South African anti-poaching staff associated community engagement with lower reported poaching
WHAT THE EVIDENCE SAYS
Forty-nine conservation practitioners reported their reserves' management practices and whether poaching was a concern. The highest proportion reporting poaching was 84.2% in KwaZulu-Natal; practitioner-reported community engagement was associated with lower odds of reporting poaching after modeled covariates.
WHY IT MATTERS / OUR READ
Reserve boundaries are managed social systems as well as ecological ones. The result supports examining the quality of engagement and trust alongside fencing and enforcement, not replacing incident evidence with perception alone.
CAVEATS / UNCERTAINTY
Small, non-random practitioner sample; outcome was binary self-reported poaching, not incident counts or an experimental before-and-after estimate. Community engagement might correlate with other better-resourced management practices.
SOURCE
Environmental Management — Shivambu et al. (10 Oct 2026)
View original evidence ↗
A 49-practitioner survey adds a governance signal but cannot establish that engagement caused fewer incidents.
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