Stimuli and barriers to innovation in wildlife policy – long-term institutional analysis of wolf management in Belarus

Abstract

Following democratisation, many post-socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe adjusted their wolf policies to accommodate a more positive discourse on the species and the need to sustain and expand its populations. However, Belarus continues an approach informed by a discourse on wolf as a dangerous pest that should be reduced to the most possible extent through unrestricted hunting. Based on data from desk research covering the last 150 years and from semi-structured interviews we explored the reasons for the long-term stability of the policy path and identified potential sources of policy innovations. We argue that the persistence of potentially unsustainable practices has been connected with a strong dominance of hunters in the policy field and the lack of actors representing alternative discourses and policy options. This has changed recently when wildlife biologists and environmental activists proposed policy adjustments modelled on the approaches used in the EU. However, these have not translated into meaningful changes because of hierarchical, top-down governance, dominance of the ministry responsible for hunting, and the lack of external stimuli for policy innovation. We propose activities to strengthen the co-ordination of wolf policy between Belarus and its EU neighbours and to ensure sustainable wolf management.

Keywords:

• Biodiversity conservation
• human-wildlife conflict
• wildlife politics
• environmental governance
• discourse analysis

Acknowledgements

This research was carried out within the project No. 2017/27/B/HS6/03067, financed by the Polish National Science Centre. Anton Shkaruba acknowledges support from Erasmus+ Jean Monnet project 611949-EPP-1-2019-1-RU-EPPJMO-PROJECT. The authors would like to thank the interviewees for sharing their thoughts on wolf management in Belarus.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Polish National Science Centre [grant number 2017/27/B/HS6/03067] and by the European Commission [grant number 611949-EPP-1-2019-1-RU-EPPJMO-PROJECT] .

Notes on contributors

Krzysztof Niedziałkowski

Krzysztof Niedziałkowski is an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. His academic interests include environmental sociology and politics. His research concerns socio-political and environmental determinants of environmental governance. He is particularly interested in the development of environmental institutions over time and their relationships with social controversies regarding the preservation and use of natural resources, including natural habitats and wildlife. His work has been published in journals such as: Conservation Biology, Ecology and Society, Ecological Economics, Environmental Sociology, and Land Use Policy.

Anna Sidorovich

Anna Sidorovich is a lead researcher at the Scientific and Practical Center for Bioresources, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Minsk, Belarus. She is an ecologist and conservation biologist with a broad interest in various management contexts. Her research primarily concerns the ecology and management of predators in Belarus, with a particular interest in large mammals. She is actively involved in consultancy and policy development work on biodiversity conservation planning in Belarus. She is also engaged in international biodiversity assessments, such as IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, and on Sustainable Use of Wild Species.

Viktar Kireyeu

Viktar Kireyeu is a researcher at the Institute of Earth Sciences of Saint Petersburg State University, Russia. He is a landscape scientist with a particular interest in the vulnerability of Belarusian forests, climate change adaptation, and multilevel environmental governance. He works with Belarusian non-governmental organisations on the development of interactive tools for informing various stakeholder groups about landscape and biological diversity. He has contributed to the development and implementation of ERA-NET, Erasmus+, and Visegrad projects in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.

Anton Shkaruba

Anton Shkaruba is a senior researcher at the Estonian University of Life Sciences (Tartu, Estonia). Over the past 10 years he has worked in a wide range of interdisciplinary projects focusing on mapping and spatially-explicit assessment of ecosystem vulnerability to global environmental change, adaptation of social-ecological systems and sectors (forestry, biodiversity conservation) and, more recently, also land-use planning and policies. He was a lead author for the IPBES Europe & Central Asia regional assessment, and currently a lead author of the IPBES assessment on sustainable use of wild species.