What makes a major change of wildlife management policy possible? Institutional analysis of Polish wolf governance.

Krzysztof Niedziałkowski,Renata Putkowska-Smoter,Laurentiu Rozylowicz

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0231601

Krzysztof Niedziałkowski, Renata Putkowska-Smoter + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231601

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Abstract

Poland was one of the first countries of Central and Eastern Europe with stable wolf populations to effectively introduce year-round protection of the species. This paper traces the process of policy change using institutional theory as an organizational perspective. Based on the analysis of data from desk research and semi-structured interviews, we propose a model of institutional change and argue that in the 1990s, environmental activists and wildlife biologists successfully used a political window of opportunity connected with socio-economic transformation after 1989 and managed to induce the government to move the species from the domain of hunting to the domain of nature conservation. The new policy, informed by an ecological paradigm, diverged from the historical path dominated by hunters and the vision of the wolf as a pest and a hunting target. The improved protection led to the numerical growth of Poland's wolves and ultimately to their westward expansion.

Highlights

Wolf populations in Europe are on the rise [1, 2]
We aim to identify the conditions that facilitated the path-breaking legal and organizational changes leading to the growth of the Polish wolf populations (Fig 1) and their dispersal from eastern to western Poland (Fig 2) and to Germany and other western European countries [1, 13]
Shock events might include political, economic, technological, and environmental “punctuations” as well as policy decisions and impacts from other policy fields [48]. Based on these premises concerning institutional change, we have developed a model of policy change (Fig 3)

Summary

Introduction

Among the reasons for this, Chapron et al [2] and Boitani and Linnell [3] enumerate the changing of hunting practices, the introduction of European conservation legislation (Bern Convention of 1979, Habitats Directive of 1992), significant changes in public opinion in many countries regarding carnivore conservation, stable political institutions conducive to proper law enforcement, and the relatively smooth political transformation of the post-communist countries that facilitated sustainable forestry and hunting practices They suggest that the recovery of wolves and other carnivores have been aided by socio-economic changes that have decreased the pressure of human persecution (e.g. large scale rural-urban migration and land abandonment), improvement in habitat quality for wolves and their prey (e.g. through reforestation), the recovery of prey populations due to changes in hunting management, and the introduction of a variety of practices (such as livestock protection measures) that have improved coexistence between large carnivores and people.

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