World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)

Abstract

Dung CT, Huyen HT, Thuy Dung NT, Gore ML (2022) Potential for informal guardianship in community-based wildlife crime prevention: Insights from Vietnam. Nature Conservation 48: 123-147. https://doi. Abstract The notion that indigenous people and local communities can effectively prevent conservation crime rests upon the assumption that they are informal guardians of natural resources. Although informal guardian-ship is a concept typically applied to "traditional" crimes, urban contexts, and the global North, it has great potential to be combined with formal guardianship (such as ranger patrols) to better protect wildlife, incentivize community participation in conservation, and address the limitations of formal enforcement in the global South. Proactive crime prevention is especially important for illegal snare hunting, a practice that has led to pernicious defaunation and which has proved difficult to control due to its broad scope. This paper uses interview data with community members in protected areas in Viet Nam where illegal snare hunting is commonplace to 1) analyze the conditions for informal guardianship in the study locations ; 2) explore how community members can become more effective informal guardians; and 3) examine how formal and informal guardianship mechanisms can be linked to maximize deterrence and limit displacement of illegal snaring. Results indicate that conditions for informal guardianship exist but that re-A peer-reviewed open-access journal