Detecting shared norms as a strategy for sustainable programming: Wildlife crime enforcement versus local community actors in Zambia's protected areas

Sustainability implementation efforts, relevant to all Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), can succeed or fail based on how the program activities effectively align with local community norms. Conflict arises when implementers incorrectly assume the ways in which local communities and other stakeholders share their world views. A novel approach was applied to identify conflicts between stakeholder norms through the example of wildlife conservation. This case is based on 62 systematically collected interviews involving law enforcement staff (wildlife police officers [WPOs]) and local community members in four of Zambia's Game Management Areas. Cultural consensus analysis (CCA) was used to extract and compare cultural models across groups. Discordant cultural norms were identified for resource protection, which reflected frailty of collaborative strategies. Concordant norms were relevant to shared understandings of the disproportionate burdens to GMA-based communities from conservation and some potential benefits of collaboration. This case shows exemplar application of CCA to capture and compare stakeholder norms associated with livelihoods and conservation, allowing better program design that reduces conflict and builds on shared values to better support SDGs, especially SDG15 (Life on Land).