Here’s another guest post from another switched-on Queensland student, Duan Biggs. Duan, originally from Namibia and South Africa, is doing his PhD at the ARC Centre for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland. His PhD is investigating the resilience of nature-based tourism to climate change. I’ve met Duan a few times, and I’m impressed by his piercing views on conservation science and its implementation. Duan has already posted here on ConservationBytes.com (‘Make your conservation PhD relevant‘) and now adds his latest post discussing a paper he’s just had published in Conservation Letters. Thanks, Duan.
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Achieving conservation outcomes almost always means working with stakeholders. ConservationBytes readers who have participated in multi-stakeholder conservation processes will know how difficult they are. Even more so when parties come from very different backgrounds and cultures. Farmers feel they just cannot comprehend what scientists are saying… ecologists silently curse [CJAB’s note: well, not always silently] because government officials ‘just don’t get it’ and so forth. So often, conservation projects are impeded, or even brought to a grinding halt because the very different perspectives that stakeholders bring to the table and the inability to see eye to eye. This has left many a fervent conservationist and scientist feeling like the associated cartoon.
However, our new paper entitled The implementation crisis in conservation planning – could ‘mental models’ help? just out in Conservation Letters suggests ways of dealing with this almighty challenge.
Effective conservation requires conservation scientists to partner successfully with managers, extractive users and other stakeholder groups. Often, key stakeholders come from very different backgrounds and cultures, and hence have a diversity of values that result in a range of perspectives on issues. These differences are frequently a source of failure in conservation projects.
ConservationBytes.com 