Policy Instruments in International Wildlife Law

Since the 1970s, international wildlife law has developed at pace. However, this development has occurred rather haphazardly, leading to a complex and opaque international legal framework. As a consequence, our picture of said international legal framework has also become fragmented. One of the problems is that we no longer precisely know how the legal framework for wildlife conservation is constructed and why it was constructed particularly that way. This book offers a first step towards a remedy by zooming in on policy instruments within international wildlife law. More specifically, it makes an in-depth study of policy instruments for large carnivore conservation in southern Africa. In a first step, the study develops a comprehensive overview of the policy instruments that currently make up the international legal framework for wildlife conservation. In a second step, the study zooms in on southern Africa, and makes an assessment of the implications of the international legal framework for large carnivore conservation as it applies in southern Africa. In the final part, the study tries to understand how international policy instruments are implemented on the international and national level. To do so, two examples of the implementation of international commitments under multilateral wildlife-related agreements are analysed; the CMS-CITES African Carnivores Initiative and national implementation in Namibia and South Africa.

Elke Hellinx is a lecturer in international law at Tilburg University. She has taught and published in various areas of international law, but her research mainly focuses on international environmental law, in particular international wildlife law. Elke holds a PhD degree from KU Leuven. During her PhD studies, Elke worked at the Legal Unit of the CITES Secretariat for six months. She holds a Master’s degree in law from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2015) and the University of Leeds (2015). She also obtained an LLM from the University of Michigan (2016).

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