conservation

This article introduces this issue of Conservation and Society, and argues strongly for new place-based conservation through a multispecies lens.

Kamaljit Kaur Sangha and Jeremy Russell-Smith propose an integrated ecosystem services (ES) valuation framework for an indigenous savanna estate in northern Australia, describing how capabilities along with biophysical and socio-cultural ES benefits play a vital role for peoples’ well-being.

Allison L. Mayberry, Alice J. Hovorka and Kate E. Evans use qualitative methods to explore human experiences with elephants and perceived impacts of elephants on human well-being in northern Botswana. They emphasize the importance of investigating both visible and hidden impacts of elephants on human well-being to foster holistic understanding of human-elephant conflict scenarios and to inform future mitigation strategies.

Monika Krause and Katherine Robinson follow up on the observation that charismatic species attract a disproportionate amount of attention and resources in international conservation by investigating how cultural schemas and organizational routines shape resource allocation in conservation more broadly.

Crystal A. Crown and Kalli F. Doubleday explore media representation of Human-Leopard Interactions (HLI) in India, focusing on detecting agenda-setting and framing in articles, and whether these differ with the level of association with HLI. They conclude that the largely negative depiction, and differences in representation between geographic locations, could hinder mitigation strategies and policy by presenting stakeholders with incomplete information.

Catrina A. MacKenzie, Rebecca K. Fuda, Sadie Jane Ryan, and Joel Hartter use interviews and focus group discussions to assess the interaction of oil exploration with the three primary conservation policies employed by the Uganda Wildlife Authority: protectionism, neoliberal capital accumulation, and community-based conservation.

Sorrel Jones, Malcolm D. Burgess, Frazer Sinclair, Jeremy Lindsell and Juliet Vickery present new data on rule-breaking prevalence in Gola Rainforest National Park, Sierra Leone, and use these data in spatially explicit simulations to assess the survey effort and design required to detect change and assess the effect of rule-breaker behavior to these designs.

In this Special Section on the Green Economy in the South, Stasja Koot and Walter van Beek argue that a Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) program in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Namibia, with a strong focus on tourism, has dominated and changed the environment of the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen.

In this Special Section on the Green Economy in the South, Brett Sylvester Matulis considers Costa Rica’s national “payments for ecosystems services” (PES) programme. He explores World Bank / Costa Rica relations and market-oriented interventions to the financing of ecosystem service payments and explains that (despite inherent contradictions inhibiting market formation) neoliberal actors within the state can still implement mechanisms designed to approximate markets.

In this Special Section on the Green Economy in the South, V. Corey Wright contributes to the debate about Tanzania’s Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) and the nature of decentralization. He argues that WMAs represent risk but also an opportunity for rural communities.