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WP2: Institutions and governance of hunting

Camilla Sandström & Anke Fischer

Hunting and the rules of the “game”:
Environmental governance, including the governance of hunting and biodiversity management, is growing increasingly complex, involving multiple actors with multiple interests at multiple levels from international to local.

We thus set out to investigate the governance of hunting:

How effective are modern governance arrangements in managing multiple interests in hunting and wildlife management?
What are the implications and consequences of these arrangements themselves?
How can their (potential) shortcomings and emerging problems be addressed?

The objective of this work package was thus to analyse how institutional arrangements and institutional change influence hunting. Institutions are here understood as the ‘rules of the game’.


We present here some of our work, organised into four ‘steps’:

To preview, we find that there are indeed a number of approaches, such as collaborative fora, that explicitly aim to reconcile the interests of multiple actors over multi levels in the governance of hunting, all across Europe and eastern Africa. However, although the inclusion of a wide range of actors is seen as a cornerstone in many of these approaches, our findings highlight a number of obstacles and shortcomings:

Despite the inclusive ambitions of multi-actor fora and other collaborative arrangements, there is often a mismatch between their vision and their actual endowment with property rights and power, which constrains the degree to which they can effectively reconcile different interests

Despite their integrative intentions, these approaches are often driven by a sectoral or mono-functional interest (e.g., biodiversity conservation) which contributes to the exclusion of other functions such as (local) economic or cultural functions

The focus on pragmatic problem-solving, consensual deliberation and exchange of knowledge also tends to neglect different opinions and needs. The challenges of collective action fuel power and political struggles across levels, thus undermining possibilities for successful governance.