What happens after conservation?
That’s the question at the heart of a new study on Sweden’s celebrated carnivore policy, which pays Indigenous Sámi reindeer herders to share space with wolverines, lynx and wolves.
The 30-year-old conservation performance payment (CPP) scheme “is the oldest of its kind and widely hailed as best practice for coexistence,” write the co-authors.
Unlike traditional ‘damage compensation’ programs that pay livestock keepers when an animal is killed, the CPP is tied instead to conservation results: namely, the number of carnivore births documented on a community’s grazing grounds.
That means herders are incentivized to protect their herds and find ways to coexist effectively with predators.
In its first two decades, the scheme seemed to work pretty well: a 2015 study showed it had supported the recovery of endangered wolverine populations in Norbotten, a county in the country’s far north and the species’ historical stronghold.
Yet this year’s research tells a different story: despite expanding into southern Sweden, wolverine populations are declining again in the north.
So, what changed?
Lynx are another carnivore covered by the CPP. Photo: Zdeněk Macháček, Unsplash
Why Sweden’s carnivore conservation scheme fell apart
Basically, the ‘math stopped mathing’ for Sámi communities. As the number of wolverines grew, the herders started to lose more reindeer – but the cash they received didn’t increase.
“There’s an agreement that the reindeer herding community shouldn’t lose more than 10 percent of their herd every year to large carnivores,” says Hanna Pettersson, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral associate at the University of York.
“That target isn’t being achieved, and nothing is happening.”
Neither, she says, were the CPP payments adjusted for inflation. “The payments to the reindeer herders have been frozen for more than 20 years at the same level, which basically means it has been decreasing year by year, and there’s a very real payment gap.”
There are also challenges with the population monitoring process. As the climate changes and winters become milder, it’s becoming more difficult for community monitors to find tracks and dens. When they do, the official approval process is convoluted and opaque.
“We have had four to six reproductions in our [community], but in the last 10 years, we’ve had only 1.5 (approved),” said one Sámi herder who was interviewed in the study.
“Something is obviously wrong! Because the population has not decreased; we see the tracks – it is stable, and they take reindeer.”
“I have zero trust in today’s carnivore management,” another herder told the study. “It’s all about impossible criteria, secrecy and that the result should be as low as possible so that the state doesn’t have to pay.”
Reindeer in northern Sweden. Photo: Kotryna Juskaite, Unsplash
A breakdown in trust
All this means it’s no longer worth herders’ while to avoid killing the wolverines that hunted their herds.
It has also contributed to a breakdown in the Sámi’s relationship with the state, as herders felt their coexistence challenges were undervalued and their livelihoods – practiced for millennia – were under-recognized.
Local government officials also expressed discomfort with the payments they were authorized to deliver.
“Nobody’s content that the payment is appropriate,” says Pettersson. “And for this reason, the legitimacy and trust in the system has plummeted.”
The decision to update the payment system lies with the central government, but its spending decisions are political, and the Sámi’s concerns have long been sidelined.
When Pettersson interviewed central government officials, “they basically said, ‘This is not a priority for us.’They’ve taken money from the reindeer herders and put it to wolf management [in southern Sweden] instead.”
So, is the scheme doomed? Pettersson doesn’t think so, but reviving it will require urgently updating the payment system, and then sorting through the rest of the sticking places one by one.
“We called it a relational tipping point,” she says. “By dealing with the payment issue as a first step, you would enable people to come back to the table to deal with everything else.”
The research makes an uncomfortable broader point for conservation payments in practice: if a scheme works, its costs – in monitoring, in predation and in cash – will rise. And if governments aren’t prepared to factor that in, such costs are frequently shouldered by the most vulnerable communities.
“The burden of conservation is unequally distributed,” says Pettersson. “The more recovery there is, the more difficult it will become if we don’t deal with the inequalities.”
That’s a paradox that conservation – a ‘crisis discipline’ focused explicitly on saving species from extinction – is often ill-equipped to navigate.
“The idea is that once we’ve brought something back, then everything is fine,” says Pettersson, “but that’s actually not the case: that’s when the troubles begin.”
A lion crosses a road in front of two tourist jeeps in the Maasai Mara. Photo: serrnovik, DepositPhotos
A wider reckoning
Sweden’s conflicts – between wildlife and communities, and between communities and governments – are not unique. Similar conservation payment schemes have since emerged across the planet, with Sweden’s scheme often cited as a template.
While the species, settings and funding sources differ, the logic is the same: pay communities to coexist with wildlife, rather than compensating them after the damage is done.
How Sweden sorts this out matters. Across the Global South, which is home to a disproportionate share of the world’s biodiversity, the stakes are arguably higher: more people rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, and social safety nets are often weaker or absent.
The Maasai Mara is a savanna in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley and a world-famous safari destination. There, Maasai landowners receive lease payments from lodges and camps in the area in exchange for setting their land aside for wildlife and tourism.
The model now supports more than 14,000 landowners across the Mara ecosystem. The underlying premise mirrors Sweden’s: make wildlife worth more alive than dead, and communities will protect it.
Yet the vulnerabilities run deeper. The Sámi’s CPPs are paid by the government and tied to conservation outcomes, while the Maasai’s come from private enterprises and tourist dollars.
That meant that when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and international tourism collapsed, around 90 percent of Mara conservancies lost almost all their income almost overnight.
That shock pulled the scheme’s inequities into sharp relief: some community members were far better equipped to deal with the income loss than others.
“The effects of the pandemic emphasized deep divides in income, resources and social standing which must be addressed over the coming years,” wrote researchers Shreya Chakrabarti and Anneli Ekblom.
“Clearly, if lease payments are too low or unstable, landowners will be more reluctant to participate in the model.”
A Sámi reindeer breeder in traditional dress. Photo: TravelFaery, DepositPhotos
Who pays for conservation?
This brings us back to the central question posed by CPP schemes: who are we asking to absorb the costs and risks of conservation? And is it actually ethical to do so?
Across the planet, the people on the front lines of carnivore coexistence – often pastoralists and subsistence farmers – are some of the most marginalized.
This marginalization is not accidental; it’s the result of policies that put local and Indigenous land uses last.
In Kenya, the creation of national parks such as the Mara has displaced many Maasai from their ancestral lands. In Sweden’s north, it’s the Sámi’s historical grazing land being earmarked for other things – including a litany of renewable energy projects for the country’s green transition.
“It’s very difficult to make reindeer herding compatible with large carnivores nowadays, because the conditions have changed so much,” says Pettersson.
“The Sámi are being squeezed together with the carnivores into smaller and smaller fragments in the landscape. In the past, they could move into areas with fewer wolverines, but they can’t really do that anymore.”
Yet she’s hopeful that the scheme can still become workable – and that others can follow on.
Redistributing costs and benefits across the Swedish populace is first on the list, alongside other ways of supporting herding communities to protect their herds, such as by protecting key areas like calving grounds from the growing carnivore population.
“There are definitely things we can do to improve the conditions of coexistence,” Pettersson says. “It’s not only about the money, but the money is a starting point.”