Wildlife conservation would be impossible without rangers, who patrol vast landscapes, deter criminals, and enforce laws to protect wildlife and habitats – often at great risk to their own safety. However, some activities that rangers do as part of their day-to-day duties can be extremely controversial. This is especially the case when rangers use military-like law enforcement techniques, tactics, personnel, and equipment – sometimes referred to as “militarised conservation”.

Militarised conservation has sparked substantial controversy over the past decade. High-profile incidents in which rangers have been accused of serious crimes and implicated in human rights abuses have sent shock waves through international media and illuminated the importance of understanding the social acceptability of approaches to conserve biodiversity.

Since the rise of militarisation in response to high-intensity rhino and elephant poaching in the 1980s, researchers and PCA managers have had questions about where the boundaries of social acceptability lie on their minds. What types of activities are acceptable or unacceptable for rangers to carry out to? Is it acceptable for rangers to monitor people’s movements, stop and search people, arrest people, and carry guns? If rangers are armed, is it acceptable for them to shoot at people they suspect of breaking conservation laws?

In public debates, militarised conservation is often presented in quite simplistic, binary terms: right versus wrong, good versus bad, acceptable versus unacceptable. Layered onto this is another assumption: that militarised conservation is more acceptable to people in the Global North than to people in the Global South. Such narratives imply that militarised conservation neatly falls into black-and-white categories.

Our research team had experience studying public attitudes towards conservation in the Global North and Global South, but we had never worked directly on issues of conservation law enforcement and militarisation. However, as observers of the controversies surrounding militarised conservation, we suspected that the issue would be far more complicated than simplistic narratives imply. Crucially, we also noticed that the voices of ordinary people living near PCAs in sub-Saharan Africa were often absent from most debates, even though they are most affected by conservation laws, and encounter rangers in their daily lives.

This made us wonder what people living near PCAs think about conservation law enforcement.

Could it be that people living near PCAs think that some ranger activities are more or less acceptable than others? Does it depend on whether rangers conduct these activities inside or outside of PCAs? Does why rangers conduct these activities matter?

We were fortunate to work in person with five communities living near PCAs in high- biodiversity areas of Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. (Figure 1) This gave us a unique

opportunity to study this controversial topic in a new way and delve into its complexities by comparing perspectives from high-biodiversity areas in sub-Saharan Africa with perspectives from farther away: the UK, the USA, and urban areas of sub-Saharan Africa.

We interviewed over 3,800 people in total, including more than 2200 living near PCAs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that not everyone thinks the same about the contentious issue of militarised conservation. However, our work also revealed several surprises that challenge simplistic narratives.

One major finding was that the acceptability of militarised conservation depends on the specific activity rangers carry out, where the activity is taking place, and why. For example, monitoring or searching people is more acceptable than carrying guns, and ranger activities occurring inside PCAs are more acceptable than those occurring outside. PCAs are seen as ‘rangers’ territory’, but the lands where communities live and work are not.

Some of the most striking results came from Mau, a politically sensitive area in Kenya known for long-standing tensions between forest rangers and adjacent communities. Respondents in Mau did not see ranger activities – even activities closely associated with militarisation such as carrying guns and shooting at people – as categorically unacceptable.

Moreover, perspectives in Mau were remarkably similar to perspectives from the UK. This was unexpected! Given the fraught history of Mau, we anticipated negative reactions to militarised ranger activities. Instead, respondents expressed views aligned with those of people living thousands of miles away. This result challenges simplistic Global North-Global South divisions over militarised conservation.

Nevertheless, acceptability was generally lower among people living near wildlife areas in SSA and higher among people living further away, including in urban areas of sub- Saharan Africa. This illustrates how people’s views cannot be neatly mapped onto geography, but seem to be shaped by a more complex mixture of factors, including personal lived experiences.

Highly contentious conservation issues like militarised law enforcement are never simple. Our research has charted some of the contours of international public opinion. Findings like ours can help decision-makers in the very difficult position of having to conserve biodiversity in ways that respect local people, while operating under intense international scrutiny.

By Dr Lovemore Sibanda and Dr Darragh Hare

‘On the Contrary…’ is a thought leadership series. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Jamma Conservation & Communities. We provide a platform for diverse, evidence-based perspectives to inform and enrich the conservation conversation.