CITES enforcement information sharing—if you don’t know where you’ve come from … you don’t know where you’re going

This study explores the evolution of the compliance mechanism of the CITES Convention and draws a historic timeline describing how various political and economic factors changed the course of decision making on wildlife enforcement information sharing. Focusing more on the deliberations at the United Nations and in particular at the CITES Conference of Parties (CoP) and standing committee meetings, the authors excavate various paradigm shifts within CITES enforcement and compliance decisions, extending from the origin of the convention to the recent developments at CITES CoP 18. Here, the authors do not seek to evaluate the whole history of the CITES Convention itself. Rather, they investigate a specific aspect, namely, enforcement matters and the role of stakeholders and events that influenced the CITES decision-making process on enforcement information sharing and development of enforcement information systems. The main objective of this article is to address a key question: What were the reasons for the failure of enforcement information sharing in CITES? This study is particularly relavent during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, where there is little evidence to show the link between illegal wildlife crime and COVID-19.