Professor Friedo Herbig knew he had a respectable research track record in his field—that of conservation crime—but he had no idea just how world-class it actually was until he opened the pages of the December 2018 issue of Deviant Behavior, an American criminal justice journal with an impact factor of 1.76.
Inside was an article, Taking stock in wildlife crime research: trends and implications for future research, by Sarah C McFann and Stephen F Pires of Florida International University, Miami. There, on page eight, was a table listing the 10 most-published wildlife crime scholars in the world—and among them, in eighth position, stood his name: Friedo JW Herbig.
That wasn’t all. Directly below the table stood a list titled “Top 10 universities” and, in third place, after Rutgers University and Montana State University in the United States, was “University of South Africa”—the only university in Africa on the list.
Granted, the publication date of this particular issue was December 2018, but it was only in 2020 that Herbig discovered, almost by accident, that he and Unisa had featured so prominently in what was essentially a global literature study.
“I remember receiving an e-mail from Stephen McFann asking me for articles I’d written,” he recalls. “I sent the articles and left it at that. Much later, someone alerted me that my and Unisa’s names were listed in the top 10. It was a nice thing to see.”
Herbig, who is part of the Department of Criminology and Security Science in the College of Law, has certainly come a long way since his days as a marine conservation inspector with the then Department of Sea Fisheries in the Western Cape.
He found himself gravitating away from hands-on conservation towards the academic evaluation of conservation-related crime, law enforcement practices, and, particularly, the policing of South Africa’s natural resource assets. Seeking a better understanding of policing in general, Herbig enrolled for a degree in Police Science at Unisa, then followed that up with honours and master’s degrees and a doctorate in Criminology.
Along the way, he and his PhD supervisor, Professor SJ Joubert, coined the term “conservation crime” to replace the plethora of existing terms used to describe crime directed towards natural resources, including “environmental crime”, “ecological crime”, “wildlife crime”, and “green crime”.
“All these terms muddy the waters, creating confusion and uncertainty.” Herbig says. The result of this vagueness is that natural resource crimes—in South Africa at least—tend to be grouped together with general crimes such as drunkenness and petty theft.
Considering that natural resource crime is rapidly becoming a social and economic crime with global ramifications, this kind of approach is woefully inadequate. What is needed is a proper crime category. In much the same way that the category of violent crime encompasses murder, rape, robbery, and assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm, among others, ‘conservation crime’ would fit the bill here, Herbig says.
While South Africa has yet to adopt conservation crime as a category in its own right, the term has gained traction among scholars in the field. For example, in the very same Deviant Behavior article mentioned earlier, Herbig and Joubert are specifically mentioned as the originators of conservation criminology as a term. “It has been a real career highlight to see how the use of ‘conservation crime’ has matured among scholars internationally,” he says.
*By Clairwyn van der Merwe, Contract writer, Directorate of Research Support
Publish date: 2020-12-11 00:00:00.0