Finding politically feasible conservation policies: the case of wildlife trafficking

Conservation management is of increasing importance in ecology as most ecosystems nowadays are essentially managed ecosystems. Conservation managers work within a political-ecological system when they develop and attempt to implement a conservation plan that is designed to meet particular conservation goals. In this article, we develop a decision support tool that can identify a conservation policy for a managed wildlife population that is both sustainable and politically feasible. Part of our tool consists of a simulation model composed of interacting influence diagrams. We build, fit, and use our tool on the case of rhino horn trafficking between South Africa and Asia. Using these diagrams, we show how a rhino poacher’s belief system can be modified by such a policy and locate it in a perceived risks-benefits space before and after policy implementation. We statistically fit our model to observations on group actions and rhino abundance. We then use this fitted model to compute a politically feasible conservation policy.