The Disappearing Act: The Illicit Trade in Wildlife in Asia

Key Points in Document:

• A Foreign Policy working paper by the Brookings Institution that reviews the current status of illegal wildlife trade in Asia and provides a broad set of guidelines for designing policy responses.
• To inform the paper, the author performed an “extensive review of current government policies in Southeast and parts of East Asia and of the effectiveness of various regulatory designs and policy actions from around the world.”
• The policy paper contains an analysis of the current status of wildlife trade in Asia, demand-side factors driving the trade, government actions, policies, and enforcement efforts around wildlife trade, and a review of the effectiveness of supply-side and demand-side measures to tackle the issue. Supply-side measures examined include increased law enforcement, wildlife trade bans, captive breeding and legal supply, and alternative livelihoods programs.
• The author provides broad policy recommendations to mitigate illegal wildlife trade, but concludes, in part, that the effectiveness of policies to combat illegal wildlife trade is highly contingent on the national context; there are no silver bullets. “Local institutional and cultural settings matter a great deal… a policy can only be effective if it is based on extensive local data and is closely tailored to local conditions.

 

Citation: Felbab-Brown V. The Disappearing Act: The Illicit Trade in Wildlife in Asia. Washington, DC; 2011.