Did we ask wolves whether they consent to be managed?

There is an increasing focus on collaborative governance to enact wildlife conservation policies, where non-state stakeholders engage in collective, consensus oriented and deliberative decision-making processes. This form of... [ view full abstract ]

There is an increasing focus on collaborative governance to enact wildlife conservation policies, where non-state stakeholders engage in collective, consensus oriented and deliberative decision-making processes. This form of governance, it is argued, will increase the legitimacy of conservation policies. However, while this governance is presented as being truly democratic, inclusive and participatory, it is systematically grounded on the exclusion of one party: wildlife itself. John Rawls did acknowledge in A Theory of Justice that his social contract “is not a complete contract theory” and that it “fails to embrace all moral relationships” and left out “how we are to conduct ourselves toward animals and the rest of nature”. For wildlife governance, this deliberate omission has important consequences for the ability of policies to conserve and fully restore wildlife populations. Because the current social contract remains strictly between human agents or institutions, policies built on successions of compromises will never establish lasting safeguards that can protect nature under a growing human population and economy. The crux of the problem lies in the fact that nature does not have rights on its own. Having rights carries profound governance implications for the importance given to a party’s recognition, procedural access, and distribution of benefits and costs. The party’s own interests need to be explicitly taken into account and are no longer what other parties exclusively and arbitrarily decide they can afford. Legal personhood further implies that the party can initiate legal actions on its own, that the court must consider the injury suffered by that party and that relief must run to the benefit of the party. Human societies have for centuries extended the scope of legal personhood to include more human beings (e.g. prisoners, aliens, women, people of color or indigenous people) or inanimate agents (e.g. nation states, churches, municipalities, corporations). In Should Trees Have Standing?, Christopher Stone explained that proposals to confer rights to some new entity – such as trees and forests – are often met with laughter or fear, because until the rightless thing receives its rights, it is only a thing for the use of the right holders at the time. Resistance to giving the thing rights is expected until it can be valued for itself; however valuing it for itself is hard until the right holders give it rights. We encourage conservation researchers and practitioners to revisit their actions and practices by giving and enforcing rights to species, populations and ecosystems.