Contested Illegality: Understanding Legitimacy Challenges in Wildlife Governance
Hübschle, Annette (2025) Contested Illegality: Understanding Legitimacy Challenges in Wildlife Governance. In The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Law and Policy.
Abstract:
This chapter introduces the concept of contested illegality as a conceptual framework for understanding environmental crimes, with particular focus on wildlife trafficking. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and theoretical contributions from critical criminology and economic sociology, the chapter challenges the formal legal framing of environmental infractions as merely criminal or illicit. It argues that actors engaged in these economies often justify their actions through alternative moral economies, historic grievances, and practical needs, revealing a spectrum of social legitimacy that contests legal authority. Through the wildlife harmscapes framework and ethnographic insights from southern African wildlife economies, the chapter examines how actors justify participation in criminalized activities not only through economic need but also as acts of resistance, survival, and social ordering. The analysis challenges conventional binaries such as legal/illegal, poacher/hunter, and community/state, revealing how legality itself is plural, fluid, and contested. By theorizing contested illegality as both a legitimation mechanism and a form of political expression, the chapter contributes to broader debates on environmental crime, governance, and justice, offering critical tools for rethinking environmental policy beyond punitive paradigms. While focused primarily on wildlife trafficking, the insights illuminate dynamics present across various forms of environmental crime, from illegal logging and fishing to waste dumping and pollution offenses.}
Available on the publisher’s website.