Friends, colleagues, I hope that I am audible, not only within the room, but to a large diaspora on the internet.
This is an exciting occasion. Actually, it's the third such exciting occasion for our natural governance programme here at the Martin School.
Many of you, I'm sure, will remember that we've had a couple of earlier talks one by John visited and the other by Mohamed Kardinya,
and it's a double pleasure.
Not only that those were startlingly successful and well attended, but the John I know is on line and Mohamed is in the room to join this discussion.
No less exciting is the third in the series is to be presented by Dr. Alexandra Zimmerman,
who's had a startling career in the topic of human wildlife conflict and at the moment, most significantly,
perhaps as well as being a senior research fellow at the wild crew, is also the leader,
the chair of the IUCN Taskforce on that topic, which is gaining enormous international attention.
So many things in life tend to end up in a bit of argy bargy and conservation, and everything associated with it is no exception.
So hardly any conservation issue anywhere in the world is devoid of at least some
conflict between the protagonists or between elements of wildlife and people.
So this is as it were a funnel.
This topic is a funnel into which almost every aspect of biodiversity conflict pause, and it's one that's gravely in need of solutions.
It's solutions that Alex is came to tell us about.
So I'm going to invite her to the stage in just a moment, but I'll anticipate the future by telling you that after she has spoken,
we have the opportunity for a question and answer session that will involve those people in the room and people beyond the room.
We will be terribly disciplined.
I'll say it now and I'll say it again later about using the microphone because without the microphone, the wider family can't hear us at all.
So when people have anything to say, they must say in the microphone.
And I just conclude by pointing out that not only do we think this topic is important,
but I think you will do as well because this event was completely sold out more than a week ago, which surely is a marvellous sign for its importance.
And on that note, I'd like you to welcome Alex Zimmerman up to the stage to give her presentation.
Thank you very much, David, for the kind introduction thank you to the Oxford Martin School for organising this.
It's my pleasure to be here and talk to you about conflicts in conservation.
Now many of us know each other already, and I think many of our audience online,
we have worked together, you know me as working on human wildlife conflict.
One of the flagship conflicts that takes place in biodiversity conservation.
And I'm certainly going to talk a little bit about that.
But today I want to really explore the wider conservation conflicts that we need to grapple with in that in this field and human wildlife conflicts.
That is, direct conflicts over wildlife are very much a flagship within that, and they teach us a lot about the wider conflicts as well.
And so I came to this through a sort of a past starting in zoology.
I studied zoology many, many years ago.
And just as the field of conservation biology has involved a great deal more into what we now call conservation science,
I have to respond very quickly from zoology into social sciences on the realisation that so much at the core of these issues is entirely about people.
And so following that kind of evolution of the field of conservation science, it has become more and more interdisciplinary.
And we've seen that in that in the degrees that are out there, the work of institutes like the wild and many others,
the work of conservation organisations has become entirely interdisciplinary and it needs to be.
And the social sciences when I started out were kind of a bit of a niche side, nice to have,
and they've now become entirely core and essential and seen as that in conservation science.
And so what I'm going to propose today is that this evolution needs to continue and the way it is going,
and I'd like to propose it should go is to start to include the field of peace and conflict studies and everything that that entails.
Because at the core of so many of the issues we're grappling with in conservation are conflicts.
They're everywhere in all different dimensions, different levels, different scales, different severities.
And it is becoming quite urgent that we really incorporate this not as a little Nisid topic,
but it becomes woven into the field of conservation science substantially.
And I would predict that that is where this field is actually going.
And so the core purpose of my talk today is to propose to you that conflict resolution is absolutely critically important,
it is urgent and it is needed at scale, not a little bit here and a little bit there.
We have to actually weave this into conservation biodiversity conservation substantially everywhere globally and that this is essential.
So let's explore that a little bit. And I think this is extremely timely because right now,
as we have all learnt in the last two years, we have several global shocks or crises happening.
We have climate change with the COP 26 having just finished.
That itself is full of conflicts in every way possible.
We've had the COVID pandemic. Bringing about conflicts everywhere from the from losses of income to global.
Clashes between states and organisations and somewhere in there, we have the crisis of biodiversity loss,
and we're trying to grapple with this as well, and all of these things bring about, you know, day to day fundamental problems from loss of income.
We see this particularly post-pandemic now,
where a lot of biodiversity conservation strategies heavily relied so much on tangible economic benefits from biodiversity.
For example, tourism, such things have just disappeared during these times of lockdown and so on.
And so we have seen really direct threats to people and their ability to conserve wildlife biodiversity,
and these sorts of conflicts now are not going to go away.
These are not just going to de-escalate and die off. These problems are.
Global, and they're huge. And I would say we have to figure out very quickly how to address these at scale,
and so much so that even in the next big U.N. convention cop, that is about to happen in April next year,
the COP15 deal of the Convention on Biological Diversity,
where the aim is to now look at the next 10 years through this so-called post-2020 global biodiversity framework.
If you look at that entire aim, the entire vision of that convention is to create to find ways to live in harmony with nature.
So again, this is the opposite of all these conflicts that we are that we are facing.
So how are we going to do this? It is very important, very good to have this vision.
How to do this in practise is going to be very much more difficult. And so what are we talking about?
Well, it gets very, very messy. These conflicts are about so many things,
and so many of these things are social and they're political and they're cultural and they're about people and groups and organisations.
And how do we deconstruct this mess of factors and how do we make sense of what we need to do?
And what sort of conflicts are we talking about, actually? So let me give you examples.
One clear and obvious one straight away is protected areas now protected areas as the foundation of biodiversity conservation essentially important.
And there's very much a drive to increase the area of marine interest or protected areas.
Nowadays, this naturally creates potential for conflict.
These are areas that might bring about questions of who is allowed to access resources.
Big, they create disputes over tenure access.
Who gets the benefits? Is it the tourist resource or is it the local people and which local people and conflicts between those?
There's layers and layers. Of potential conflict here.
And so this is very much about benefits from conservation, it's about equity, it's about access.
Then you have your other very high kind of profile, high profile kind of conservation conflicts, as we saw, for example,
with Cecil the Lion a few years ago, where of course you have a very contentious issue like hunting or trophy hunting of wildlife,
and there will be people who are in favour of this and there is people who are adamantly against this,
and there's people who are trying to figure out what to do with this issue.
And interestingly, this isn't this is classic in conservation conflicts because it isn't it isn't binary.
There are many different sub conflicts going on here, so you might think that it is primarily between conservation and hunting.
But actually, there's an enormous conflict between conservation and animal rights, which we see over and over and conservation again as well,
because this becomes an issue of both beliefs and values that are opposite to each other, and it brings out quite intense emotions.
And so you have those who campaigned very strongly for absolutely no hunting on the basis of welfare and rights of the animal.
And then you have others who advocate that there has to be a balance.
There has to be there are actually benefits from this activity to.
And this can become extremely heated and complicated and multi-layered.
Let me give you another example, which really gets into the sorts of dilemmas we face sometimes.
This is a map of the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh near the border of Myanmar before the refugee crisis.
It looks like this. The refugee camp, which emerged in twenty seventeen twenty eighteen 800000 people, moved into this area.
This is an absolute humanitarian disaster in crisis. And yet look what happened very, very rapidly.
Now this creates a huge dilemma. There are in so many ways in so many layers.
And one of the quite noticeable conflicts that happened here is that elephants used
to pass through this area and they continue to try to pass through this area.
And they encountered in the new settlement of 800000 people and around a dozen people,
refugees were killed by elephants and it created absolute chaos.
And of course, this made it into the papers. Of course, this created a lot of attention.
And here you have a real dilemma.
You have a very dire humanitarian, serious humanitarian crisis and you have a conservation problem piled on top of each other,
and there are layers and layers of of issues here.
Not only is this a problem of what do you do about the elephants trying to pass through, but then there were also, of course,
local communities who were there before, and there's resentments that pile up and there's clashes between all sorts of different groups.
And so as conservation scientists are, we meant to figure out how to solve this?
This is really going a little bit beyond the scope. So this is about needs, it's about human rights, it's about security.
And then lastly, the classic human wildlife conflict example people against other people about a species.
And one of the most intractable and complicated one is that of wolves, particularly in parts of the US and parts of Norway and other parts of Europe.
And this this this is really not about the wolf very much at all.
This is about different groups of people who have very different deep rooted values, beliefs and identities,
mistrust each other who blame each other, who you cannot talk to each other anymore.
And these are conflicts that are about politics. They're about identities.
They're about polarisation and divisions.
And so you look at these just these examples of you kind of typical examples of the sorts of conservation conflicts that
exist and you look at what they're about and they're about access and benefits and values and beliefs and emotions.
They're about security and divisions, identity politics.
These are about the social interactions of humans.
And so these really cannot be solved with technology and they can't be solved with data very much either.
And so this is why I'm saying the field of conservation biology, which has turned into science.
It needs to move further. It needs to start to figure out how do we deal with all this mess, this intangible, these difficult dilemmas?
And so what we tend to do and have done in the past to try and resolve
environmental and conservation conflicts is to look at the obvious what you see,
what you see above the surface is some sort of clash, some sort of dispute. Something has happened and you try your best to do something about it.
And so most efforts currently in resolving conflicts and biodiversity try to focus on this.
Understandably so. This is both a bit of a criticism, but it's also an acknowledgement of this is the best we've got right now.
However, underneath all of these are layers and layers of less visible drivers triggers causes
things that are that are causing these conflicts to to occur in the first place.
And really focussing only on the quick fixes that the technical or the practical interventions that just look at the dispute is very, very limiting.
This looking only here isn't going to create change if you want long term change,
if you want to work towards that CBD mission of vision, of living in harmony with nature.
Change happens here and this is, of course, very, very much harder.
And so. In conservation conflicts and in human wildlife conflicts, very classically, the fundamental recognition,
the fundamental thing for us to realise is that although it looks like there is a conflict between a resource and animal,
a park something and people who live there, the conflicts are actually, of course, between all the different groups of people that are involved.
And that can be individuals, it can be different communities, it can be organisations, it can be parts of governments, it could even be entire states.
And so there is a need to shift a little bit our thinking from looking at the
visible species or wildlife or protected area issue to what is actually going on.
And it is very, very rarely binary. There's usually no number of parties involved.
And so what I want to try to to do today in this brief talk is to have a little look at how can we make sense of this massive conflict?
It is. It can be so overwhelming, intimidating. What sort of approaches are out there that we can import, adapt,
modify to use directly in biodiversity conflicts and what might be the way forward ultimately in this?
And for this, I would take us to one of the the main models that is used in conservation and in human wildlife conflict in particular,
which I have worked with a lot. And you may have heard me speak about before it was originally developed by my
colleague Brian MacLean in the Canadian Institute for Conflict Resolution.
It was adapted further by Madam and the Queen to look at conflicts over wildlife, and I have worked with this extensively around the world, too.
And this is basically it's a conceptual model. It's trying to take the messy conflicts.
I'm trying to make sense of what is going on because one thing you may observe and you may know from
your own work is that some conflicts seem relatively solvable and some seem absolutely impossible.
And how do you even know what's going on? How do you, first of all, make sense of it all?
And so this is kind of alluding to the iceberg.
So the visible top, you have a dispute. Something has happened.
There has been some kind of some loss or damage.
Some property has been damaged or there is an issue of safety or an issue of access or livelihood loss.
This is what what you see. But very, very often, in fact, most often, there is something else going on underneath.
There are these things are rarely just one-off events.
There's usually a history and that history is what drags this conflict into it and to levels of off of deeper complications that below the surface,
this is what we have to figure out and uncover the history of recurrence of an issue and in particular,
a history of unsatisfactory attempts to resolve it is what tends to make these conflicts more weighty and more complicated.
And in the worst case scenario, this carries on and on,
and it time is a factor in this and these this history accumulate so much that groups of people feel threatened.
They feel threatened and who they are. Their identity is mistrust starts to build values, feel threatened and everything starts to break down.
And so what we really are looking at in conservation is that these sorts of conflicts,
we come with the right techniques, with the right knowledge awareness.
We can do something about. This kind of deep-rooted, identity based, intractable conflict is extremely difficult to deal with.
And what we need to do urgently in conservation is try and make sure that we keep as
we stay out of this level that we don't allow conflicts to get that bad over time.
So. How do you figure out what's going on as I try to show you with this analogy?
You see, first of all, that there is something there is some dispute,
but you have to ask what is actually happening in order to figure out what is underneath that surface,
what is actually going on, what is the tension that is there really about?
And therefore, are you trying to solve the problem? An example of this.
I've spent a lot of time working in the past working on conflicts about Jaguares in Latin America, particularly Brazil.
And so you go in, there are many, many of these all over the 17 countries that attack is occurring and each of them is very, very different.
But very often it appears at first glance that it is a problem of of cattle rancher killing Jaguar in retaliation for losing livestock.
And so if you look at it only there and you look at only that top level, you will think, Well,
we need to reduce it, we need to protect the livestock, then they will no longer kill the Jaguar.
That's not at all what's going on in most of these.
This is entirely about these, this community's identity, who they are, their history, their culture.
In this particular example, it is part of the culture to hunt jaguars to a certain extent.
And so just coming in with a bigger fence or some kind of quick fix isn't going to do it.
And my worry is it is going to make the conflict worse. So how do you know what is actually going on?
So with this, with the levels of conflict, we took this further and we started to look at what are the telltale symptoms that can help you?
Get a sense of what's going on, even before you perhaps do some more in-depth qualitative research on understanding the issues you can get us,
you can very much get a sense, for example, if you are dealing with that top level dispute.
You will know you will hear from the parties involved, a certain sympathy for the situation.
There will be concern with a practical resolution. There will be a willingness to adapt and an openness to actually working with people.
If, however, you are, what's going on is deeper than that and there is a history and this, the conflict has evolved into something more deep-rooted.
There is going to be you will hear in conversations really some frustration about the issue, exaggeration of the incidences.
There will be a history of of unresolved attempts.
And there's definitely an expectation that somebody else has to fix this.
And there's a huge amount of scepticism. And then worst case scenario, if you observe a conflict about wildlife biodiversity,
where the language is extremely negative, it's polarised, it's hostile.
There's actual aggression, perhaps even violence. There is a refusal to cooperate in the hostility towards other parties.
And you're dealing with something that is approaching an intractable conflict.
And so the problem we currently have in conservation is that the vast majority of our efforts right now are looking at these conflicts
as if they are simply at that level and they're trying their best to find quick fixes pressured by the urgency of the situation.
And that is understandable. However, the vast majority of biodiversity conflicts, I would suggest,
are actually more in that middle level, and this is where a lot of progress is basically hindered.
Because if you try and apply a quick fix, as I said before, this is something that is actually a deeper conflict amongst parties.
You're not going to get very far. So how do we how do we approach these problems?
What can. In what can we do in the short term, what are some of the techniques just to get a feel for?
How does one actually start to work with these different layers?
And of course, this is a huge field of its own, as I'm proposing that we need to add peace and conflict studies to conservation science.
The whole family of studies around that, including negotiation, peacekeeping, conflict resolution,
conflict transformation, mediation, these are fields of expertise that need to be added.
So all I'm giving you today is a little bit of a flavour of the sorts of approaches.
That are there. The fundamental one fundamental tool for thinking about this comes from negotiation,
and that is that you have to look at everything as having these three overlapping elephant elements.
There is an issue. Something has happened.
But there are also relationships, and there is a process that will help repair relationships and deal with the issue.
And these three things have to be looked at together.
So if you if you do have what I would call a level one conflict and you are dealing with primarily
something that is there has been some damage and there isn't yet much hostility or resentment.
This is the aim of the of this is really to find them to find tangible solutions that are acceptable to all the parties.
This is about safeguarding income, it is about reducing risk and it's about diversifying income sources,
if necessary or these sorts of short term solutions that the parties can work with.
And the primary approach in the primary tools to this is interest based negotiation negotiation.
So let me explore this a little bit because this is extremely fundamental,
very simple and yet absolutely fundamental to all conflict resolution, whether you're dealing with this kind of level one or more complicated.
And the first most fundamental. Saying that has to be done here is you have to get the parties to talk, to get to each other.
And the first stumbling block very often is that people involved in this dispute take on the position.
And a position is six idea, it is a statement of where we or I stand and it is not in.
This is my take on this. And it's not to be budged.
And what has to happen,
and this is the foundation for starting any kind of conflict resolution is that those positions have to be shifted and we have to
talk about interests for what is actually what are actually the underlying needs and motivations and wants of the parties involved.
So to give you an example, one of the human wildlife conflicts I've worked with is around bats and marshes,
where bats are perceived by many people, including the government of Mauritius, as co-operators and menace.
And the whereas the conservation organisations of Mauritius want to protect the species which is endangered, listed as endangered.
And so the positions that the parties are taking here is you have those who say this is a this is a co-operator, we need to eliminate the species.
And you have a conservation stakeholders in this who are saying absolutely not.
This is a protected species. Killing even a single one of these is out of the question.
So then you have a deadlock right there. So how do you shift this from talking?
Not so much about this is my position. I'm not moving from it to talking about what is actually what might be explorable options in this.
This is the first thing, it is the foundation of beginning any kind of dialogues to resolve conflicts.
It applies in your day to day life as much as it does to negotiating some major treaty.
The what this does and why this is so simple yet important is that what you.
It helps to de-escalate a tension, and it focuses the party on some kind of some kind of common outcome,
and it can unlock the ability of those involved to find other solutions.
And this is this then takes you to finding solutions that can be more win win.
One nice example or illustration of this that comes up quite often in negotiation courses is,
is this, for example, if I were to ask you right now to arm wrestle with the person next to.
And I were to say, OK, everybody in this room, you will get one point.
Every time you manage to arm wrestle the other person's arm down once and you need to get three points.
Everybody in this room needs to get three points. That is your aim. Off you go.
The vast majority of us start to try and use force and arm wrestle the other person's arm down to get our points on our second point to third point.
Why do we do this? Because we already have. There's context here.
We already know what arm wrestling is. This is we know it's a game of winning and losing.
And so we bring that into it straightaway. But the thing is, and the few people in will always pick this up straight away.
I didn't say you need to win. I said, you need to get three points.
But we naturally tend to look at things a little bit as win lose.
And so the whole aim, the whole practise of conflict resolution is to think differently, to not bring.
And this is what the third party has to do is not bring in those those that that
framing that we already have and start to look at the situation differently.
And so what you're doing, then, is you're moving from this win lose to a possible win win of some sort.
And to get that and again, this is so, so basic.
But these are the foundations I'm suggesting here that then from which you then can build a much more sophisticated conflict resolution approaches.
So this absolutely requires a different way of looking at the problem, a challenging one's own, what one brings into it and looking at it in new ways.
And so what this is essentially and what is another extremely foundational method in
all interest based negotiation and in conflict resolution is what we call reframing.
You take the problem as I've given it to you and you keep turning it this way,
that way the other way until you find some kind of entry point and you see something
that can nudge you towards a solution that can nudge the parties towards a solution.
And it can be as simple as looking at a problem negatively and then looking at exactly the same problem slipped into something more positively.
How do we solve the problem of appropriating elephants, or how do we turn elephants into an opportunity?
Do we look at human wildlife conflict, or do we look at human wildlife coexistence?
These are subtle changes that help they are tools to help reframe and re understand a problem.
And it sounds extremely simple, but these are the building blocks of all conflict resolutions.
These are the foundational tools. And this can then open up this kind of creative problem solving that ideally you want to do as a group.
Now important to say here is that often if we are a party in a conflict, we can't really do it.
We struggle to do this. This is where a third party comes in and brings fresh, fresh insights.
So what do you do then, is if things are more more,
they have more of a history that accumulated more layers this this now becomes not so much about practical problem solving,
but it becomes about relationships. It's become becomes about rebuilding trust.
And very, very key in this is that it is natural need for all groups and all people to be heard and very often in the process.
One of the very first things that has to be done is that the parties involved in a conflict about whatever it may be a protected area of wildlife.
Needs to simply have a chance to have their side heard.
And this is, of course, why we do things such as have all sorts of community meetings in conservation.
This is something that conservation has already become much, much better at the whole processes of engagement.
And this is but it is important to really understand what this is about.
This is about building relationships from which you then can start to engage in conflict practical conflict resolution.
And so very often for this, you bring in an external party of some sort.
It could be using more mediation,
which is used throughout society for everything from interpersonal conflicts to to conflicts across states and in mediation.
Really what this is, you're bringing in an impartial external third party to help those who are in conflict together find a solution.
This is not where the third party orders the solution.
This is where they help the parties find the solution themselves and really,
really important to realise in conservation is that the conservation sciences we are,
we are not these mediators, and there is sometimes an attempt to try and be sometimes perhaps the lack of awareness or lack of resources.
But in conservation conflicts, conservation scientists are a party.
They are not the third impartial party. They should not be the ones trying to mediate here.
And so what I think we really, really need to do is make use much more use of this in conservation.
The problem we have right now is that we don't have access very much. We have they don't have the funding or the resources to bring in mediators from
other seals or we don't have conservation mediators in in our field and we don't.
There are very, very few people or we don't think about doing this. This is something we need to think about a lot, lot more when that has.
When that has happened and you start to rebuild relationships,
you can start to then go back up to that more practical level and you can start to discuss interest and you can start to reframe issues and
you can start to engage in some creative problem-solving once these parties can talk to each other again through the help of a third party.
And I wanted to tell you a little example of a creative problem solving story, which is a classic in conflict resolution.
Maybe someone's heard this before. This is I was trying to find the original source.
It's a story of 17 camels. It's an old parable from the Middle East.
It's been retold many, many times. It's used often in in conflict resolution teaching.
So the story goes that there was a man who had 17 camels.
He he passed away and he had three sons. And in his will, it said that these sons would get the first son would get half of his camels.
The second son would get one third of his camels and the third son would get one ninth of his some of his camels.
And if they could figure this out, they would have the camels and they would also have hotels here left to them.
And so this this goes on and on because these the three sons try and solve this problem and they
realise that 17 can't be divided if you want whole camels by a half or a third or a knights,
and it seemed absolutely impossible. There is no solution to this, and they became more and more entrenched and they took their positions.
I demand my house because I'm the older one and so on, and they start.
This starts to gather layers of argument and they are unable to resolve this.
And one day a wise old moment comes along and says, I don't know how to help you, but I'm going to give you my camel.
And then they look at the problem again, and they have 18 camels. The first son takes half of 18, that's nine.
The second son takes a third of 18, that's six camels.
The third son takes one ninth of his of 18 camels, that's two camels, and it adds up to 17.
And they give the spare camel back to the old lady.
And this is such a lovely story because what it teaches us is that the solution was there all along, but we couldn't see it.
The six camels are there and the nine and the six, and they're there, but we couldn't see this.
It had to have that fresh look from somebody outside to turn it around this way in that way until you find a solution.
And this is a very creative one, and it's a lovely story. And so I think that very much about what we really need to do in conservation science
is try to figure out what is our what is our 18th camel solution to these conflicts?
So very briefly, looking at that third level, and this is where it really gets difficult and messy.
What's going on in these in these deep rooted conflicts is that you have you have clashing identities,
people who are deeply divided, they don't trust each other, they do not even want to talk to each other.
It is just and you can think of examples in the world currently within countries between groups and so on.
This happens. It is part of societies. These kinds of conflicts are extremely difficult to resolve.
It takes a very, very long time. This takes it, takes teams of people.
It takes years and years.
And what we must at all costs try and prevent is that our conservation conflicts slip too much into these sorts of situations.
And I won't go very much into these, but just to explain a little bit.
These kinds of what are called in and conflict studies, intractable conflicts, these are situations that are persistent.
They're destructive, they're very resistant to any kind of they're systemically resistant to solutions.
This is where you have extreme divisions, extreme mistrust.
And this is not just a matter of differences of opinion. People actually have different realities.
They will see what you see differently and adamantly see it differently.
It is. You can see the same thing in different ways.
I don't know if you see here a seagull or a rabbit.
There are and this is where you can't say your reality is wrong.
And that just makes it all worse. So these are these are conflicts that need reconciliation efforts.
They need a very widespread approach to this is something of conflict transformation, which is starting to come into conservation.
Also, you may have come across this conflict transformation basically essentially tries to look at all three levels at once.
It looks at the dispute. Maybe it's the elephant.
But it also looks at the elephant in the room, which is the hidden things that we can't talk about that you distrust each other about,
and it tries to work structurally and tries to work on relationships.
It tries to work on tangible issues all at once. And this is a very long, difficult process with a lot of setbacks.
And so really, what we absolutely need to do in conservation right now urgently, I'm saying, is urgent.
We need to get much, much better at resolving conflicts before they get to this stage.
It may feel like a lot of conservation conflicts are, and some would argue that a lot of them are already in this sort of realm.
I'm a little more optimistic, I think some look, some conflict look to us more intractable than they are.
I think there are actually quite a number of kind of 18th camels which are solutions out there,
but we as collectively as a field do not yet have the capacity and the numbers of people who know how to resolve these things.
That's what I'm suggesting has to change. Where do we go from here?
Even if we have a surface level understanding of how these conflicts evolve and what needs to be done,
what the approaches are, what what needs to happen. There's a huge field out there of conflict and peace studies.
There you will find all sorts of models of the cycles of conflict and the very common kind of example.
And so this makes me think about the fact that in conservation or in any in any conflict, really what typically happens,
which is always depicted in the series, is that something triggers a conflict escalates.
There is a crisis and then through some form of intervention, it manages to de-escalate.
So this is kind of the simple conceptual curve of how conflicts progress.
My concern, my real worry, is that in conservation,
we do not at scale have the ability to to to bring these conflicts back down and that they can carry on and they can go and they can just.
Stay at crisis level for far too long and stay at intense levels much, much too long, and the worry here is, you know,
take for example, here recently, in the last weeks there was a row over fisheries between England and France.
This is a very common situation. Fisheries conflicts pop up all the time.
This is so high stakes that immediately it's dealt with very with people who know
how to deal with these things and these things are dealt with and conservation.
We don't have those. We don't have the knowledge, we don't have the resources, we don't have access to that kind of structural support.
And so we're at risk of going ending up with a lot of conflicts that are just going on and on.
And of course, we have to think also about costs. Human conservation is a very poor field.
Intervening might cost a little bit. Resolving once it's getting worse and worse is going to cost more.
When you've got a crisis and you've got many of them, we don't know what these costs are.
This would be an interesting thing to study, but they're going to be high and they're going to just continue.
We can't we literally can't afford this in conservation. We don't have this funding to deal with this.
So we have to. We have to become very much better at knowing how to how to stop those escalations as an entire field.
I would propose that we the first thing is to understand the importance of this across conservation, to build capacity,
to make conservation, to make conflict resolution part of every project of every intervention and to reach out to to fields that can help.
And to incorporate this into policy and strategy as it is now emerging and things like this.
So I said at the beginning, conflict resolution is critically important for conservation worldwide and I would say,
well, the solution to that is we have to invest in concert conflict resolution,
peacebuilding at scale and by investing in in resources and in capacity building and knowledge and in everybody works in conservation,
becoming aware and knowing how to approach these things.
I would like to see conflict resolution taught in every conservation degree and every conservation course.
I would like to see that hundreds of mediators who can who are there to help in conservation projects.
I would like to see projects actually building this into into their initiatives as as a norm, not an exception.
And with that, I think we can finally get there.
Thank you very much. Basically.
But thank you. We have now the opportunity for questions from the floor and through the marvellous intervention of Terry,
who's came to multitask by running the microphones around and keeping an eye on the extended family hours and the internet.
We all have questions from both. So if you'd like to indicate, please, if you've got to go to question.
Yeah, at the very BACTÉRIAS post you already. I am.
Very briefly, you've talked quite a lot about conflicts between people arising through in
relation to conservation and not that much about the natural world and its voice.
So how do you take into account the voice of nature as represented, perhaps through representatives in this process, by the way you say who you are?
David Calvert I'm an independent, retired researcher. Thank you, Harris.
So nature, wildlife itself, its voice is portrayed through people,
people speak on behalf of the interests or what we consider to be the interests of wildlife, people or biodiversity.
And so that then is a group of people and those they represent what they value, and that may be different to what others value or need.
And so ultimately, it is again about people versus people.
OK, you got a question from the outer world.
So this is from Rachel online, she said. How can education programmes be used to resolve conflicts?
And can you share any key examples where an educational programme has played a significant part in the resolution?
So education in the sense of provision of information or awareness itself tends not to resolve disputes,
simply throwing, and we see this a lot in the more and the deeper conflict.
Simply throwing information at people does not get them to change their minds.
If you're talking about how do we educate better conflict resolution skills, then that that, I would say, is extremely important.
And I'm one, I'm asking, why are we not at scale learning these skills in schools?
Also, why are we not teaching negotiation and conflict resolutions in schools?
It is part of everybody's everyday life and the fabric of society, but in particular in conflict.
In conservation, these skills need to be built up hugely.
Thank you. I'm I'm a student of biodiversity conservation in the School of Geography.
And when you mention or when you say conservation is a little funding or capacity to deal with these conflicts,
you also mean that governments and NGOs and other stakeholders have little interest in contributing the solution of these conflicts.
Sorry, I didn't catch that the second. So the last part again.
I want him to know if there's interest from the governments and NGOs and the corporations contribute in the resolution of this conflict,
because you mentioned that there's little funding and capacity elsewhere to contribute.
I think there's definitely increasingly an awareness, a need for for the need for this, the willingness to actually put resources to it,
for example, into training or capacity building or even hiring mediators, for example, that ice I'm not seeing.
Or very, very little. It's the exception, and I think that has a little bit to do with it doesn't it's not very tangible for a funder.
It's quality. It's soft. How do you how do you demonstrate what has been done for if you put yourself into the shoes of a thunder,
they have to show impact and they have to show it quickly.
And a lot of the funding is in short cycles and we need quick results.
That no, some of these companies are not going to be fixed in two or three years.
How are you going to show this is another question that is tied into the bigger policy questions?
Actually, how do we demonstrate that we are making progress in resolving conflicts like that?
Are you angry? Close to zero?
You made a compelling case about conservation practitioners not getting involved in mediation and the need for professional mediation.
Quite often,
conservation practitioners belong to a different culture and a society different to those people having conflict and quite often mediators.
That protein also come from different backgrounds. So what would be the main criteria to find successful mediators in a genetic way?
Well,
I would say that there's no reason that conservation scientists can't learn how to become a mediator because when you're dealing in some situations,
you can put yourself outside of the problem enough to take on a sufficiently impartial role to help help along.
Even just to maybe firefight the situation in the first instance.
And those are skills that we can and should all learn, actually.
But when it becomes when things are much more tense or where the conservation as seen as a party by any of the other parties,
when there's a clash between you conservation people, then obviously you will be seen as that you cannot act as an impartial mediator.
So I think that the fields of sustainable development have are actually ahead of us in this.
They they already use this much more than we do in conservation. There's something to learn and maybe to borrow and bring in.
There are quotes from these, as this is Laura Perry from Wild Crew.
She is following on, I think, from what you've just been saying,
she wants to know what the extent your point about conflict resolution are quite evident to situ researchers.
But what then do you think the barriers are to courses institutions building conflict resolution into programmes?
Why aren't they doing this already? And what can we, as individuals do to push this conflict resolution education agenda?
Great question. So I think at this point in time, it's a it's it's an issue of awareness, actually, because if you think back to, you know,
20 years ago, conservation efforts were so focussed on natural science and we started to bring in social science.
And now it's very, very normal to do that. And in conservation projects, you will tend to have social scientists on the team.
So I think that that will naturally happen. We will start to through talking about the need for this start to see project
designs actually incorporate conflict resolution and professionals in that.
At least that is my hope and that's what I'm arguing we need to see. Whatever.
Q, thanks for the nice talk, Irish Courtesy. I have a question there.
How much you see conservation is being reflexive on their own actions in terms of creating new conflicts.
I mean, we are talking, for example, about 30 by 30 and all the conflicts that probably would escalate with such decisions,
potentially, and there are strong calls against it.
How much, for example, IUCN, as a high level conservation organisation, really takes into account in their decision making to account for a company.
Exactly, so creating new protected areas, which is a 30 by 30 is about IS creates high potential for conflict,
and that is why that was also quite controversial or one of the reasons it was controversial.
And so what has to change structurally and systemically is that conflict prevention
and awareness of the possibility of conflicts of merging has to be a given.
It has. We have to be aware of that at every level. So as the conservationists on the ground, but also at general CVB levels conflict prevention,
if you if it would be nice to actually calculate some of those costs and we might try and do that,
but certainly not letting it get to the point where you then with conservation,
start with the intention of making a win win solution, but can get sucked into being a party that is then facing a lot of hostility.
You don't go there. Please allow from Natural England.
You're my U.S. and is currently developing guidelines for human life conflict.
Can you just give us a little bit of an update of when they're likely to be available for us to use
coming in the IUCN reintroduction guidelines sort of being sort of a benchmark for reintroduction,
hoping that the will have conflict ones will prove to be the same.
Yeah. So that is actually the reintroduction translocation guidelines of ICE in our kind of our our model in a way because what we'd like to
achieve with these guidelines is that these are kind of a standard that you need to be aware of and that gives you practical guidance.
This is very, very much. Short bits of practical guidance. It has been a difficult thing to even figure out how to structure and how to
make how to make most useful for all the human wildlife conflicts in the world.
So how do you the right guidelines that apply to humpback whales and fisheries in Scotland, but also apply to shark issues in?
Reunion. So where we are at, we're in the very final stages, couple of chapters in the last stages of draughting,
what we are going to do is once there is a reasonably good complete version,
which is probably in the next few months, we are going to start piloting it and sort of testing it.
We're going to field test these guidelines rather than format and say, Here you go, everybody follows this.
We're going to have projects and ministries and organisations actually try them out as a sort of pilot version.
Then improve them, so use the collective intelligence of practitioners, enough decision makers to make them better and then create a final,
that very final version is a little way off, but a pilot version is pretty imminent.
We're on to our last rather brief question. Thank you for your talk.
You spoke about taking, though many suggestions that you provided to scale,
and that's a very common phrase being used in environmental related issues right from climate to biodiversity.
So I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how do you reconcile this, the time and more?
Because many of the things that you suggested like, especially for conflict two and three,
which are most citizens, think about histories, and all of that takes a lot of time building trust and everything.
So what are your thoughts on how do we keep that in mind?
Because it would take a long time to do some of the things that you have suggested in the ways forward?
Absolutely. All the more reason to really hurry. I would say and start to have the first thing we can do is have everybody studying
conservation science start to understand these things and all of us to actually,
I mean, you don't have to. There are zillions of negotiation courses in conflict resolution courses.
If you're interested in this, there's a lot of material out there there.
But then what I would like to see is that it becomes part of the how we do things as a norm in every project and every organisation.
It becomes completely normal to involve conflict resolution specialists.
In the short term, that might mean bringing an end for that any resources.
But eventually we need to be able to do this internally. OK, well, some brief, but nonetheless, sincere thanks.
Of course, these things all focus on Alex and her tremendous presentation, but there's a wider circle here.
I go back to our very first question asking about who represents wildlife or nature or animals.
One of the things that's been developed actually from our natural governance programme here is a way of thinking about social justice in conservation.
Several of us led by Visit Choose a scholar as part of our programme with Alex and myself and others.
The co-authors was to draw a distinction between different worldviews.
You might characterise them glibly as anthropol. centrists who think that nature and wild
animals are merely chips in the game to be played or no known threat for centrists.
I'm one of those who thinks that nature and wildlife have a stake in the US,
having interests in the conclusion and have to be taken into account accordingly.
My mention of natural governance programme was because this is actually the last event in that Martin School programme.
So as well as thanking Alex and thanking all of you and all who participated over the years.
Now that we've been doing this, I want on behalf of myself and my two colleagues who convened the whole programme,
professors of the White House and Dominic Johnson, to acknowledge what a delight this programme has been for us.
I think it's been fruitful and our thanks go to the and school and all who saved her from making that possible.
Our experience and I hope it's been yours, is the mountain school is the most extraordinary institution for bringing the best out of scholarship.
So thanks to everybody involved, thank you to my colleagues in the natural governance programme.
Thank you to the mountain school. Thank you to all previous speakers and colleagues.
And today, most particularly, thank you to Alex for her talk.
Thank you.