Legitimacy and Wildlife Disease: Should Chronic Wasting Disease be Managed without Government?

Abstract Natural resource institutions have embraced a deliberative turn to improve how they solve management problems and promote peacebuilding with and among stakeholders. However, actors who would rather not help decide, understand, evaluate, or implement decisions, or, at least not be dictated to in that regard, pose challenges to democratic governance arrangements. Such an inclination can be prevalent among landowner segments and befuddle efforts to safeguard state trust resources such as wildlife. Specifically, landowners’ decision to self-govern can be problematic for wildlife disease management because voluntarism is critical to curbing the negative effects of disease. Researchers suggest that different types of legitimacy play an important role in explaining obedience, interest, or realized engagement or collaboration. We studied which types of legitimacy drive Texas landowners living in the midst of the deadly and highly infectious chronic wasting disease (CWD) to disengage with state-led disease governance that aims to protect deer, elk, and moose populations. Our survey of 481 landowners revealed that a pathway towards landowner willingness to engage CWD management in Texas requires top-down and bottom-up alignment with conceptions of ideological and consequential legitimacy. Given the results of our study, an evolution in contemporary CWD governance would require elements of both socially constructed instrumentally- and value-rational norms (i.e., CWD management in the right way and for the right reasons) to carve a space for political legitimacy at different levels, with aims of rendering voluntarism to benefit the common good culturally normative.