integrated Environmental Management
Introduction
I am actively researching methodological tools to combine social and natural science, along side stakeholder perceptions to develop environmental management plans. My involvement in this field began with a small piece of empirical research I did on how different cultural groups perceive the environment and how this has a significant impact on environmental policy. My interest grew while doing forestry work in Belize where I saw first hand what sort of problems can be caused by poverty and a lack of economic opportunity. The jungle had been utterly destroyed by farmers trying to survive. No amount of park planning could alter the fact that these people have nothing to do except grow corn and to feed their children they need land.
Field work
I then spent some time helping to set up an urban agriculture project in Thailand where I observed how “environmental experts” and “community members” needed to work together to develop effective strategies for dealing with complex environmental problems. In many ways this project was quite successful and resulted in some wonderful community garden where before there had just been degraded land.
Click here for the project website.
A PhD student of mine, David Mkwambisi has continued this theme with funding from the International Development Reserach Council in his native Malawi.
Most recently, these approached have been applied to work in the rural parts of the UK where we are working with farmers, park officials, scientists and tourist operators to develop policy to promote a sustainable future from the UK’s threatened natural areas.
Click here for the project webside.
Adaptive Management
The question of what role scientists and community members should play
led to a broader exploration of case studies where community
participation was used in environmental planning. This question
also lies at the heart of a critique I recently co-authored of “The
Environmental Sustainability Index,” an index designed to measure
nations’ social, economic and environmental impact that was developed
almost entirely by elite Western academics. The key is to design a system that is both streamlined and focused as well as being inclusive, participatory and uses the best possible science. Building on the "adaptive management" literature the work I've been doing has tried out a number of ways of formally bringing stakeholders together to develop environmnetal management plans and anticipate future problems.
To date myself, and the colleagues who are working on this have published a number of case studies including:
1. A paper drawing on field work done by Mark Reed in Bostwana;
2. A paper comparing this African work with work done in Coastal British Columbia and on the Isles of Guernsey;
3. A paper looking specifically at the role of communities in adaptive management planning in Europe, Thailand and Africa.
FUNDED PROJECTS
Thailand work was funded by the Canadian International Development Agency. (value $250,000 Canadian)
Malawian work has been funded by the International Development Research Council ($20,000 Canadian)
Work in the UK upland comes out of a large research collaboration funded by the UK’s research councils over the past two years.
These projects include:
1. A scoping study (value £50,000)
2. A Ph.D. scholarship (value £60,000)
3. And a full research proposal (value £770,000).