A Rebuttal to Harvey, R. (2016). ‘Risks and Fallacies Associated with Promoting a Legalized Trade in Ivory’ in Politikon 43(2): 215–229

ABSTRACT

By framing contemporary policy debates as a superficial choice between two polarised approaches to global ivory trade legality, Harvey [2016. “Risks and Fallacies Associated with Promoting a Legalized Trade in Ivory.” Politikon 43 (2): 215–229] oversimplifies and mischaracterises the nature of the African elephant conservation and trade regulation problem. Consequently, there is a failure to engage appropriately with the analytical work undertaken by economists and other social scientists since the 1989 ivory ban. Much of this work elucidates deeper institutional complexities relating to elephant management across different scales and geographies and acknowledges it as an issue of political economy as much as one of conservation. Over-simplifying the trade legalisation debate provides a distraction from more fundamental challenges facing the survival of Africa’s elephants. To understand and address these challenges more appropriately, analysts and decision-makers should carefully consider the implications of conflicting values, institutional interplay and economic limits. Most importantly, they should work closer together to identify and resolve outstanding questions of mutual interest.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, for example, Mason, Bulte, and Horan (2012), ‘t Sas-Rolfes, Moyle, and Stiles (2014) and Nadal and Aguayo (2016).

2. Readers are invited to inspect the Abstract and Conclusions of our (open access) article to verify its core message.

3. We remain of this opinion, mindful of recent deliberations in the grey literature about the impacts of the 2008 one-off sale (Do 2016; Hsiang and Sekar 2016; Underwood 2016).

4. For a discussion on how and why this latter objective was poorly achieved, see ‘t Sas-Rolfes and Fitzgerald (2013, 22–23).

5. See, for example, Alchian and Demsetz (1973), North (1990) and Ostrom (1990).