Les liaisons fructueuses - RUIG-GIAN

and Development) Capacity Building Task Force
on Trade, Environment and Development, which
was critical to the project’s overall success. A widerange
of expertise (e.g. in law as well as social and
natural sciences) was brought to bear in the project’s
implementation through the above-mentioned mix
of international partners, a multidisciplinary International
Advisory Group and intersectoral steering
committees and review teams at the national level.
Strengths and challenges
Although the GIAN initiative provided a unique
opportunity, it was not without its challenges. Principal
among these, and also the greatest strength
within the initiative, was the requirement that all
projects must be done in partnership with Genevabased
academic institutions.
Orchids are heavily traded species, listed in Appendix II
of CITES. Appendix II lists species that are not necessarily
now threatened with extinction but that may become
so unless trade is closely controlled.
Although the CITES Parties made their support for
national wildlife trade policies clear, the mandate
did not include funding. Rather, the governments
called on the CITES Secretariat to work with other
IGOs, such as UNEP, to identify potential funding
sources. However, few, if any, wildlife trade policy
reviews had ever been conducted previously, making
many traditional bilateral donors hesitant to invest
deeply in this undeveloped, and untested, area.
For this reason, the GIAN initiative seemed like
an excellent fit. As an initiative that is based on the
pursuit of joint academic research, the initiative
was well-suited to the groundbreaking nature of the
project. The GIAN financial contribution was used
to leverage matching funds from the joint UNEP-
UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade
In moving this project proposal forward we needed
to first identify a potential academic partner
with expertise and interest in wildlife trade policy
reviews. At the end of the day, this proved easier
than initially envisioned. After reaching out to some
academic contacts, the GIAN Secretariat helped put
us in touch with Professor Marc Hufty of the then
Graduate Institute of Development Studies (IUED).
At the time, Professor Hufty was completing some
field research in Latin America and after a few initial
discussions it became clear that his research on
environmental governance and the objective of the
project would complement each other well.
From our initial meetings, through development of
the project application and ultimately project implementation,
the collaboration between the three
principal partners has been rich and intense. It has
not been unusual through periods of the project for
the team to meet bi-weekly to work on aspects of
project implementation. In addition, the core document
of the project, a framework for reviewing wildlife
trade policies, was developed jointly among all
the partners. This closeness in collaboration meant
that the partners had to first improve their mutual
understanding of each other’s interests and institu-
Enhancing National Capacities to Assess Wildlife Trade Policies in Support of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)
Coordinator : Hussein Abaza
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