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Community power over conservation regimes: techniques for neutralizing the illegal killing of large carnivores in Finland

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Abstract

Certain weaknesses in large carnivore conservation policies have led to a form of political dissent and resistance against dominant conservation regimes, manifested most clearly in the drastic decrease in the Finnish wolf population in 2014. The illegal hunting of large carnivores has been carried out by a particular social group with the support of community members, and hunting violators have been viewed as benefactors by many of their fellow citizens. In the attempt to understand how rural communities sustain alternative ways of regulating their worlds, and how community members negate shame and stigma on behalf of hunting violators, the neutralization techniques presented in the sociological literature by Sykes and Matza provide an effective tool. In collecting the data, we used non-active role playing with empathy-based fictional stories. We obtained a total of 231 narratives from a core group of hunting violators, within which we identified the use of the nine different techniques. These discourses express how a rural identity and way of life is defended and how rural protests against conservation policies are expressed under the pressure of modern conservation regimes. The results address the importance of acknowledging biosecurity issues in wolf territories, of placing a value on local knowledge, and of strengthening trust between the locals and the authorities in implementing responsive and deliberative governance; they also suggest how to formulate effective deterrents to illegal killing and increase compliance with conservation regimes by informal sanctions, based on collective moral judgments and the perceived legitimacy of rules.

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Notes

  1. According to the estimates of Natural Resources Institute Finland, available on the internet http://www.rktl.fi/riista/suurpedot/

  2. A national conservation status assessment is conducted for Finnish species using IUCN criteria, and results are published in the Red List.

  3. An amendment (232/2011) to the Criminal Code stipulates that any illegal killing of large carnivores will be treated as an aggravated hunting offence, and sentences were therefore tightened. In addition, the indicative value of game animals was raised in 2010 to make the financial gains of committing a hunting offence less attractive. The amount of compensation to the state varies according to whether the animal was a juvenile or adult. The indicative value for wolverine is up to €16,500, for lynx up to €2100, for bear up to €15,500 and for wolf up to €9100.

  4. This data were previously collected in the study of community support to illegal killing of large carnivores [12].

  5. In Finnish, the term ‘large carnivores’ is largely understood, in both formal and colloquial discourse, as comprising four species: the brown bear, the lynx, the wolf and the wolverine.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Ellen Valle, Sakari Mykrä and Sami Kurki for their contributions to the article. The data collection was carried out as part of a research project entitled ‘Toward societal sustainability in large carnivore management: background and importance of illegal killing’, funded by the Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. The research was funded by the Maj and Tor Nessling Foundation. Constructive comments from two anonymous referees improved the clarity of the work.

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    Mari Pohja-Mykrä

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Pohja-Mykrä, M. Community power over conservation regimes: techniques for neutralizing the illegal killing of large carnivores in Finland. Crime Law Soc Change 67, 439–460 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-016-9666-y

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