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Category: Project

Description: What drives poachers to illegally harvest wildlife? Wildlife, both plants and animals, is a natural resource utilized by many households, primarily in developing countries, and is used as food, medicine, collectibles (e.g. pets), ornaments, or as construction materials. However, not all wildlife can be harvested legally, and frequently the harvest violates local or international legislation. The reasons as to why people illegally harvest wildlife, also referred to as poaching, has been subject to debate (Hope 2002; Duffy & St John 2013; Duffy et al. 2016) with many different drivers mentioned i.e. poverty (Kühl et al. 2009; Stiles 2011), food insecurity (Yamagiwa 2003), economic interests (Eliason 2012) and social disasters like war (Plumptre et al. 1997). The current understanding of these drivers seems to be hampered by a lack of empirical data (Duffy et al. 2016). In addition, drivers have been suggested as context dependent, contradictory to each other (van Velden et al. 2018) or part of a more complex context (Lunstrum & Givá 2020). Although many studies mention the drivers of illegal harvesting, empirical evidence for these drivers is frequently absent or in worst case, contradictory. Studies documenting drivers appear to be specific to certain regions (e.g. Muth and Bowe,1998), species (Huebschle 2017; Lunstrum & Givá 2020), or to a particular type of commodity (e.g. Bushmeat; Van Velden et al 2018). Consequently, there seems to be a lack of consensus of what drives poachers to illegally harvest wildlife. In addition, research on the drivers of illegal wildlife harvesting has attracted researchers from various disciplines, resulting in a high heterogeneity of documented drivers and resulting complexity of the available data. Policy interventions aimed at reducing the illegal harvest of wildlife depend on these studies, but might be less effective due to the complexity of available research. It is therefore necessary that a better understanding is generated of the literature discussing drivers of illegal harvesting. We here define the illegal harvest of wildlife as the intentional harvest and killing of non-timber wildlife in violation of national or international legislation This scoping review aims to provide an overview of the currently documented drivers, examine, and critically appraise the used methodology, identify key characteristics and factors related to drivers of illegal harvest, and to identify and analyse knowledge gaps to drivers of illegal harvest. The results from this review will provide an overview of the current literature as to what drives poachers to illegal harvest wildlife and will provide essential information for future policy interventions and research needs.