Managing Large Ungulates in Europe: The Need to Address Institutional Challenges of Wildlife Management

Abstract

To address the problems associated with the management of increasing numbers of large ungulates in many European countries, more holistic approaches, such as ecosystem or landscape management, are called on to replace, for example, sectoral and single-species management. The implementation of holistic approaches, however, requires changes in societal institutions, which have proven to be both complicated and conflicting. The purpose of this article is to examine the institutional obstacles and incentives associated with the implementation of two holistic approaches to wildlife management, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the European Landscape Convention (ELC). Examination of the operational guidelines of the two approaches identified a number of challenges associated with multilevel and multiparty decision-making procedures. These institutional challenges need to be addressed in a systematic way in order to increase the adaptive capacity of the management of wildlife in Europe.

Keywords:

• landscape management
• ecosystem management
• large ungulates
• institutional analysis
• governance

Acknowledgments

The researcher is grateful for comments by two anonymous reviewers and funding from Future Forests, a multidisciplinary research program supported by the Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (MISTRA), the Swedish Forestry Industry, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Umeå University, the Forestry Research Institute of Sweden, and the European Community's Seventh Framework program (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement 212106.