TNRC Publications

Corruption as an indirect threat to conservation

The Conservation Measures Partnership’s (CMP) “Direct Threats Classification” serves as a foundational tool for collaboration across conservation fields and organizations. It offers a common framework for identifying and addressing key threats to conservation. By utilizing this classification, conservation teams can identify potential oversights in their analysis or find new approaches for action. This guide builds on the classification to highlight how corruption can manifest as an indirect threat alongside each direct threat. Similar to the Direct Threats Classification, practitioners can use this tool to uncover any corruption dynamics they may have missed in their analysis.

Designing social norms and behavior change interventions: Guidance resources for conservation practitioners

This series of four guides offers practical guidance on the potential applications of behavioral science to enhance anti-corruption and conservation efforts. The first guide provides an introduction to behavioral science for addressing corruption's impact on the environment. The second guide offers insights on how red tape, a common issue generating corruption risks in the fisheries sector and beyond, can be tackled. The third guide explores the topic of collusive corruption and how it can be addressed using a social norms and behavior change approach. Finally, the fourth guide discusses the challenge of corruption affecting front-line wildlife defenders and possible anti-corruption approaches.

Integrating anti-corruption into traceability initiatives

This model results chain illustrates how conservation and natural resource management practitioners could integrate anti-corruption into their traceability or other supply chain initiatives. However, like any model, it is only a starting point, and it should not be used “as is.” Not every factor will be applicable or feasible for all traceability initiatives, and all require careful adaptation and integration into the specific strategy or activity that is being designed.

Social norms and behavior change for anti-corruption

This model results chain illustrates how conservation and natural resource management practitioners could leverage social norms and behavior change (SNBC) for anti-corruption. Like any model, however, it is only a starting point. The factors in this chain can be adapted and integrated into a conservation activity, or they could be used as one strategy targeting a corruption norm that threatens a targeted conservation outcome.

Transparency and accountability for market-based incentives

This model results chain illustrates how conservation and natural resource management practitioners could integrate transparency, accountability, and other open governance initiatives into a standard market-based incentive program. However, like any model, it is only a starting point, and it must be adapted to the specific context and objectives of a given activity. Not all of these factors will be applicable or feasible for all market-based initiatives, and all require careful adaptation and integration.

Integrating anti-corruption into law enforcement approaches

This model results chain illustrates how conservation and natural resource management practitioners could incorporate anti-corruption elements into a law enforcement activity. The chain focuses on the illegal wildlife trade, meaning here any unlawful activity related to profiting from fish, forests, and wild fauna. However, most of the information will be relevant to broader law enforcement against any crimes affecting the environment. This model results chain serves as a starting point and must be adapted to the specific context and objective of an activity.

Researching Social Norms and Behaviors Related to Corruption Affecting Conservation Outcomes

Corruption behaviors are complex, so research to identify ways to address them can be challenging. Responses to a corruption problem may focus on different actors and seeks to influence different social norms (SN) that might motivate a behavior change (BC). Not every corruption problem may be right for SNBC approaches and alternatives or accompaniments could include more transparency, increased scrutiny and oversight, or the introduction of technology. Identifying whether to use SNBC or these more “structural” amendments, and if SNBC is chosen, then where, how, and with whom to engage, will depend on multiple factors. These two-part Resource Guides introduce some foundational principles and common considerations for research into conservation-focused anti-corruption actions. They encourage conservation practitioners to consider their strategic interventions when addressing corruption and to question whether opting for SNBC approaches or "structural" amendments is the best intervention.

Translating political economy insights into conservation practice: A six-step guide to using PEAs to design and test theories of change for interventions to protect and defend nature

This guide suggests six steps for bringing political economy analysis (PEA) findings into a theory of change (ToC) for a project or program. It aims to provide a practical means for conservationists to navigate political economy (PE) in contexts where they work. While a ToC explains the logic of a project, a PEA, which looks at the influence of power, helps get to the heart of what needs to change for a project to work.

How-to Guide: Strengthening internal controls to prevent corruption in illegal wildlife trade enforcement

This guide was developed for program managers and donors who seek to understand and assess the strength of internal control functions in government agencies responsible for enforcing laws against illegal wildlife trade (IWT). It provides detailed steps and guidance based on experience implementing assessments of internal controls, but a scan of the guide may also be helpful for conservation practitioners who want to understand more about how internal controls systems should work to reduce risks posed by corruption. Such an assessment can aid strategic efforts to enhance the integrity of government operations and to reduce the negative impact of corruption on the enforcement of IWT laws. Though this guide focuses on IWT, the same approach can be useful in other areas of natural resource management, such as forests and fisheries.

Pathways for targeting renewable resource corruption: A summary of evidence

This brief summarizes empirical evidence and learning from research led by the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Center as part of the five-year, USAID-supported, Targeting Natural Resource Corruption (TNRC) Project. Using a political ecology approach, teams of researchers studied select conservation projects in Peru, Madagascar, and Vietnam. This country-based analysis was complemented with secondary data, including a systematic literature review of over 900 publications, reviews of official documentation, and environmental change data on deforestation. This analysis addressed the fundamental research question, “What factors condition anti-corruption success and failure in renewable resource sectors?” Five recommendations emerged for conservation practitioners and donors seeking to scale efforts to target natural resource corruption.

Guide to conducting corruption risk assessments in a wildlife law enforcement context

This guide is a high-level “how-to” for carrying out a corruption risk assessment in a conservation law enforcement context, using the Map, Characterize, Assess, and Recommend (MCAR) approach designed by the Basel Institute on Governance. The first section covers planning: the resources, timing, and other considerations for setting up the assessment. The second section lays out each step of the assessment, with tips, basic instructions, and implementation recommendations for each stage. Finally, the annexes provide sample supporting materials, including a simplified process diagram and map, a sample questionnaire for interviews, and a basic confidentiality agreement.

Conducting a corruption-oriented situation analysis for conservation work: Guidance from experience

This guide explains how conducting a corruption-oriented situation analysis can help conservation and natural resource management (NRM) practitioners understand and respond to the threats that corruption poses to conservation and NRM outcomes. It also shares lessons learned from three case studies where corruption-oriented situation analyses were conducted. Each case demonstrates the ways corruption may impact NRM activities and how practitioners can design projects that would respond more effectively to those threats.

Internal controls and illegal wildlife trade: A systemic approach to corruption prevention and law enforcement integrity

This brief highlights the importance and potential of robust internal controls in helping achieve the objectives of agencies tasked with protecting wildlife and the environment by identifying performance gaps and opportunities for improvement, enabling oversight, and fostering accountability. However, in some countries, internal controls are not always applied to wildlife-related corruption or even natural resource management. Conservation or anti-corruption partners can help government institutions strengthen their systems of internal controls, building on procedures already in place. Well-designed systems of internal controls can discourage corrupt behavior and mitigate other risks to wildlife and natural resources. While no system can completely eliminate the potential for corrupt behavior, enhancing internal controls can help close the implementation gap between agency objectives and what happens in practice.

The Open Government Partnership and Anti-corruption in Conservation: Templates for Collective Action

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a collaboration of over 150 national and local governments and more than 1000 civil society partners working to promote transparent, participatory, inclusive, and accountable governance. OGP offers a promising opportunity to bring transparency, participation, and accountability to the governance of natural resources, as participating governments collaborate with their civil societies to commit to concrete, impactful reforms to bring transparency, accountability, and participation to bear on the most relevant and important challenges those publics face. This guidance shows how conservation organizations can start taking advantage of OGP as a possible key platform for accomplishing conservation priorities.

Monitoring wildlife crime cases: A possible approach to reduce corruption in the justice system?

This practice note is based on interviews with 18 people who worked in or with justice systems in Africa, Asia, and South America, to understand their perception of the effect case monitoring can have on corruption in the justice system. Monitoring cases can help identify and highlight weaknesses in the justice system and reduce corruption vulnerabilities related to wildlife crime cases. But projects must be designed with appropriate scope and resources, as impact takes time and is difficult to measure. Monitoring is likely most effective when monitors use multiple cases to identify patterns of red flags that indicate systematic failures. This note recommends several good practices, based on the interviewees' and authors' experiences. However, these practices must always be tailored to a specific context.

Visualizing corruption risks in the illegal rhino horn trade supply chain

The rhino horn trade represents one of the four largest illegal wildlife trade flows by value and corruption is a key facilitator. Visualizing how corruption manifests along the supply chain can help conservation practitioners and wildlife management agencies better understand both the specific risks and the potential responses to combat illegal rhino horn and other illicit wildlife trades. This guide includes an infographic and accompanying text that maps the areas along the rhino horn supply chain that are most vulnerable to corruption and identifies feasible entry points for different anti-corruption approaches.

How political economy analysis can support corruption risk assessments to strengthen law enforcement against wildlife crimes

This practice note summarizes the value added and key insights of using two analytical approaches, political economy analysis and corruption risk assessment, to help natural resource management and conservation practitioners understand corruption risks in specific contexts and design and implement mitigation measures. These techniques take prevailing political and power dynamics into account and help identify windows of opportunity for addressing corruption risks and highlight strategically important stakeholders that may support or oppose the intervention.

Tracking the trade: Increasing efficiency and transparency in Tanzania's timber sector

The forestry sector is immensely important to Tanzania’s economy but corruption robs much of the revenue and the government's ability to effectively manage timber harvesting. This practice note from TNRC partner TRAFFIC explores how the timber tracking system has improved data management and traceability along Tanzania's timber products supply chain. Additionally, it shares the experiences, views, gaps, and challenges encountered and suggestions for further improvements of the frontline users of the system.

Corruption in community-based conservation: A synthesis of lessons

This TNRC Topic Brief examines the key design features of Community Based Conservation (CBC), focusing on the impact of corruption in the establishment and operation of CBC projects, to draw out lessons for conservation and NRM practitioners. Achieving the promise of CBC requires mitigating power imbalances, securing land tenure, and equitably sharing revenue. When these features are lacking, corruption risks and impact on CBC projects grows. That corruption may take two broad forms: (i) political and administrative corruption involving the commission of corrupt practices or omission of duties by public officials, and (ii) elite capture, bribery, and collusion in the collection and investment of CBC project revenues.

Corruption risks and anti-corruption responses in sustainable livelihood interventions

Sustainable livelihood projects can be vulnerable to corruption risks that may contribute to further social and environmental damage. This guide has been developed for programming designers and implementers aiming to reduce corruption's impact on community-based conservation initiatives. It contains three modules exploring the corruption opportunities, power, and justifications that might manifest in three typical sustainable livelihood interventions. Each module identifies corruption risks in that activity type and anti-corruption responses that have been tried or can be considered to address those risks.

Community forestry and reducing corruption: Perspectives from the Peruvian Amazon

Indigenous communities play an essential role in successful forest conservation. Community Forest Management (CFM) is a tool that promotes the participation of Indigenous peoples in forest conservation and sustainable management by preventing abuses from third parties and community leaders that could act against the common interest. While CFM has led to many positive results, a variety of obstacles inhibit Indigenous communities’ involvement in CFM-based legal timber harvesting, such as forest-related corruption, a lack of technical and financial support, bureaucratic barriers, and lack of capacity. This Brief aims to help fill knowledge gaps, generating recommendations to strengthen initiatives that promote the participation of Indigenous communities in forest conservation and sustainable management.

Open secrets: Corruption in Free Trade and Special Economic Zones as an enabler for illegal wildlife trade

This paper presents three case studies that portray how FTZs/SEZs’ characteristics contribute both to IWT and corruption, while also demonstrating that wildlife trafficking is merely an expression of the multiple illicit economies that can take place in FTZs/SEZs in the absence of adequate controls. These cases also demonstrate that the corrupt practices within these areas do not necessarily differ from other forms of corruption happening elsewhere in the country, region, or trade chain. Rather, what makes FTZs/SEZs particularly interesting for illicit trade is the additional layer of opaqueness and complexity that they pose for local authorities.

Where are the weakest links in the illegal wildlife trade enforcement chain? Lessons from corruption risk assessments with agencies in three countries

This note has a dual focus. First, it summarizes experiences and lessons from conducting CRAs with authorities responsible for investigations and prosecutions of IWT cases in three countries in Africa and Latin America. It seeks to demonstrate the value of adopting a collaborative approach to CRAs, illustrates potential avenues for pursuing such an approach when the right factors are in place, and demonstrates how mapping the criminal justice process provides a solid starting point to identify critical vulnerabilities. Second, this note highlights some common risks that emerged from the CRAs in the three countries and that may negatively affect the progress of IWT cases in other countries.

Anti-corruption Programming in Conservation and Natural Resource Management: Principles for Getting Started

This short reference guide is intended to assist conservation practitioners who are considering undertaking an anti-corruption project or adding an anti-corruption component to their work. It outlines eight principles based on learning from supporting pilot projects with WWF practitioners in widely varying contexts using different approaches. A key message is that anti-corruption projects tend to be most successful when they respond to specific corruption problems from a systemic perspective, in a manner that is appropriate to a given context.

On the case: Identifying corruption by reviewing wildlife crime court cases in southern Africa

Corruption is a key enabler of wildlife crimes. For agencies and organizations focused on curbing the illegal wildlife trade, reviewing historical cases can be useful to establish a baseline of knowledge on court performance. Such reviews can inform the design of interventions that build the capacity of investigators, prosecutors, and the judiciary to target higher-level organizers and financiers. This practice note outlines learning from TRAFFIC's review of wildlife crime court cases in southern Africa to assess missed opportunities to identify corruption, and barriers to investigating and charging corrupt actors.

Beyond the institutional fix? The potential of strategic litigation to target natural resource corruption

In many contexts in which conservation and natural resource management practitioners work, ineffective environmental regulations and the rule of law deficits have led to irreparable social and environmental damage. Corruption has enabled this damage, undermining regulations and promoting impunity for violating laws or causing harm. Strategic litigation is the pursuit of court-based strategies in the public interest to bring about social change beyond the individual case. Conservation and natural resource management practitioners can learn important lessons from past strategic litigation efforts in the field of natural resource governance.

Monitoring, evaluation, and learning for anti-corruption projects: What conservation practitioners need to know

Conservationists and natural resource management practitioners looking to address corruption that affects the objectives of their work will need to develop comprehensive monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) plans that employ a range of evaluative concepts and methods, as well as ethical procedures common to research activities. Fortunately, there is a wealth of information available on both time-tested and experimental approaches. This introductory overview provides a summary of approaches that program designers, program managers, and MEL specialists should consider.

Building Transparency and Accountability in Natural Resource Management (NRM): The Role of Social Accountability and Civic Participation in Addressing Corruption in the NRM Sector

Social accountability is an approach that relies on civic engagement to exact accountability. The aim is to strengthen citizens’ mobilization and voice, support citizen-generated information, and provide spaces for organized citizens to engage with power-holders to influence decision making and hold them accountable. Using three case studies from CARE’s natural resource management (NRM) projects in Uganda, Vietnam, and Nepal, this paper examines the policies, social norms, tools, and approaches that created an enabling environment for effective governance and, by extension, might have contributed to the prevention and reduction of corruption in NRM.

Examining social accountability as an anti-corruption approach in conservation and natural resource management

With increasing reliance on local and community-based management approaches in natural resource management and conservation, the ways that corruption affects local processes is a growing concern. Social accountability shares important characteristics of anti-corruption strategies, especially its emphasis on transparency, accountability, and voice in citizen-based approaches for holding authorities to account. Conservation practitioners can draw on a wide range of resources introduced in this overview to assess the context for social accountability and to design and implement appropriate support for social accountability initiatives.

Anti-corruption and equitable benefit sharing in Kenya’s wildlife and forest sectors: Gaps and lessons

Equitable sharing of the benefits of conservation is essential to successful conservation efforts and sustainable use of natural resources. Effective benefit sharing, facilitated by transparent and informed decision-making, can help build community partnerships and support for conservation, facilitate law enforcement, and prevent conflicts and corruption. Recent changes in Kenya’s legal frameworks for managing wildlife and forests have reformed benefit sharing between state or private investors and local communities. Conservation interventions increasingly build on the opportunities provided by these institutional and legal reforms.

Targeting Profit: Non-Conviction Based Forfeiture in Environmental Crime

Non-conviction based forfeiture can be an effective way to target the profits from environmental crimes where corruption and money laundering are frequently significant components. Practitioners, policymakers, and donors may have different opportunities for action related to the use of asset forfeiture for addressing environmental crime and the corruption that enables it.

Beneficial ownership transparency and natural resource corruption

Beneficial ownership transparency (BOT) aims to uncover the identity of “beneficial owners” who ultimately control assets. BOT allows law enforcement and the public to track bad actors’ connections to other businesses and hold them accountable for any corruption, illegal activities, or illicit fund transfers. For the conservation and natural resource management community, progress in BOT could play a significant role in deterring corruption, particularly corruption that can infiltrate resource supply chains.

Beneficial ownership in the fishing sector and links to corruption

Complex corporate structures and jurisdictions that allow or encourage the use of mechanisms like flags of convenience and financial secrecy jurisdictions, obscure the identity of beneficial owners in the fisheries sector. The lack of transparency, oversight, standardized rules, and enforcement around beneficial ownership facilitates corruption and complicates efforts to combat IUU fishing. Large-scale reforms are needed to improve regulation and prevent the exploitation of opaque jurisdictions and flag states that facilitate illegal fishing.

The Impacts of Infrastructure Sector Corruption on Conservation

Corruption early in the infrastructure lifecycle creates cascading negative effects and significant conservation impacts. Within infrastructure, the conservation impacts of grand corruption are greater than those of petty corruption. Anti-corruption strategies to increase integrity, transparency, and accountability can reduce these impacts but require complementary advocacy efforts and direct action.

Corruption definitions and their implications for targeting natural resource corruption

This Brief addresses how understandings of corruption have changed over time, particularly focusing on the practical implications of definitions for how we address corruption. It provides conservation and NRM practitioners with a short overview of the range of corruption definitions that they may encounter and underlines how our place in and view of the world (referred to as “positionality”) shapes our understanding of corruption challenges, as well as the anti-corruption responses we formulate and implement.

Traceability systems: Potential tools to deter illegality and corruption in the timber and fish sectors?

Illegal logging, fishing, and the associated trade in their products are major threats to sustainability and are often abetted by corruption. One reason that the illegal timber and fish trade and the corruption that facilitates it have flourished is that it is possible and often easy to “launder” illegal products in ways that make them difficult to distinguish from legal ones. This Brief finds vulnerabilities in some traceability systems that reduce their effectiveness in preventing laundering and combating illegality and corruption. While they can be strengthened in a variety of ways, the efficacy of traceability systems as anti-crime/corruption tools will always be conditional upon the will and capacity of authorities to act on the information the systems provide.

Natural resources, human rights, and corruption: What are the connections?

Corruption undermines the realization of human rights and may also constitute a human rights violation in itself. Using two examples, this brief explores how examining corruption through a human rights lens might deepen understanding of the impact of corruption on conservation and natural resource management outcomes, and provide avenues for addressing corruption.

The International Links of Peruvian Illegal Timber: A Trade Discrepancy Analysis

International trade and the infrastructure that supports it (regulations, institutions, practices) are important drivers and enablers of the illegal timber trade in Peru. This paper's Trade Discrepancy Analysis (TDA) identifies significant and consistent discrepancies in the international trade of wood and wood products coming out of Peru. Commerce data between Peru and it’s most important trading partners flagged specific issues that could potentially be related to illegal acts such as tax evasion, fraud, or money laundering. The analysis suggests that the ease to perform all these acts though trade mis-invoicing, in a context of increasing global demand for timber products, are factors that drive and facilitate illicit timber in Peru.

Corruption in the Fisheries Sector: Import Controls, Transparency, and WWF Practice

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing is a huge global problem estimated to cost the global economy between 15 billion and 36 billion USD in direct losses annually. Corruption facilitates IUU by threatening effective regulation and crime prevention at every stage of fishing operations. The types and extent of corruption in the fisheries sector are vast, requiring different types of interventions at different levels of power. This paper describes three levels of anti-corruption efforts involving transparency and their successes and challenges in reducing opportunities for corruption. These lessons and perspectives can inform foundational efforts to enhance transparency in fisheries, reduce opportunities for fisheries corruption, and safeguard marine ecosystems.

Corrupting conservation: Assessing how corruption impacts ranger work

The entire wildlife value chain is reported to be rife with corruption, which can have devastating effects on conservation, nearby communities, and rangers themselves. Public perception that rangers profit from corrupt activities can undermine the integrity of future generations of rangers. In turn, this erodes trust and undermines any potential for developing trust between rangers and communities. This brief examines the issue of ranger corruption, drawing on data from a recent global study led by WWF and the University of Central Florida as well as other available literature.

Using Wood Forensic Science to Deter Corruption and Illegality in the Timber Trade

Corruption and crime in the forestry sector are closely interrelated. Much of the world’s remaining primary forests containing high-value timber are found in countries with weak governance, where corruption is systemic and forest crime is rampant. One reason that the illegal wood trade and the corruption that facilitates it have flourished is that, by laundering illegal wood in supply chains in ways that make it difficult to distinguish from legal wood, criminals and corrupt actors have generally evaded scrutiny. Wood forensic science has the potential to reveal illicit activities that are otherwise easily disguised, bringing a new level of transparency and accountability to the international timber trade.

Enrolling the Local: Community-Based Anti-Corruption Efforts and Institutional Capture

This Brief examines community-based anti-corruption efforts in natural resource management in order to better understand their rationales, potentialities, and challenges—especially complications posed by the intersection of such initiatives with national-level dynamics of institutional capture. The authors present a case study from northeastern Madagascar in order to empirically explore such dynamics, and conclude with a discussion of how multi-level anti-corruption interventions might offer a promising way forward for reducing corruption in natural resource management for certain high-value landscapes or resources that might be subject to challenges connected to institutional capture.

Whistleblower Protection: An Essential Tool for Addressing Corruption that Threatens the World’s Forests, Fisheries and Wildlife

In the past few decades, whistleblowers have proven to be a powerful tool for detecting and prosecuting environmental crimes and corruption. Thanks to modern whistleblower protections, such as those incorporated into the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, whistleblowers around the world are currently partnering with law enforcement officials to make a meaningful dent in corruption in a host of industry sectors such as oil and banking. To date, whistleblowers have relied heavily on U.S. laws because of the unique protections and rewards they provide. Conservation practitioners and anti-corruption professionals can support the use of these successful whistleblower laws for the benefit of natural resources conservation.

Keeping Better Company: Engaging the private sector to reduce forest sector-related corruption risk

Corruption poses a significant threat to forests and the communities that depend on them. By addressing corruption in forest products supply chains, companies can reduce reputational risk, ensure compliance with laws and regulations, avoid high penalties and felony charges, and improve their bottom line. This topic brief sets forth recommendations for approaches these stakeholders can take in the fight against corruption.

Understanding corruption risks in the global trade in wild plants

The scale and nature of corruption in wild plant supply chains is poorly understood, presenting important risks to livelihoods and the success of conservation efforts. Practitioners in the conservation and natural resource management (NRM) sector can benefit from a stronger understanding of available evidence on NTFP supply chains to assess risk better and assure sustainability and legality of the trade. The aim of this brief is to understand the corruption risks in NTFP supply chains and outline possible ways to address corruption effectively. The authors reviewed both grey and academic literature to identify different types of corruption in NTFP supply chains.

Targeting corruption and its proceeds: Why we should mainstream an anti-corruption perspective into “follow the money” approaches to natural resource crime

“Follow the money” (FTM) techniques are increasingly being applied to investigate natural resource crimes and networks, but the corruption that facilitates these crimes is not often included in programs and initiatives that apply financial investigations to environmental crime. The FTM approach analyzes the illicit natural resource supply chain from a financial perspective. This mindset can be used to identify all possible financial responses to corruption from a crime prevention, detection and enforcement perspective.

Trade-Based Money Laundering and Natural Resource Corruption

Trade-based money laundering is a form of money laundering commonly used to hide proceeds of environmental crime and related corruption. Natural resource crime is rarely committed in a vacuum – it is nearly always facilitated by corruption and combined with other types of criminality. Reducing opportunities for laundering the proceeds of environmental crimes helps reduce the overall appeal of these crimes.

Accessing, harvesting and trading in wildlife: Corruption in the use of permits and allocation of access rights

Legal harvest or trade in wildlife, fisheries and forest products typically involves obtaining access rights and permits. Corruption in these processes undermines regulations that promote sustainability and legality and address disease risk. Strategies to address abuse of these processes include a range of regulatory and administrative reforms, but implementation is not a simple matter of increasing employee pay or cutting bureaucratic red tape. Recognizing and mapping the political, economic and social power dynamics that shape regulations and enforcement may indicate larger problems in the enabling environment that should inform strategies for addressing corruption risks in wildlife harvest and trade.

Corrupting trade: An overview of corruption issues in illicit wildlife trade

Corruption is a key facilitator of illegal wildlife trade. In addition to measures called for in international and regional resolutions and treaties, efforts to address corruption should focus on areas such as streamlining and auditing permitting processes and controls; engaging the transport sector; strengthening stockpile management systems; improving traceability systems; addressing vulnerabilities in special economic zones; and employing behavior change approaches.

A Political Ecology Lens for Addressing Corruption in Conservation and Natural Resource Management

The “political” nature of corruption makes it a structural driver of conservation and natural resource management (NRM) threats and a barrier to better outcomes. Understanding the political context for conservation work is critical to more effectively addressing corruption’s impact on conservation and NRM outcomes. Political ecology can help better analyze dimensions of politics and power in a given conservation/NRM context and integrates nature into this political understanding. As such, it helps practitioners to develop better strategic approaches to their work.

The Conservation Mosaic Approach to Reduce Corruption and the Illicit Sea Turtle Take and Trade

Although it has been illegal to kill sea turtles in Mexico since 1990, poaching for human consumption remains a major threat to the recovery of these endangered species. The most common reasons for poaching include direct economic benefits from the sale of turtle meat and other products, lack of law enforcement, and the ease of bribing authorities. Strong cultural traditions promoting the consumption of turtles exacerbate the problem, as do family and extended social networks that cut across poaching and enforcement communities, reducing the likelihood of legal sanctions. Corruption, largely in the form of bribery, facilitates this illegal sea turtle take and trade.

Addressing corruption in CITES documentation processes

Abuse of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) permits and certificates is a global issue that affects a wide range of species and can take place across the entire trade chain. Commerce in precious timber, caviar and live animals including primates, birds and reptiles, is particularly vulnerable. Methods of abuse range widely and all can be facilitated by corruption. The involvement of corrupt officials, including high-level individuals, makes this problem more difficult to solve.

Why is money laundering a critical issue in natural resource corruption?

The profits from illicit natural resource trade in fish, timber and wildlife are estimated to be between USD 62.5 billion and 316.4 billion annually. These funds are usually transferred through banks, corporations and other accounts in the international financial system. “Following the money,” confiscating it and arresting the money launderers, however, has received less attention than arresting the individuals most closely associated with illegal shipments, poached animals or undocumented catch. Yet this next step helps reveal the networks that finance, facilitate and grow rich from environmental crimes. By following the money flows, it is possible to target the perpetrators and their facilitating networks and ensure that crime does not pay.

Reducing corruption’s impact on natural resources – How does a gender lens help?

Evidence shows that women and other groups that face power inequity have an essential role to play in achieving natural resource management (NRM) and conservation results. Many corrupt actions are only feasible for those with money and power, and corruption often perpetuates and deepens power networks. When programs and reforms are developed to prevent and address the corruption behind negative environmental and social outcomes, how can a gender lens help?

A Guide to Identifying Corruption Risks Along Natural Resource Supply Chains

Reducing the threats that corruption poses to conservation and natural resource management objectives involves reducing opportunities for corrupt actions, increasing the likelihood of detecting them, and strengthening accountability when they are detected. To accomplish this, a first necessary step is understanding the range of corruption risks in a natural resource sector. This guide provides a simple, easy-to-follow overview of where corruption risks are likely in the supply chains for fish, forests, and wildlife.

Building accountable resource governance institutions

Formal institutions are central actors in natural resource governance decisions and a key arena in which policies, laws and regulations ranging from forest concessions to trade in wildlife products are negotiated and implemented. As gatekeepers in resource management decisions, natural resource governance institutions are frequent targets for actors seeking undue influence on these decisions. Getting to know institutions – how they work, the personalities involved, the pressures they are under, where their revenues come from – is a critical first step towards minimizing corrupt influences and unlocking their anti-corruption potential.

Understanding effects of corruption on law enforcement and environmental crime

Law enforcement agencies monitor and enforce laws that protect landscapes, seascapes, and the species that inhabit them. In many countries environmental crimes are a low priority for law enforcement authorities, particularly when they are under-resourced and face a range of other threats to the rule of law. Corruption helps violators circumvent these laws and regulations and makes law enforcement a much less reliable tool for limiting and preventing environmental harms.