TNRC Knowledge Hub - Conservation Challenge: Wildlife trafficking

Does your work focus on combating wildlife trafficking? Is corruption enabling illicit trade and undermining your results? This page outlines three steps to start building anti-corruption approaches into your conservation programming.

The Challenge

• Corruption is a key facilitator of the illegal wildlife trade and is broadly associated with transnational organized crime.
• Corruption can occur anywhere, from the point of access to transport, export, and sale to consumers.
• Programming to combat wildlife trafficking should be informed by careful assessment of the corrupt practices involved, the power and resources of change agents and their opponents, and associated risks.

Three Steps to Follow

Whether you have decades of experience or are new to the field, you may not know exactly where corruption risks lie, how they might be influencing your conservation outcomes, and what can be done about them. Start by taking the 90-minute eCourse below.

Best results will come from layering interventions at multiple risk points. The first step is to think about who has power in your implementing context. You can then start to identify drivers and facilitators of corruption and entry points for—as well as limitations on—change. The resources below will help you to ask the right questions and identify those risk points.

Consider whether some of the programming avenues below would help to address your challenges. Take a moment to read these principles for getting started from recent experience testing anti-corruption approaches in various contexts.

Remember: Evidence suggests that targeting corruption through multiple approaches yields best results.