Participation in planning and social networks increase social monitoring in community‐based conservation

Exploring Routes to Coexistence: Developing and Testing a Human–Elephant Conflict-Management Framework for African Elephant-Range Countries

Creating a future for elephants and people is a highly complex and dynamic challenge, involving social, behavioral, and ecological dimensions as well as multiple actors with various interests. To foster learning from human–elephant conflict (HEC) management projects and share best practices, a study was conducted to review the management of conflicts between elephants and humans in 12 African countries by qualitative expert interviews. Based on this information, a HEC management framework was developed in a two-tiered process. In the first phase, the theory of the framework was developed. In a second phase, the theoretical framework was validated and adjusted through stakeholder participation in two southern African projects (in Mozambique and Malawi). This holistic approach considers environmental as well as social, political, cultural, and economic factors directly or indirectly affecting interactions between people and wildlife. The framework integrates six interlinked strategies to guide managers and conservation practitioners to address HWC drivers and mitigate their impact. A legal environment and spatial planning form the basis of the framework. Social strategies, including meaningful stakeholder engagement and design of appropriate institutional structures and processes are considered the heart of the framework. Technical and financial strategies represent its arms and hands. At the top, monitoring steers all processes, provides feedback for adjustment, and informs decisions. The integration and coordination of these six strategies has great potential as a guiding route to human–wildlife coexistence in Africa and elsewhere.

Equity – the Bottleneck and the Opportunity

There is a widespread tendency for diverse uses of Nature, on scales from small and local to very large, to become unsustainable. Once unsustainable, bringing a use back to sustainability and keeping it sustainable then takes substantial effort and tools appropriate to the context of the use. This Perspective first asks why is the tendency for unsustainability so pervasive, when it is an outcome that no user group has adopted as an objective, and ways to keep uses sustainable are known. I argue and present evidence that the common factor underlying the pervasiveness of unsustainable uses of Nature is inequity in the distribution of the benefits created from those uses, with both the wealthy “winners” of the distributional inequities and those disadvantaged and in poverty driving uses toward increasing unsustainability in ways that depend on the nature of the inequities. Unless the inequity of distribution of benefits from uses of Nature is addressed as an issue in its own right, there are few or no pathways to medium or long-term sustainable use. However, if inequity is addressed broadly and effectively, many pathways are available and societies can select the pathways appropriate to their cultural and ecological contexts.

Fundamental insights on when social network data are most critical for conservation planning

As declines in biodiversity accelerate, there is an urgent imperative to ensure that every dollar spent on conservation counts toward species protection. Systematic conservation planning is a widely used approach to achieve this, but there is growing concern that it must better integrate the human social dimensions of conservation to be effective. Yet, fundamental insights about when social data are most critical to inform conservation planning decisions are lacking. To address this problem, we derived novel principles to guide strategic investment in social network information for systematic conservation planning. We considered the common conservation problem of identifying which social actors, in a social network, to engage with to incentivize conservation behavior that maximizes the number of species protected. We used simulations of social networks and species distributed across network nodes to identify the optimal state-dependent strategies and the value of social network information. We did this for a range of motif network structures and species distributions and applied the approach to a small-scale fishery in Kenya. The value of social network information depended strongly on both the distribution of species and social network structure. When species distributions were highly nested (i.e., when species-poor sites are subsets of species-rich sites), the value of social network information was almost always low. This suggests that information on how species are distributed across a network is critical for determining whether to invest in collecting social network data. In contrast, the value of social network information was greatest when social networks were highly centralized. Results for the small-scale fishery were consistent with the simulations. Our results suggest that strategic collection of social network data should be prioritized when species distributions are un-nested and when social networks are likely to be centralized.

A network of grassroots reserves protects tropical river fish diversity

Intensive fisheries have reduced fish biodiversity and abundance in aquatic ecosystems worldwide^1-3. 'No-take' marine reserves have become a cornerstone of marine ecosystem-based fisheries management^4-6, and their benefits for adjacent fisheries are maximized when reserve design fosters synergies among nearby reserves^7,8. The applicability of this marine reserve network paradigm to riverine biodiversity and inland fisheries remains largely untested. Here we show that reserves created by 23 separate communities in Thailand's Salween basin have markedly increased fish richness, density, and biomass relative to adjacent areas. Moreover, key correlates of the success of protected areas in marine ecosystems-particularly reserve size and enforcement-predict differences in ecological benefits among riverine reserves. Occupying a central position in the network confers additional gains, underscoring the importance of connectivity within dendritic river systems. The emergence of network-based benefits is remarkable given that these reserves are young (less than 25 years old) and arose without formal coordination. Freshwater ecosystems are under-represented among the world's protected areas⁹, and our findings suggest that networks of small, community-based reserves offer a generalizable model for protecting biodiversity and augmenting fisheries as the world's rivers face unprecedented pressures^10,11.

Keystone actors do not act alone: A business ecosystem perspective on sustainability in the global clothing industry

Global industries are typically dominated by a few disproportionately large and influential transnational corporations, or keystone actors. While concentration of economic production is not a new phenomenon, in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world, the scale of the impacts of keystone actors on diverse social-ecological systems continues to grow. In this article, we investigate how keystone actors in the global clothing industry engage in collaboration with a variety of other organizations to address nine interrelated biophysical and socioeconomic sustainability challenges. We expand on previous theoretical and empirical research by focusing on the larger business ecosystem in which keystone actors are embedded, and use network analysis to assess the contributions of different actor types to the architecture of the ecosystem. This systemic approach to the study of keystone actors and sustainability challenges highlights an important source of influence largely not addressed in previous research: the presence of organizations that occupy strategic positions around keystone actors. Such knowledge can help identify governance strategies for advancing industry-wide transformation towards sustainability.

Integrating Governance and Quantitative Evaluation of Resource Management Strategies to Improve Social and Ecological Outcomes

In this article, we examine how governance can be more effectively integrated with quantitative evaluation methods in applied resource management. Governance refers to how societies organize to make decisions in ways that influence management choices (e.g., harvest allocation), such as levels of participation, the inclusion of different types of knowledge, and legitimacy of processes that lead to decisions. Using a fisheries example, we show that a failure to consider the governance context for quantitative evaluation of alternative management strategies may lead to unexpected consequences or break points in decision-making, bias estimates of risk and returns from management choices, and mask the potential for undesirable social and ecological outcomes.