Since 2021, we have been working with the Institute of Geography on an interdisciplinary study of legal and illegal hunting in southern Africa. In October 2025, the project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) will begin, which we are conducting together with Linus Kalvelage from the Institute of Geography/Global South Studies Center and further cooperation partners both from the Global North and Global South.

By combining a criminological perspective with an economic geography lens, this project aims to assess the interface between illegal and legal wildlife value chains and understand the causal linkages between law changes on the one hand, and the production and traffic of  wildlife products on the other hand. We assume that legal and illegal ways of commodifying wildlife coexist and partly overlap in many conservation areas. In southern African countries in particular, wildlife conservation is a dominant land-use and plays an important role for regional economies. Thereby, light is shed on the linkages between shifting trade regimes in Europe and the circumstances of wildlife commodification in a region that largely rely on the production of wildlife commodities: The Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA) in the border region of Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola.

This border region will be examined as a social-ecological system, in which legal and illegal wildlife hunting value chains are rooted. Thereby, it will be assessed under which circumstances wildlife is transformed into commodities and how different legal frameworks affect the production of wildlife. In a second step, this project is interested in the circulation of wildlife products. While about a large body of literature is concerned with the consumption of illegal wildlife products in the consumer markets, lesser studies have focused on the transit countries in illegal wildlife trade. As a point of entry, Germany’s role in the trade of illegal wildlife products will be assessed, in order to understand which legal and illegal wildlife value chains exist and how value is added along the (illegal) trafficking chain. These patterns will be regarded against the background of international law changes and how these affect the configuration of value chains. Thus, we will address recent calls for an evaluation of interventions in illegal wildlife trade to achieve inclusive policies that minimize the risk of unethical or counterproductive outcome for people and wildlife.

Project duration: 01/10/2025 - 31/03/2028

Project Partners: Prof. Dr. Frank Neubacher, M.A.; Dr. Linus Kalvelage; Job Avelino Lohmann

Cooperation Partners: Prof. Dr. Javier Revilla Diez (University of Cologne); Prof. Dr. Andreas Schloenhardt (University of Vienna); Dr. Pius Rutina (University of Namibia); Prof. Selma Lendelvo (University of Namibia); Dr. Willem Odendaal (University of Strathclyde); Dr. Stefan Schulz (Namibian Institut of Science and Technology)

Previous Publications

• Southern Criminology − Oder: Wie international ist die Kriminologie wirklich? In: Stempkowski, Monika / Beclin, Katharina (Hrsg.), Festschrift für Christian Grafl, Wien: Verlag Österreich, 2024, S. 257-269 (Frank Neubacher)
• Big Shots – Großwildjagd, globale Märkte und die Kriminologie, in: Beisel, Horst / Verrel, Torsten / Laue, Christian / Meier, Bernd-Dieter / Hartmann, Arthur / Hermann, Dieter (Hrsg.), Die Kriminalwissenschaften als Teil der Humanwissenschaften, Festschrift für Dieter Dölling zum 70. Geburtstag, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2023,  859-872 (Frank Neubacher)
• Wilderei und illegaler Wildtierhandel in Afrika – Erkenntnisse und Chancen eines interdisziplinären kriminologischen Forschungsansatzes, in: Kriminologie - Das Online-Journal | Criminology - The Online Journal, 4(5), 2023, 297–315 (Job Lohmann) doi.org/10.18716/ojs/krimoj/2023.4.6
• Valuing Nature in Global Production Networks: Hunting Tourism and the Weight of History in Zambezi, Namibia; Annals of the American Association of Geographers, online first, 2023 (Linus Kalvelage, Javier Revilla Diez, Michael Bollig) tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24694452.2023.2200468
• Chapter 13 - Hunting for Development: Global production networks and the commodification of wildlife in Namibia. In:  Currey, J.: Conservation, Markets, And The Environment In Southern And Eastern Africa, Commodifying The ‘Wild’, 2023 (Linus Kalvelage) jstor.org/stable/jj.3643592.19
• Regional resilience and social-ecological systems: the impact of COVID-19 on community conservation in Namibia, online first, 2023 (Lars Lüder, Linus Kalvelage) doi.org/10.1080/19376812.2023.2276939

Previous Presentations

• Explaining illegal hunting and the illegal wildlife trade – Theoretical framework and future research, August 2025, CRIMSA Biennial Conference in Cape Town, South Africa (Job Lohmann)
• Poaching – cultural practice and criminal offence between historical normality, modern attribution processes and modern (de)criminalisation, March 2024, Annual Conference “Criminology in North Rhine-Westphalia” in Siegen, Germany (Job Lohmann)
• European Conference on African Studies: “Regional Resilience and Social-Ecological Systems: Capturing the impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on community conservancies”, May 2023 in Cologne, Germany (Linus Kalvelage)
• Poaching of big game in Africa from a criminological perspective – phenomenon, explanation, countermeasures, March 2023, Annual Conference “Criminology in North Rhine-Westphalia” in Cologne, Germany (Job Lohmann)
• Global Conference on Economic Geography: “Valuing nature in global production networks: hunting tourism in Zambezi, Namibia”, June 2022 in Dublin, Ireland (Linus Kalvelage)
• University of Bayreuth, CBNRM workshop: “Navigating through the storm: conservancies as local institutions for regional resilience in Zambezi, Namibia”, March 2022 in Windhoek, Namibia (Linus Kalvelage)