The USAID Reducing Opportunities for Unlawful Transport of Endangered Species (ROUTES) Partnership is a novel approach to bring together transport and logistics companies, government agencies, and conservation and development stakeholders to tackle the illegal wildlife trade. We share this case study to give an example of how an inter-agency collaboration can work to address a very complex issue in conservation, and also to show how adaptive management can be applied to such initiatives to increase success.
How IT All BEGAN
The challenge...
The illegal wildlife trade threatens the existence of many plant and animal species and can also have negative impacts on global health, and local and national economies. It is a multi-billion dollar business which exploits the global network of transport supply chains as traffickers move wildlife between countries and continents.
The opportunity...
As the convening points for all flight routes, airports serve as a bottleneck for wildlife traffickers. Due to the sheer number of people working within airports, there is an opportunity for mass intervention against wildlife trafficking through individual staff efforts to detect and report trafficking incidents to law enforcement.
The Partnership
The ROUTES Partnership was established in 2015 to bring together a range of stakeholders to collaboratively tackle wildlife trafficking. At the heart of ROUTES is a core group of partners collaborating with the U.S. Government and the transport sector that includes Airports Council International (ACI), the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), the International Air Transport Association (IATA), TRAFFIC and WWF. The diversity within the Partnership brings a range of expertise, professional networks, and most importantly the ability to engage thousands of aviation industry companies.
The strategy
In line with an agreed theory of change, the Partnership had five objectives: strengthen data and information on wildlife trafficking through air transport; engage transport leaders; train transport staff; strengthen industry policies; and raise awareness across the industry. The ultimate aim was to increase detection of wildlife trafficking incidents by transport staff and reporting to law enforcement.
Each year we collaboratively designed and implemented activities to achieve these five objectives, including producing wildlife trafficking reports, engaging industry and attending events, developing training materials and providing training to airlines, and producing awareness materials for industry use (such as the video below). We then used our monitoring data to review our progress and develop the next year’s work plan.
Pausing to Reflect
Two years into the Partnership, we conducted an internal review of our theory of change and progress towards our objectives, to identify any issues. Following continued reflection and discussion, the partners realised that a critical component of the theory of change and strategy was missing: strengthening relationships between the transport sector and law enforcement at airports. No matter how much we worked with transport stakeholders to strengthen policies and train staff to identify and report wildlife trafficking, the current lack of contact and communication channels between transport and law enforcement would mean that we would never see increased reporting of incidents and interventions against wildlife trafficking.
ADAPTING THE STRATEGY
Having identified the need to strengthen transport-law enforcement relationships, we revised the theory of change to incorporate this new objective, and at the following annual work planning meeting built in new activities accordingly.
In addition to the continued provision of support to the industry to strengthen policies and training programmes, our new activities included raising awareness of the need for law enforcement to communicate with transport stakeholders, and developing information-sharing software for wildlife trafficking incidents at airports.
Success Is in the Air
Within five years of implementation, the ROUTES Partnership has achieved significant success. Many airlines and airports have hosted awareness raising events, integrated wildlife trafficking training, strengthened their policies and established reporting protocols. Three airlines are now certified in the new wildlife trafficking prevention component of the IATA Environmental Assessment Programme. We have developed a reporting app to support communication between transport and law enforcement, and are working with other law enforcement and transport bodies to develop software to automatically detect trafficked wildlife at airports. We also continue to learn valuable lessons for engagement of the private sector in conservation. If this commitment and action within industry continues, we should soon see an increase in interception of wildlife trafficking incidents in air transport and eventual reduction of wildlife trafficking.