Wildlife NGOs: From Adversaries to Collaborators
| Published date | 01 November 2015 |
| Date | 01 November 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12253 |
| Author | Margi Prideaux |
Wildlife NGOs: From Adversaries to
Collaborators
Margi Prideaux
Indo-Pacific Governance Research Centre
Abstract
Many governments perceive a ‘contested ground’between Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) and governments
in multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Governments have asserted a concern that increasing NGO involve-
ment is an erosion of their sovereignty.
The other side of this coin is that wildlife related MEAs including the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) are a low
order political priority and government budgets for these environment issues are stretched. Many governments lack
even basic implementation budgets, let alone capacity for progressive work. MEA secretariats are funded so minimally
that there is insufficient facility to really progress implementation.
A recent review of wildlife related NGOs associated with the work of the CMS family has found that NGOs will commit
to increase implementation efforts if the right dynamic is created.
Moving beyond the impression of ‘contested ground’to a ‘collaborative governance’future, where all participants are
invested in policy, discourse, negotiation and arbitration could increase human and financial resource and in turn
increase implementation for the CMS family.
Policy Implications
•Wildlife MEAs have minimal financial resource available to them.
•There is significant scope for NGOs to provide specific types of implementation activity within the CMS family,
especially where taxonomic or geographical gaps are identified or capacity building is needed.
•Increasing NGO implementation efforts will require the right dynamic to be created. This could be delivered
through a ‘collaborative governance’model that includes mechanisms for the NGO community to contribute more
systematically, consistently and transparently to the work of the CMS.
A recent review t o better define the existing and potential
relationship between wildlife Non-governmental Organisa-
tion (NGOs) and the Convention on Migratory Species
(CMS) was conducted in 2013–14 as a formal contribution
to the CMS Strategic Plan 2015–2023 Working Groupprocess.
While similar research has investigated the role of civil soci-
ety in a range of other international policy spaces, including
land mines, nuclear disarmament, human rights, global
finance and especially the European Union’s processes, this
review was the first to focus specifically on CMS.
Unlike most multilateral environmental agreements
(MEAs), the CMS family is more than one convention. It
has an additional layer of complexity, as it is comprised
of a parent convention and 29 separate species-focused
agreements,
1
Memorandum of Understanding
2
and Spe-
cial Species Initiatives,
3
each with their own structures
and processes, parties and signatories, meetings and
action plans. This complication is also CMS’inherent
strength as it facilitates CMS parties to focus on detailed
conservation priorities for specific species migrating
between national jurisdictions within the agreement
structures, as well as overarching policy directions
through the parent convention.
The new CMS Strategic Plan was being developed, in
part, to assist parties to prioritize the CMS family agenda
in the future, acknowledging that financial resources and
implementation capacity are already stretched (CMS,
2008d).
The CMS budget fares poorly compared to other inter-
governmental organisations (IGOs). In 2011, many of the
specialized agencies including the United Nations Educa-
tional, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),
the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO)
had annual budgets ranging from $300 million to over
$2 billion. The United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP) annual budget was US$217 million (Ivanova,
2011).
Global Policy (2015) 6:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12253 ©2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 6 . Issue 4 . November 2015 379
Research Article
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