struggle with Dasmann's premise, have started to ask these uncomfortable questions about western understanding and scientific concepts as we apply them around the developing and tropical world. We ask questions about the production systems we, and this includes scientists, promote, the governance arrangements we help to put in place, and the stakeholders we support. We know well that we often fail to reach wildlife and wildlife-dependent communities alike. We also know that our favourite systems we like to promote do no work in the real world and that we are losing the middle ground (e.g. wildlife which can be sustainably harvested) of productive and healthy ecosystems. But we also have countries, places and projects where approaches have started again to reflect ethnic and national identities and do things better than western approaches. It will be clear that few of the trends driving the loss of the middle ground I describe in this chapter are reversible in our world. What can happen, however, is that communities and traditional landowners, the real guardians of wildlife, can claw some of the lost middle ground of productive wildlife management back.