Zoos and Conservation: Policy Making and Organizational Challenges

The zoo community seeks improved relevance to society by contributing to restoration of biological diversity, but faces special challenges to meeting this admirable policy goal. We examine zoos’ effectiveness in endangered species restoration, public education, and policy and operations. We suggest that the zoo community can improve its performance in a complex context by better clarifying its aims, avoiding defensive activities, and enhancing its policy analytic skills. Also, zoo professionals can secure more effective operations if organizational structures and activities are better tailored to the task environment, organizational learning and change mechanisms are nurtured actively, and decision makers fully capitalize on all staff knowledge and skills. Every effort must be made to ensure that zoos’ policy, public, and technical roles effectively support conservation of local and global biological diversity. The “zoo” is a monument to a long-standing tradition of people’s fascination with non-human nature. Since the early societies of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Chinese, wild animals have been maintained in captivity in order to satisfy human curiosity with exotica. Most western zoos today, however, embrace far more benevolent values—supporting the conservation of biodiversity through specialized animal breeding, research, and education programs. These aims are intended to move zoos along an evolutionary continuum that will see them eventually transformed from “living natural history cabinets” to “environmental resources centers” (Rabb 1994: 162). While zoos have changed significantly since their origins, further progress may be frustrated by some zoo professionals’ understandings of and reactions to significant philosophical and practical challenges. Debates about zoo policy include questions such as: what constitutes zoos’ conservation obligations? What is the moral and scientific basis of zoos? Should zoos exist at all? (Norton et al. 1995). Traditionally, zoo professionals have responded to the zoo debate by re-emphasizing zoos’ technical or logistical capabilities to deliver conservation programs. As we see it, the process of resolving the competing ideas, beliefs, and perceptions about the appropriateness and feasibility of zoos’ goals and operations is far more central than defending zoo performance. It may be that before zoos can complete their evolution, more attention must be turned towards a greater understanding of zoos’ collective decision-making processes and organizational arrangements. That is, to what degree do zoos’ organizational structures, cultures and operations impede or enable realization of their conservation goals? While zoos have changed significantly since their origins, further progress may be frustrated by some zoo professionals’ understandings of and reactions to significant philosophical and practical challenges. Debates about zoo policy include questions such as: what constitutes zoos’ conservation obligations? What is the moral and scientific basis of zoos? Should zoos exist at all?