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In Norway, as in many other countries, a government-sponsored campaign against large carnivores was waged well into the twentieth century and eventually led to the disappearance of gray wolves (Canis lupus) from the country.1 By the 1960s, the species was considered functionally extinct both in Norway and neighboring Sweden. In 1971, wolves received legal protection under Norwegian law.2 Occasionally in subsequent years,wolves dispersing fromthe Russian-Finnish population made it into the Scandinavian Peninsula. In 1983, in the south-central Swedish–Norwegian border area, two of these immigrants produced a first litter of wild Scandinavian wolf pups again. The Scandinavian wolf population has been growing since and numbers over 400 individuals today, although only a small part of the population lives on the Norwegian side of the border. The threats faced by Scandinavian wolves include inbreeding, low levels of tolerance by some sectors of the rural public, and high levels of poaching.3 Since the official status of wolves in Norway switched from vermin to a protected species, wolf conservation and management has been an increasingly contested topic in the country, with the controversy generally peaking every time the Norwegian government authorizes a winter wolf hunt.4 Whereas some Norwegian citizens would like to seemanymore wolves in the country than the currently estimated 65– 68 animals (plus another 25wolves or sowhose range straddles the Sweden–Norway border), others would rather see them all disappear once more.5 The latest chapter in the Norwegian wolf saga began in summer 2016 when Parliament agreed on a new wolf policy. In the follow-up implementation of this national policy, the relevant RegionalManagement Authorities earmarked a total of 47 wolves—two-thirds of the national population— for culling in order to reduce sheep depredation, only to see the Climate and Environment Minister reverse this decision and reduce the number of wolves to be killed to 15.6 One international treaty has been an influential feature in debates on Norway’s wolf policy during the past three decades: the Council of Europe’s 1979 Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats.7 The discourse has, unfortunately, been affected by some tenacious misunderstandings concerning the compatibility of Norway’s constantly evolving wolf policy with the Convention. Our aim in this article is to reduce the confusion in this regard, in order to promote a constructive and well-informed debate regarding the future of wolf conservation and management in Norway. An added advantage of this focus is that it entails the legal analysis of certain features of the Bern Convention, the relevance of which extends far beyondNorwegian wolves, as they apply to European wildlife conservation at large.

Fences, walls and other barriers are proliferating along international borders on a global scale. These border fences not only affect people, but can also have unintended but important consequences for wildlife, inter alia by curtailing migrations and other movements, by fragmenting populations and by causing direct mortality, for instance through entanglement. Large carnivores and large herbivores are especially vulnerable to these impacts. This article analyses the various impacts of border fences on wildlife around the world from a law and policy perspective, focusing on international wildlife law in particular. Relevant provisions from a range of global and regional legal instruments are identified and analysed, with special attention for the Bonn Convention on Migratory Species and the European Union Habitats Directive.

The EU Habitats Directive is a key biodiversity conservation instrument. It contains legal obligations for the 28 EU member states in order to safeguard a ‘favourable conservation status’ (FCS) for selected species and habitat types. The crucial FCS concept itself, however, remains subject to considerable confusion regarding its proper interpretation and operationalization, impairing the Directive’s effective implementation. Diminishing this confusion is the purpose of this review. It focuses specifically on large carnivores—wolf (Canis lupus), brown bear (Ursus arctos), Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) and wolverine (Gulo gulo). These pose particular challenges, given their low densities, transboundary populations, and human-wildlife conflict potential. Large carnivores are also the only species for which specific guidance has been adopted by the European Commission— and subsequently contested. Our methodology combines legal analysis with an understanding of the species’ ecology and associated social, economic and cultural dimensions. We analyze the methods and processes through which EU law is interpreted, implemented, and enforced, by member states, European Commission, and EU Court of Justice—which is the ultimate authority regarding EU law interpretation. On that basis, we engage three particularly complex interpretation questions which are also of great practical significance: (1) the appropriate scale to achieve FCS (national or transboundary population level); (2) the respective roles of demographic, genetic and ecological factors in determining FCS; and (3) the use of extinction versus carrying capacity as benchmark. Regarding these questions, we identify approaches that are workable and effective, as well as likely to be endorsed by the EU Court.

Through their annual movements in search of favorable locations to feed, breed, and raise their young, migratory birds connect ecosystems and countries that are sometimes thousands of kilometers ap...

Many conservation professionals are familiar with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Ramsar Convention, and the World Heritage Convention. Regional instruments, such as those focusing on Africa, Antarctica, or Europe, are also conspicuous features of the conservation arena. Other international wildlife agreements focus on particular species, such as polar bears or albatrosses, or particular transboundary protected areas, such as the huge Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (see table 1). These agreements are collectively known as international wildlife law (Bowman et al. 2010). The binding agreements themselves are typically accompanied and informed by an evolving set of nonbinding instruments, such as Conference of the Parties (COP) decisions and action plans.

The ongoing refugee crisis in Europe has seen many countries rush to construct border security fencing to divert or control the flow of people. This follows a trend of border fence construction across Eurasia during the post-9/11 era. This development has gone largely unnoticed by conservation biologists during an era in which, ironically, transboundary cooperation has emerged as a conservation paradigm. These fences represent a major threat to wildlife because they can cause mortality, obstruct access to seasonally important resources, and reduce effective population size. We summarise the extent of the issue and propose concrete mitigation measures., While cooperation across national boundaries has emerged as a key concept in wildlife conservation, this Perspective reveals that, at the same time, there has been a dramatic increase in the extent of security fencing along international borders, which has dramatic consequences for this approach.

More than 80% of the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) range in Africa still exists outside of formal protected areas, and sits across many administrative and political boundaries. These ranges comprise a matrix of multi-use landscapes of potentially divergent administrative, legal and political systems. It is further recognised that the evolution of the various human focused administrative systems, from an elephant conservation perspective, has been ad hoc and without integration. This has resulted in or facilitated a progressive encroachment on the natural range by human settlement and agricultural activities. The movement of elephant across international boundaries results in a parochial approach to their management, particularly within a context of increasing human-wildlife conflict, and an inconsistent consideration of ecological requirements of the elephant at a trans-boundary level, leading to a mismanagement of these populations, at a trans-boundary level. This study investigates the conservation and management of the Central Limpopo River Valley (CLRV) elephant population roaming between Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and utilizing the trilateral Greater Mapungubwe Transfrontier Conservation Area (GMTFCA). The desirability of conserving and managing wildlife at the level of the biological unit of the trans-boundary population is taken as a starting-point, following insights from trans-boundary large carnivore and waterbird species in Europe. The many legal and policy frameworks applicable to the CLRV elephant population are identified and tested against this approach. The current approach taken in respect of the CRLV elephant population meets the benchmark to a substantial degree, although some essential steps remain to be taken. We discuss potential adjustments to laws and policies that are required to ensure the ecological stability of trans-boundary elephant populations, and to provide for their collective management.

This article engages the narrative of fragmentation in international law by asserting that legal academics and professionals have failed to probe more deeply into ‘fragmentation’ as a concept and, more specifically, as a spatial metaphor. The contention here is that however central fragmentation has been to analyses of contemporary international law, this notion has been conceptually assumed, ahistorically accepted and philosophically under-examined. The ‘fragment’ metaphor is tied historically to a cartographic rationality – and thus ‘reality’ – of all social space being reducible to a geometric object and, correspondingly, a planimetric map. The purpose of this article is to generate an appreciation among international lawyers that the problem of ‘fragmentation’ is more deeply rooted in epistemology and conceptual history. This requires an explanation of how the conflation of social space with planimetric reduction came to be constructed historically and used politically, and how that model informs representations of legal practices and perceptions of ‘international legal order’ as an inherently absolute and geometric. This implies the need to dig up and expose background assumptions that have been working to precondition a ‘fragmented’ characterization of worldly space. With the metaphor of ‘digging’ in mind, I draw upon Michel Foucault’s ‘archaeology of knowledge’ and, specifically, his assertion that epochal ideas are grounded by layers of ‘obscure knowledge’ that initially seem unrelated to a discourse. In the case of the fragmentation narrative, I argue obscure but key layers can be found in the Cartesian paradigm of space as a geometric object and the modern States’ imperative to assert (geographic) jurisdiction. To support this claim, I attempt to excavate the fragment metaphor by discussing key developments that led to the production and projection of geometric and planimetric reality since the 16th century.