Using Policy Goals to Evaluate Large Carnivore Reintroduction: The Case of the Red Wolf Recovery Program on the Albemarle Peninsula, North Carolina

Despite being politicized in its early stages, the Red Wolf (Canis rufus) Recovery Program (RWRP) existed for 30 years in eastern North Carolina with little attention paid to the nexus of values, goals, decision-making, legal... [ view full abstract ]

Despite being politicized in its early stages, the Red Wolf (Canis rufus) Recovery Program (RWRP) existed for 30 years in eastern North Carolina with little attention paid to the nexus of values, goals, decision-making, legal structure, and politics. This paper focuses on the understudied but influential sociopolitical context of large canid management on the AP to fill a knowledge gap concerning wolf recovery in the U.S. We situated our data from 62 key informant interviews within Deborah Stone’s policy goals framework (equity, liberty, efficiency, and security) to evaluate the RWRP and large canid conservation in general in eastern NC. Stone’s “objects of political struggle” are fundamental to U.S. political culture and offer common ground with which to begin negotiation among policy contestants. Results indicated that governing actors should craft trade-offs between policy contestants instead of pursuing a democratic approach to conflict resolution because a winner-take all approach has resulted in continuous conflict. A trade-off approach will first entail reconciling divergent interpretations of success and failure within and across policy goals. Further, decision makers will need to consider ways to reform red wolf governance. The results suggest that reform begins with reconciliation of the ESA’s established and problematic infringements upon civil liberties as well as rooting out the causes of organizational inefficiency. A holistic rather than democratic or technocratic approach must attend to local expressions of Nature-culture relations in order to uphold human dignity and security.