In recent years, conservation researchers have arrived at the conclusion that evidence is only part of the story.  Although the concept of policy impact comes with its own baggage, there is recognition that for conservation research to translate to practice, it needs to engage better with policy.  The problem is that no one really knows how to do this, given that it requires navigating varied aims, mandates, values, and decisions of a range of actors at various scales. 

Building on research that commenced in 1986, government research institutions, ecologists, and wildlife managers from various Indian states came to a consensus at a workshop in 1993 that to counter the risk of extinction, some individuals of the critically endangered Asiatic lion needed to be translocated from Gir National Park, Gujarat to Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh. There was no doubt in the minds of scientists that this was a conservation priority, and the National Board for Wildlife issued a unanimous recommendation for translocation.  Madhya Pradesh spent USD 40 million  and displaced 1500 families to make room for the lions in Kuno.  The lions however, never turned up.

Resorting to a sequence of invented bureaucratic hurdles and political obstruction that called on party allegiances in Madhya Pradesh, against a conservation policy formulated by an opposing political party at the Centre, Gujarat was able to stall and eventuallyobliterate all references to translocation as a conservation tool for the Asiatic lion.  The evidence built over years of study  tied itself up in expert reports and recommendations.  Even an order of the Supreme Court of India on the grounds of “species best interest standard”, that pointed out that Gujarat could not “claim ownership” over the Asiatic lion could not get the state government to budge.

At the heart of conservation policy lies values and decisions based on those values.  Scientific evidence is only a small part of this process.  In the Kuno case, both science and law were laid down at the altar of cultural pride and parochialism.  Officials from Gujarat consistently rebuffed attempts at translocation by citing its cultural history of conservation and proven track record, to ensure that it remained the world’s only home for the Asiatic lion. Cultural pride as a value so clearly eclipsed scientific evidence that even the death of 26 lions in the Greater Gir area on account of canine distemper has not proved enough impetus to reconsider the translocation policy. With the political leadership in Gujarat getting elected to the national stage, it would seem that, irrespective of widely accepted views that point to a calamity in the offing, the conservation policy around the Asiatic lion is unlikely to change.

Drawing on scholarship on the role of science and values in conservation decision-making, this project aims to understand the production of conservation policies in India. It will attempt to untangle the fuzziness of this process, using the translocation of wild animals as the domain of analysis, and explore the factors that impact the co-option or discounting of research in the course of conservation policymaking in India.