At the first General Assembly of the South Asia Wildlife Enforcement Network (SAWEN), Go Insight’s Director of Intelligence, Sarah Stoner, gave an intervention on the role of strategic intelligence in regional law enforcement.
This article is adapted from that intervention.
A Blog | By Sarah Stoner, Intelligence Lead | 24 September 2026
Across the wildlife enforcement landscape, we have seen real progress in recent years. Intelligence-led approaches are increasingly part of how agencies work. Wildlife crime is more widely recognised as a form of transnational organised crime, and regional networks such as SAWEN are bringing countries together to respond to a threat that crosses borders.
That progress puts us in a good position to go further.
Building on strong foundations
Much of this progress rests on the application of two levels of intelligence.
- Operational intelligence identifies specific individuals, suspects and networks, and builds the cases against them.
- Tactical intelligence tracks what is changing in the crime picture now, so resources can go where they are needed in the coming weeks or months. Both are essential and are complementary in their approach to each other.
However, there is another type of intelligence that we see less often in practice and that’s strategic intelligence analysis.
What it offers
Operational and tactical intelligence, by design, describe individual events: a seizure, a suspect, a shipment. They do not necessarily explain why the same pattern keeps recurring, or where the underlying drivers and enablers of wildlife crime sit. Without a strategic view, individual cases can be closed while the systemic vulnerabilities behind them go unaddressed.
Strategic analysis intends to look forward.
As well as reviewing previous criminality, strategic analysts seek to forecast and predict how criminal behaviour or illicit markets might evolve. This would often be supported by a horizon scanning of relevant issues – such as changes in legislation, the economy, or technology so that we can better anticipate what might happen in the future.
The cases, data and cooperation built through operational and tactical work are exactly what strategic analysis needs. And because wildlife crime does not respect borders, the value of that analysis increases at a regional and international level. Tightening enforcement in one country may affect crime levels in a neighbouring one. A regional view helps networks such as SAWEN see when threat levels are shifting and respond accordingly, rather than reacting when a new crime is detected.
Understanding crime drivers and enablers
Strategic analysis looks beyond individual incidents to the conditions that allow wildlife crime to persist. Drivers are the factors that create and sustain it, such as demand, market dynamics and economic pressures. Enablers are what make it possible to carry out, such as corruption, weak points at borders, access to transport resources, logistics capabilites and links with serious and organised crime.
By bringing data together across countries, strategic analysis can show where these drivers and enablers sit, how they connect, and where crime clusters as a result.
That understanding should shape decisions. Strategic analysis can help agencies and decision-makers be better informed of where to focus policy attention, resources and cooperation, and which threats to prioritise. Where wildlife crime overlaps with other serious and organised crime, the threat level changes, and so should the response.
Identifying intelligence gaps and closing the loop
Just as important, strategic analysis shows what is not yet known. Those gaps should not sit in a report. They can be turned into clear intelligence requirements and fed down to operational and tactical teams, directing collection towards the questions that matter most.
What those teams find then feeds back up, sharpening the strategic picture over time. The result is a cycle, not a hierarchy: strategic analysis sets direction, operational and tactical work fills the gaps, and each level makes the others more effective.
What this can look like in practice
CatByte, Go Insight’s harmonised, cross-species intelligence platform on big cat trade, was built for this purpose. It does not replace operational or tactical work on the ground. It complements it, by providing a regional, cross-border view that no single national authority is positioned to build alone.
CatByte is designed as a strategic intelligence tool: its purpose is to help decision-makers understand the threat to big cats well enough to set priorities.
Seizure data will always undercount wildlife crime, and numbers drawn from it reflect enforcement effort as much as criminal activity. The more durable value lies in what the records reveal about how the crime operates.
CatByte identifies repeatable patterns in the commodities traded, the routes and locations used, and the roles offenders play, and groups these into distinct criminal profiles.
Patterns like these tend to persist even as individual offenders are removed, which makes them a stronger foundation for strategy than volume alone. Understanding the nature of the threat allows governments, enforcement agencies and conservation partners to see where it concentrates, how it is changing, and which parts of the supply chain offer the greatest leverage, supporting decisions on where to focus resources, which interventions to prioritise, and where emerging risks may need attention before they escalate.
Taking the next step
Strategic intelligence is not a research exercise sitting apart from enforcement work. It builds directly on it. With the progress made in intelligence-led enforcement, we are well placed to take the next step: a shared, strategic understanding of a threat that does not stop at borders.