As I have been told since I was young, nothing worth doing was ever easy. Lots of things are challenging and I don’t want to bemoan how difficult conservation is. The grand challenges of contemporary society are all complex; reducing poverty and inequality, working for peace, dealing with the effects of war, halting environmental damage and preventing climate change are not easy. It often seems though that we make solving these problems more difficult for ourselves, and our efforts become unnecessarily frustrated.
In conservation, governments, supranational organisations, NGOS, private organisations, communities, philanthropists, and average people all strive for broadly the same goals. Of course, there will be differences in priorities and approaches between these actors but they all endeavour to protect the natural world.
What then is frustrating about this situation? Bringing together people from different sections of society, with different resources and areas of expertise should surely make a problem more manageable. What is almost unbearable is that politics, infighting, and a stubborn unwillingness to view an issue from other peoples’ perspectives often prevent normally reasonable people from effectively pursuing their shared goals. NGOs will refuse to work with each other due to differences in philosophy or a self-serving need for credit, governments can be distrustful of foreign people and organisations, and sometimes simple personal dislike can get in the way.
These differences have become most obvious to me in the divide between researchers and wildlife managers. As a field biologist studying rhinos, I rely on the consent and support of reserve managers and rangers to carry out my work. I would simply not be able to do it without them and have met some amazing people who are willing to give up their time to help. However, there is undoubtedly a disconnect between the two groups which frustrates both sides.
Reserve managers are very busy people. They have to deal with the demands of governments, tourists, staff, finance, and security. I work in Kenya, and the issue of poaching means that many reserves have state-of-the-art security technologies and heavily armed protection services that have to run alongside tourist operations. Dealing with all this on a day-to-day basis, it is unsurprising that research, which does not provide immediate benefit to the to the mangers, comes low on the list of priorities. If your to do list includes sorting out a disgruntled tourist whose fees fund the reserve, talking to a government official to ensure you have the right permits to keep running, reacting to a poaching incident and meeting a researcher who wants to study your animals, it is pretty clear who comes bottom of the list. Even if the research is aimed at answering real-world qustions and will lead to advice on how management can be optimised, this won’t be forthcoming for some time.
This can be frustrating for researchers as they can spend a long time waiting for permissions from people. Research is vital to conservation. The Grevy’s zebra, which is classed as endangered by the IUCN, is declining and no one is sure why. Without research to discover the cause, it is likely that this species will slowly decline to extinction. Even in this pressing situation, managers and researchers talk in different languages and it can be difficult to persuade managers why research is useful. Going the other way, real-world conservation does not take place in the ideal world that the models of researchers approximate. It can therefore be difficult for researchers to understand why managers do some things in the way that they do when other methods may be theoretically more effective. Constraints imposed by finance, tourism and regulations often mean that compromises have to be made.
The inability of each group to communicate effectively with the other leads to distrust and a liability to dismiss the work of the other. This is infuriating for both sides as they want the same things, both are crucial to conservation, and neither can function effectively without the other. We have to find ways of bridging this divide and communicating with each other for we face enough problems as it is without creating more