News
Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), in conjunction with the African Leadership University (ALU), has announced the award of 4 prestigious scholarships funding attendance at the Forum. These scholarships are separate from the existing, previously announced open-application Forum bursaries.
They have been awarded to Terence Chambati (Uganda), Nqobizitha Ndlovu (South Africa), Noel Mbise (Tanzania) and Edwin Tambara (Kenya), all students on ALU’s Conservation MBA programme. They were each selected as outstanding candidates by their course director and tutors.
You can read more about these awards, and biographies of the awardees on the WildCRU website.
In a recent paper in Conservation Biology, a team at WildCRU took a look at existing research on the subject.
Here is the abstract:
We reviewed recent work concerning the impact of geopolitics on wildlife conservation (and vice versa) and identified future priorities in conservation geopolitics research. Geopolitics is understood as both an analytical focus on geopolitical practices (especially concerning the behavior) of countries with respect to territory and national security and a set of theories developed to explain and predict those behaviors. We developed a typology of core geopolitical practices of relevance to conservation: territorial practices of colonisation and the management of migrations and borders, and security practices relating to military, economic, and environmental security. We identified research that considers how these practices affect conservation situations and outcomes, noting the recent emergence of conceptual developments such as “environmental geopolitics” and “geopolitical ecology” that draw on multiple fields within the social sciences to theorise the links between geopolitics and environmental management. We defined a geopolitical perspective as a focus on geopolitical practices combined with an explicit engagement with geopolitical theory and identified conservation situations where this perspective could contribute to analytical clarity. We suggest the most pressing questions in conservation research to which the geopolitical perspective might contribute are how political and economic differences between countries affect biodiversity outcomes, how geopolitical practices to address those differences facilitate or frustrate conservation efforts, how national borders and human and wildlife movements can be better managed for the benefit of both, and how the most effective conservation strategies can be best selected to suit existing (and future) geopolitical realities.
The WildCRU Conservation Geopolitics Forum is pleased to announce the award of several full bursaries for conference delegates.
Recipients of the WCGF bursary award include:
Dr Muchazondida Mkono, University of Queensland.
Dr Shadrack Ngene, Kenya Wildlife Service
Dr Abhishek Ghoshal, Nature Conservation Foundation, India
Trishant Simlai, the University of Cambridge
We have also awarded delegate fee waivers to several outstanding applicants.
The Call for Papers (oral submissions) closed on Friday 20th October. Applications for bursaries and posters are also closed.
The Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre at Worcester College Oxford, venue for the 2019 WildCRU Conservation Geopolitics Forum, has been shortlisted for a prestigious architectural award. To read more about it and see inside the venue, click here.
