Bearing down: The political ecology of a policy monopoly in New Jersey black bear management

Abstract

Some agencies tend to view wildlife as resources to harvested and potential threats to be controlled in the name of public safety. Due to a long history of hunting for conservation, this view intersects with the structures and ways the agencies work. Hunting monopolizes policy and is the main tool to manage black bears in New Jersey. This study explores what that monopoly looks like and how it endures, especially in the face of opposition. That opposition, coming from environmental and animal activist groups and their allies in government (mostly the state Legislature in this study) who oppose hunting, derives from their viewing wildlife with more sentiment and therefore they conclude non-violent management plans more focused on human behavior and humans' relationships with bears should take precedence. Using Qualitative Content Analysis on 22 policy documents, four themes emerge. The first two explain that structures and ideas create the monopoly. They are: 1) "Agencies' practices flow from power-laden interpretations, influencing access;" and 2) "Humans should shape (anthropocentric) nature-society interactions." The latter two themes elucidate the means by which the monopoly perpetuates itself. They are: 3) "Certain knowledge claims get default institutionalization" and 4) "Agencies can decide what voices to accommodate." Power asymmetries run throughout the process, exercised by actors in relational ways and rooted in assumptions and routine operations of policy players. Channeling political ecology to understand how a policy monopoly both forms and operates can better enable wider participation and communication in maintaining or changing policy.