There’s actually not really any sub-discipline in biology or economics recognised as ‘wildlife economics’. Over time, I’ve tried being an environmental economist, or a bioeconomist, or an ecological economist. But none of these really had an overlap with the sorts of problems I was thinking about. So in the end, I decided that I was a wildlife economist, even if nobody knows what it means.
One of the reasons- is that a lot of the economics literature on market failure- or the conservation literature on optimal extinction- really only agree on one thing. This claim is that under certain conditions, a free market won’t conserve wildlife.
Now while that may get some heads nodding sagely, the reality is that most wildlife management doesn’t occur in any markets. There’s a few game animals, and a few wildlife farms. But for 99.99999%* of the species on this planet, there is no market-based management.
When your chief insight does not cover more than some tiny fraction of a percent of the wildlife we try to manage, you’re not claiming much more than nothing. That’s not a good basis for thinking about wildlife problems.
Most wildlife is either in some legal sense ‘unowned’, or it is ‘owned’ by the state (and managed by government authorities) or it is ‘owned’ by communities (and managed by them- like the titi harvests in NZ). By and large, we’d have to say that we’re not doing all that well. Biodiversity is being lost at a fairly significant rate.
In this sense, market failure is a very uninteresting problem with wildlife, while government failure is a lot more interesting. Paradoxically we say very little about government failure in conservation, and often conservationists fight hard to prevent market mechanisms being employed.
So when I talk about wildlife economics, I’m basically striving to describe the real and actual problems attached to wildlife management. I’m going to be arguing, that starting from very abstract and simplified models that don’t describe the problem at hand, we haven’t produced the guidance we actually need.
So to start with, wildlife economics is about the menu of problems we actually face when trying to conserve biodiversity.
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* Most complex species are actually arthropods- insects, spiders etc and lower plants. That’s before we start thinking about the micro-organisms. I don’t actually know what percentage of species depend on markets for their management, but with say 6-10m insect species alone, it’s not going to be a big percentage.
Wildlife Economics: Where to start? Jan 28
4 Comments Leave a comment
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Brendan Moyle 1213 days ago
I think that when you start to look closely at DoC rules, consistency isn’t something that is always achieved. Sometimes a lot rides on the individual DoC person assigned to be species-manager.
The only wildlife biologist who I have heard opine on the issue is John Craig. That was in the context of Gerry Eckhoff’s suggestion to farm kiwi. John said that a native rail like the weka would be a far better choice. So I’d interpret that to be probably positive.
In general, the objections seem to fall into a number of consistent areas. First, the idea that it would create a black-market. The notion is naive, but the belief has remarkable persistence. It was used against Australian crocodile harvests in the early 80s. It’s still being used for species today.
The second, is that wild birds could be passed off as legally bred, so you may have a laundering issue. I think that would be a bit of a stretch but it does happen in some avicultural markets. And there are some management options to hinder laundering also.
There may be a fear that Beattie’s birds will eventually exhibit genetic problems and if they escape or descendants get released, they’ll introduce genetic problems to the wild population. Again, there are some pretty straightforward management problems to address that.
There are likely to be some public choice problems as well (as you recognise). The Wildlife Act concentrates a lot of authority in DoC (as the Crowns’ agent). And DoC concentrates a lot of that authority in a species manager. There’s a lot of problems getting endangered species into captive-breeding programmes in NZ for conservation reasons- let alone for commercial. It’s taken about a decade for wetapunga to get the green light. And there are a lot of restrictions on the number of birds zoos etc can hold, whether they are allowed to breed in any season etc.
Given the massive loss in range and population of weka in the last 20 years, you couldn’t really say that public sector management has been a run away success. One of the hardest things was getting DoC to recognise there had been a contraction in the early stages, so response delays were umm, ‘unfortunate’.
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Eric Crampton 1213 days ago
So some private conservation programs are banned from breeding the endangered species they happen to have. Again, having a hard time seeing a good reason for that other than the nasty public choice reason. Depressing.
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Brendan Moyle 1213 days ago
Yes, generally private captive facilities don’t have much bargaining power. DoC can tell them how many animals they are allowed to hold, whether they can breed or not, whether transfers will be approved or not, and what price they can receive for the transfer, and these permits can be revoked any time DoC wants with no appeal rights. You need to cultivate very good working relationships with the DoC people if you want to succeed.
It’s not just an NZ phenomenon, albeit you could make the case we have a stronger conservation monopoly in DoC. If you look at the Californian Condor, proposals to captive-breed them stretched back to the 1950s (the shift to in situ breeding was a last-chance gamble in the 80s). I examined an environmental law PhD thesis last year from Australia that looked at their setup also. Pretty much it comes down to ‘it doesn’t make any sense’.
I suspect that we have basically considered wildlife to be such a core ‘biological problem’, nobody was really taking any notice of the economic ramifications and aspects.
I’d love a wildlife biologist’s perspective on why Roger Beattie cannot raise weka for food. DoC’s blocking of his efforts make no sense to me; I’d like to know if there’s any plausible rationale other than the somewhat nasty public choice interpretation.
Long story short, from link above, Beattie has been breeding weka on his farm as a private conservationist and has been very successful at it. He’d like to expand to commercial operation, but isn’t allowed thus far. My naive take would be that commercial farming of endangered species, so long as they’re farm bred rather than culled from the wild, massively reduces the chances of extinction. What am I missing?