What the study of tiger preservation in India reveals about science, advocacy, and policy change

There is a growing movement throughout the world that is becoming more vocal in challenging the efforts by international environmental organizations to promulgate the wilderness ethic as the solution to the problem of habitat and species preservation. Because the ethic is promoted largely by western or northern based international environmental organizations for use by all nations, the international wilderness movement is increasingly being labeled as “imperialistic.” This dissertation aspires to provide a dispassionate account of one nation's efforts to adopt and adapt this model as a means of staving off the degradation of its forests and wildlife with an eye to the expressed concern about undue western influence. The case study chosen was India's use of the wilderness concept in its effort to save the Bengal Tiger.; Four empirical puzzles framed this analysis. First, what reasons and forces motivated India's policymakers to move from an “agrarian” ethic to “wilderness”? Second, given that nongovernmental organizations, as the primary movers, cannot power their way to a policy change, what tools and strategies were used by them to entice the Government of India to change its policy? Third, what role does science play? Fourth, can the actions of public interest international non governmental organizations be rightfully labeled “imperialism”?; Using a public policy as social experimentation heuristic with the Issue-Processing Approach to policy change, I found the following. A pre-condition for policy innovation is an acknowledged and repeated history of policy failure. In addition, the skilled use of a politicized and carefully circumscribed conservation science was required in order to subdue alternative interpretations of the cause of habitat and species degradation. Once the standing policy had lost its legitimacy and an alternative model was sanctioned, policy change occurred. The actions of international organizations are far more complex than the tag “imperialism” would imply. Future research on international nongovernmental organizations must develop appropriate concepts of “power” to capture the workings of these institutions: focusing on their sophisticated use of science, public praise, and condemnation in their effort to instigate policy change.