Wildlife crossings governance: barriers and enablers to implementation

Abstract

Despite the increased construction of wildlife crossings for mitigating the deleterious effects of roads, most conservation science research has focused on their biophysical dimensions with scant research from a social science standpoint. Roads are an omnipresent human footprint in landscapes globally, driving wildlife mortality and habitat fragmentation and resulting in isolated populations as well as disruptions to wildlife life cycles. Wildlife crossings, including overpasses and underpasses, have emerged as conservation interventions to mitigate the detrimental effects of roads on wildlife populations and improve road safety for motorists. The deployment of wildlife crossings requires governance, as it requires cooperation across sectors of society. Wildlife crossings face barriers for implementation as they are incredibly expensive, require extensive ecological monitoring, and need cooperation from multiple governance actors over long periods of time. While all have been enabled by the 'invisible hand' of governance practice, little research has been focused on them from a governance scholarship perspective. This research asks the question: what are the barriers and enablers from a governance perspective to implementation of new wildlife crossing infrastructure across roadways? Empirically, this research focuses on Summit County Safe Passages (SCSP hereafter) in Colorado. Theoretically, I use the Integrative Collaborative Governance Framework (ICGF), which emerged from public administration to theorize governance processes at the meso-level and has been applied empirically to a wide range of governance cases. Importantly, the ICGF allows us to disentangle exogenous (i.e., system context) from endogenous (i.e., collaboration dynamics) governance factors. For this single case study, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 actors and stakeholders from SCSP to understand their perspectives on the governance structures, processes, and attributes present in the governance system as per the ICGF. Our analytical approach was deductive, using the ICGF to deconstruct wildlife crossing implementation processes into distinct components which can be analyzed individually. I developed the codebook based on the ICGF components, which was subsequently applied to all transcripts from interviews. I then classified each excerpt, and eventually each sub-theme, into barriers, enablers, or neutral items based on whether the described attribute of the system hinders, facilitates, or does not affect the process of wildlife crossings implementation. I discovered that most of the barriers to implementation fall within the system context of the ICGF rather than within the collaboration dynamics of the SCSP itself. Specifically, components such as levels of conflict and trust, resource conditions, political dynamics and power relations, and institutional and procedural arrangements from the ICGF seem to obstruct the ability of SCSP to move forward. Conversely, enabling factors fell under collaboration dynamics, including those nested within principled engagement and shared motivation themes. My analysis also revealed that consequential incentives for non-wildlife interested actors are weak when human safety is "low-priority", whereby habitat fragmentation is high but wildlife-vehicle collisions are low. Despite wildlife crossings being perceived as largely apolitical, I discovered that recent wolf reintroduction in Colorado may play a role in polarization as they are likely to use wildlife crossings. Lastly, our study has shown that collective action potential toward wildlife crossing infrastructure is compromised by free riding, as some powerful actors contributing to the problem can neither be held accountable nor excluded from potential benefits from wildlife crossings. This study has uncovered how contextual factors must be carefully considered when implementing wildlife crossings.