Leong Kirsten Mya, Gramza Ashley Rochelle, Duberstein Jennifer N, Bryson Chelsey, Amlin Angela
NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.
Playa Lakes Joint Venture, Erie, Colorado, USA.
Conserv Biol. 2025 Feb;39(1):e14321. doi: 10.1111/cobi.14321. Epub 2024 Jul 8.
In the United States, policy conflicts have prevented successful population-level management of outdoor cats for decades. Wildlife conservation professionals have sought widespread use of humane dispatch (i.e., lethal culling applied humanely), whereas cat welfare professionals have promoted trap-neuter-return (TNR) (cats are trapped, neutered, and returned to the outdoors). These conflicts represent a policy panacea trap, which we argue drives many conservation conflicts. In these situations, the focus on defending a one-size-fits-all policy fails to account for the value differences that shape the different understandings of the problem and desired outcomes associated with each policy, as well as complexities in the social-ecological system. Over the past 5 years, a group of wildlife conservation and cat welfare professionals codeveloped a set of products that have started to be used to help organizations break out of the policy panacea trap. We used a case study to illustrate how efforts grounded in applied social science disciplines, such as science communication, social-ecological systems, and conservation marketing, can help identify a more robust set of policy options tailored to local management and cultural contexts for successful implementation. Shifting the focus to embrace a shared understanding of the broader system helped us identify areas for collaboration, broaden the policy toolbox, and allow space for policy tools originally framed as opposing panaceas. This work helped prepare all parties to have difficult but productive discussions and address shared policy needs. We suggest that many value-based conservation conflicts would benefit from similar efforts that use applied social science to transform how conflict is addressed, moving beyond policy panaceas that end in stalemate to develop shared understandings of context-specific policies, and to identify opportunities for creative cooperation that yield real conservation progress.
在美国，政策冲突已阻碍户外猫的成功种群水平管理达数十年之久。野生动物保护专业人士一直寻求广泛采用人道捕杀（即人道实施的致死性捕杀），而猫咪福利专业人士则倡导诱捕-绝育-放归（TNR）（将猫咪诱捕、绝育后放归户外）。这些冲突代表了一种政策万灵药陷阱，我们认为这引发了许多保护冲突。在这些情况下，专注于捍卫一刀切的政策未能考虑到价值观差异，这些差异塑造了对问题的不同理解以及与每项政策相关的期望结果，也未能考虑到社会生态系统的复杂性。在过去5年里，一群野生动物保护和猫咪福利专业人士共同开发了一系列产品，这些产品已开始用于帮助各组织摆脱政策万灵药陷阱。我们通过一个案例研究来说明，基于应用社会科学学科（如科学传播、社会生态系统和保护营销）的努力如何有助于确定一套更强大的政策选项，这些选项是根据当地管理和文化背景量身定制的，以便成功实施。将重点转移到对更广泛系统的共同理解上，这有助于我们确定合作领域、拓宽政策工具箱，并为最初被视为对立万灵药的政策工具留出空间。这项工作有助于让各方做好准备，进行艰难但富有成效的讨论，并满足共同的政策需求。我们建议，许多基于价值观的保护冲突将受益于类似的努力，即利用应用社会科学来改变应对冲突的方式，超越以僵局告终的政策万灵药，形成对因地制宜政策的共同理解，并确定能够带来实际保护进展的创造性合作机会。
