Protected Area Rangers as Cultural Brokers? Implications for Wildlife Crime Prevention in Viet Nam

The scope, scale, and socio-environmental impacts of wildlife crime pose diverse risks to people, animals, and environments. With direct knowledge of the persistence and dynamics of wildlife crime, protected area rangers can be both an essential source of information on, and front-line authority for, preventing wildlife crime. Beyond patrol and crime scene data collected by rangers, solutions to wildlife crime could be better built off the knowledge and situational awareness of rangers, in particular rangers' relationships with local communities and their unique ability to engage them. Rangers are often embedded in the communities surrounding the conserved areas which they are charged with protecting, which presents both challenges and opportunities for their work on wildlife crime prevention. Cultural brokerage refers to the process by which intermediaries, like rangers, facilitate interactions between other relevant stakeholders that are separate yet proximate to one another, or that lack access to, or trust in, one another. Cultural brokers can function as gatekeepers, representatives, liaisons, coordinators, or iterant brokers; these forms vary by how information flows and how closely aligned the broker is to particular stakeholders. The objectives of this paper are to use the example of protected area rangers in Viet Nam to (a) characterize rangers' cultural brokerage of resources, information, and relationships and (b) discuss ranger-identified obstacles to the prevention of wildlife crime as an example of brokered knowledge. Using in-depth face-to-face interviews with rangers and other protected area staff (N = 31, 71% rangers) in Pu Mat National Park, 2018, we found that rangers regularly shift between forms of cultural brokerage. We offer a typology of the diverse forms of cultural brokerage that characterize rangers' relationships with communities and other stakeholders. We then discuss ranger-identified obstacles to wildlife protection as an example of brokered knowledge. These results have implications for designing interventions to address wildlife crime that both improve community-ranger interactions and increase the efficiency of wildlife crime prevention.

“Language alludes to everything”: A pilot study on front-line worker experience with newcomer integration

There remains an ongoing need to address not only the post-migration experiences of newcomers settling in Calgary but also to understand how systems that serve them perceive, make sense of, and contribute to these experiences. By hearing from those who work with newcomers within the institutional settings that support newcomers, we can begin to understand some complexities of newcomer integration. The purpose of this qualitative pilot study was to explore the perceptions that front-line workers hold regarding needs and experiences of newcomers. This study involved a series of eleven semi-structured interviews with workers at an immigrant-serving language-learning agency which were analyzed using thematic coding. The findings highlight: front-line workers perception of their newcomer clients’ identity in correlation to language; the clients’ emotional burden and sense of belonging; and the challenges clients faced balancing everyday commitments. Moreover, this study explores the front-line worker’s role in cultural brokerage and promoting wellness.

Conflict resolution as cultural brokerage: how refugee leaders mediate disputes in Uganda’s refugee settlements

Looking through the lens of disputes and their resolution, this article examines the efforts undertaken by refugees to guarantee peaceful coexistence within and around settlements in northern Uganda. Based on extensive fieldwork, we examine which disputes occur within and around the settlements and which actors intervene to mediate and solve them. We identify a hierarchy among the different formal and informal actors involved in the resolution of disputes and show how refugee leaders operate as brokers between Ugandan law and South-Sudanese customs, between here and there, a recent past and imagined future in the home country. This finding comes to clarify the process of local integration, by foregrounding the link between law and culture. Some of the dispute-settlement outcomes facilitate the refugees’ integration into Uganda as a host country, while other resolution strategies are geared towards a long-awaited return to South-Sudan.

Brokering Culture and Power in a Media-Driven World: Parents of Adolescents in Northern Thailand

Exposure to modern media alters cultural values and individual identities. Little is known, however, about whether and how media use alters cultural socialization processes in family relationships. In this study, 20 urban Thai parents of adolescent children took part in individual interviews in which they discussed media use in their families. Thematic analysis of interview data indicates that adolescents act as cultural brokers for their parents in a media-driven culture, and that this brokerage engenders adolescent agency, power, and the renegotiation of traditional age-based hierarchies in the Thai context. Data also indicate that parental power and authority are maintained and reasserted by way of parents placing restrictions on adolescent media use and mobilizing their children’s technological desires as opportunities to teach culturally salient lessons about necessity—a value that reflects central tenets of the late Thai King Bhumibol’s Sufficiency Economy and of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. Findings suggest that media use can both transform and maintain traditional cultural values and family dynamics in northern Thailand. More broadly, this study carries implications for the psychological science of globalization by applying the concept of cultural brokerage to communities undergoing rapid technological change.