Wildlife hunting across borders

Wildlife hunting is at the centre of intense debates, and conflicts between conservation, development, and animal protection increasingly unfold across national borders. Regulatory changes in Europe and Southern Africa reshape the commodification of wildlife and affect livelihoods, market structures, and conservation outcomes. At the same time, illegal wildlife trade continues to expand, often intersecting with legal markets. Understanding how wildlife value chains oscillate between legality and illegality is therefore of high relevance for both academic debates and policy design.

This project aims to analyse (il-)legal wildlife hunting by integrating perspectives from Criminology and Economic Geography. Combining a Global Production Network (GPN) lens with the Routine Activity Approach and Techniques of Neutralisation, wildlife is conceptualised as a socially constructed commodity embedded in transnational value chains that connect production regions in the Global South with demand in the Global North. Key questions include actors’ willingness to engage in deviant behavior within these networks, socio-economic and institutional settings, and the overlap between actor networks constituting transnational legal and illegal value chains.

Empirically, the project focusses on the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), a cross-border conservation region spanning Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola. Through comparative legal analysis, statistical data collection and qualitative field research in identified hotspots, the project examines how actor networks produce institutional settings, and how these respond to regulatory interventions across multiple scales.

By conceptualising (il-)legal wildlife commodification as embedded in global production networks shaped by both formal and illegal institutions, the project contributes to debates on green criminology and the economic geography of criminal activities. The project aims to advance both interdisciplinary scholarship and to inform more effective and context-sensitive policy solutions for wildlife conservation.