Introducing Nigel and Chris: the people who make the conservation leadership wheel spin

With deep appreciation, we also want to introduce the people that have accepted the challenge to run the MPhil in Conservation Leadership and who have contributed significantly to making it a reality. Mainly, Nigel Leader-Williams, as Director of Conservation Leadership, and Chris Sandbrook, Lecturer in Conservation Leadership at UNEP-WCMC and Affiliated Lecturer of the Department of Geography.

After training as a veterinary surgeon, Nigel completed his PhD with the British Antarctic Survey on the ecology of introduced reindeer on South Georgia. For his post-doc, Nigel studied conservation measures need for rhinos and elephants in Zambia. He then worked with the Director of Wildlife in Tanzania helping write national policies for conservation. For the past 15 years, initially as Professor of Biodiversity Management at the University of Kent, and recently as Director of Conservation Leadership at Cambridge, Nigel has worked to build capacity in conservation through interdisciplinary research and teaching that sits within both natural and social sciences, with a focus on large mammals that conflict with human interests. More information on Nigel´s career and research on http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/people/leader-williams/

Chris on the other side, has focused his research on the relationship between conservation and local livelihoods in the developing world, evaluating the effectiveness of market-based instruments as tools for conservation and development.

In his own words: "Over the past few decades various tools have been developed to mitigate conflict between protected areas and local people who live in and around them. The most popular of these tools has been tourism, which is intended to deliver funding for conservation activities and benefits to local people, thereby encouraging sustainable resource use. However, there is little evidence that this theory works in practice. Much of my research to date has addressed this issue, using mountain gorilla tracking tourism at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda, as a case study. In my PhD work I adopted an interdisciplinary approach, using qualitative and quantitative research methods drawn from the biological and social sciences to assess the impacts of tourism at Bwindi for local people and for wildlife. The results showed that tourism can raise funds for conservation activities and deliver meaningful benefits to some local people, but that there remain considerable costs of tourism and conservation, inequalities in the distribution of costs and benefits, and risks to gorillas themselves.

More recently, I have carried out research on the likely impact of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) initiatives on forest governance, the values held by young conservation scientists, and the biological and social impacts of Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) interventions in Africa." A list of his publications can be reviewed on http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/people/sandbrook/