Bushmeat management policies are often developed outside the communities in which
they are to be implemented. These policies are also routinely designed to be applied
uniformly across communities with little regard for variation in social or ecological
conditions. We used fuzzy-logic cognitive mapping, a form of participatory modeling,
to compare the assumptions driving externally generated bushmeat management policies
with perceptions of bushmeat trade dynamics collected from local community members
who admitted to being recently engaged in bushmeat trading (e.g., hunters, sellers,
consumers). Data were collected during 9 workshops in 4 Tanzanian villages bordering
Serengeti National Park. Specifically, we evaluated 9 community-generated models for
the presence of the central factors that comprise and drive the bushmeat trade and
whether or not models included the same core concepts, relationships, and logical
chains of reasoning on which bushmeat conservation policies are commonly based. Across
local communities, there was agreement about the most central factors important to
understanding the bushmeat trade (e.g., animal recruitment, low income, and scarcity
of food crops). These matched policy assumptions. However, the factors perceived to
drive social-ecological bushmeat trade dynamics were more diverse and varied considerably
across communities (e.g., presence or absence of collaborative law enforcement, increasing
human population, market demand, cultural preference). Sensitive conservation issues,
such as the bushmeat trade, that require cooperation between communities and outside
conservation organizations can benefit from participatory modeling approaches that
make local-scale dynamics and conservation policy assumptions explicit. Further, communities'
and conservation organizations' perceptions need to be aligned. This can improve success
by allowing context appropriate policies to be developed, monitored, and appropriately
adapted as new evidence is generated.