> What if the real value was paying poachers to not poach?
You wouldn't believe how many animals I haven't poached today. Where's my cheque?
Ultimately, you're describing Coasean bargaining (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem). However, in this case there's a real problem of demonstrating commitment (preventing a poacher from betraying the deal) and more critically in induced demand; if I pay you not to poach then your neighbour might decide to enter the now-vacant industry themselves.
For Coasean bargaining to work, you need a very well-defined and well-enforced set of property rights, such that if the "legitimate" poachers refrain then nobody else can take up the slack. Since poaching is illegal to start with, this set of rights does not really exist.
1) demand, mostly from Asia, for body parts of endangered animals. Unfortunately, the customers are willing to pay a lot of money (a single rhino horn for example can fetch 15.000 $!), and don't care if they actively contribute to the extinction of a species.
2) Enormous poverty in the regions where these endangered animals live. The median wage of South Africa is 17.000 $ - so it's no surprise that many turn to poaching.
Basically the West would need to impose drastic sanctions on China and other Asian countries that act as demand for rare animal parts (not made easier by the fact that the West has a shoddy history itself in that regard, e.g. ivory, and so such politics always has legitimacy/neo-colonialism issues), while at the same time directing massive amounts of money towards eliminating the poverty and establishing alternative, legit jobs for former poachers.
Pay to poach the poachers. Or large sums of money to rat out organizations so they need to deal with internal revolt of some poachers throwing everyone else under the bus for their payout.
To be honest, I don't. I was more interested in having intelligent conversation around it. I feel (generally) that when people don't have aligned incentives, there can't be aligned outcomes. To me, that means there's a conversation to be had around how do we get groups with differing priorities to have aligned incentives.
