Search

The ability of alternative 'ecological' farming approaches and agri-environment schemes (AES) to deliver on sustainability goals will depend on their adoption rate and distribution at the regional level, which is a neglected topic in the agricultural literature, which focuses primarily on farm-level factors. Filling this gap is especially relevant to agriculture in England following Brexit, which prompted a reform of agri-environment policy with greater emphasis on 'public money for public goods', and landscape-scale actions. The aim of this thesis was to use an interdisciplinary approach to assess challenges and opportunities for the adoption of alternative farming approaches and AES to impact regional sustainability, focusing on English agriculture post Brexit. Semi-structured interviews were used to examine farmer drivers of adoption at the farm level and beyond by asking farmers about their willingness to identify as public good providers, and their relationship with cooperative management for public good delivery. Spatial analysis was used to assess the regional distribution of AES engagement and test the role of possible factors in explaining this distribution. Finally, a mix of scenario analysis, qualitative impact mapping, and network analysis was used for a sustainability assessment of ecological farming approaches, exploring how their adoption rate and distribution relates to their regional sustainability. The interviews illustrated how farmers chose their own interpretations of 'public goods' to fit with their views about what being a farmer meant. By defining public goods as being 'good for the public', farmers could connect their willingness to be seen as providers of public goods to a desire for the public to properly recognise the value of outputs from farming. Farmer attitudes towards public good provision also reflected how they reconciled private and public good provision with their chosen identities, whether these were separate aspects of their identity that had to weighed against each other, or interdependent features of their role. Respondents often preferred to focus on public good delivery at the farm level due to the perceived costly and onerous nature of cooperative management, and the lack of any obvious reward for their efforts, highlighting the importance of quantifying and communicating the benefits of cooperative management for its widespread adoption. A tendency of farmers to be mistrustful of institutional control means successful cooperative initiatives must have a strong farmer-driven component, but the distribution of participating farms will likely depend on the occurrence of farmers who are able to make new connections with others (who may not necessarily share views or ideals around good farming) and thus facilitate the creation of loose farmer clusters. The application of spatial analysis and modelling showed that AES distribution in England was clustered at the district level, and these cluster locations differed for different scheme types. Protected area coverage was consistently positively associated with regional adoption rates, but the impact of other explanatory variables varied according to the scheme type. Modelling also indicated that a mix of other, unidentified spatially correlated variables were likely driving a large part of the observed clustering, and that this clustering was unlikely to be due to any form of spillover or neighbourhood effect, as might be expected at a more local level. Finally, the sustainability assessment demonstrated how the adoption of locally appropriate ecological farming approaches (in this case conservation agriculture and low-input farming) could enhance regional sustainability in southeast England. Sustainability performance was maximised in scenarios where the adoption of these approaches occurred at a high rate and in a clustered distribution. The high clustered adoption scenario could reconcile positive performance across many different aspects of sustainability, although even in this scenario it was not possible to completely avoid trade-offs or resolve all ambiguities between different sustainability objectives. Applying network analysis to the scenarios highlighted the importance of information access for the regional sustainability of ecological approaches, which in turn depended on strong advisory support, use of technology, and quality of farmer social relationships. Taken together, these methods show how the processes underpinning the adoption and sustainability of ecological farming and AES may vary across different scales, and that the regional sustainability of an ecological approach depends on the geographic context in which it is applied. Utilising the full diversity of ecological approaches and ensuring that farmers can be supported to adopt locally relevant approaches, will be important for optimising regional sustainability, as will an increased emphasis on mechanisms for information sharing and building relationships with and within farming communities. Given that the sustainability of ecological farming appears to be the product of processes operating at different scales, multi-scale assessments should be a priority for future agricultural sustainability research, and the versatile methodological framework used for this regional assessment could readily be applied to such a multi-scale assessment with a few modifications.

Throughout the world an ever-burgeoning human population is putting increasing pressure on natural resources. One result of that pressure is an increasing loss of natural habitat through habitat destruction and change in land use. Currently the effects of change in land use are most strongly felt in tropical regions that also hold the highest levels of biodiversity. Significant gaps in our knowledge exist regarding how changes in land use affect faunal biodiversity and abundance, especially in the case of tropical amphibians and reptiles which can be particularly sensitive to environmental change and are often difficult to detect. Surveys were conducted in Laguna del Tigre National Park (LTNP) in Northern Guatemala with the aim of 1) comparing amphibian and reptile diversity in undisturbed forest and forest adjacent to land converted to agriculture; 2) determining predictors of diversity and finer scale effects of change in land use on assemblage structure; and 3) using the presence of common widespread species to predict hotspots of diversity on a wider regional level. Ninety-two species of amphibians and reptiles were detected from 2013 to 2016 representing 26 families and 5 orders. Eighteen percent of amphibian species and 50% of reptiles were found to be of regional conservation concern, considerably higher than when those species were considered at current national and global levels. Diversity of amphibians and reptiles was significantly lower in forest adjacent to agriculture than in undisturbed habitat. Assemblage structure was significantly altered in disturbed habitat, with a few common species dominating other species that were present. Tolerance of dry environmental conditions and specialised diet were identified as traits that allowed for successful colonisation of disturbed forest. The presence of species with widespread distributions revealed more information about overall diversity of a location than did the presence of rare species. Moreover, the presence of species common to multiple locations in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve (MBR) could be used to predict levels of diversity at under-sampled locations. Change in land use and resulting disturbance of adjacent forest could have a more significant impact on amphibians and reptiles than realized. Conservation policy for amphibians and reptiles within the MBR should take their local conservation status into consideration in addition to national and global assessments.

The importance of bridging diverse worldviews and knowledge systems to enhance conservation outcomes is increasingly recognized. Yet, the cultural, social and political dimensions of ecosystems are still largely overlooked in conservation sciences, following the premisses of prevalent nature:culture dichotomies within managerialist approaches. Building from an interrogation of the ontological and epistemological limitations of ecosystem assessment frameworks, namely Ecosystem Services (ES) and Nature's Contributions to People (NCP), this thesis elaborates the potential role of Cultural Ecosystem Assessments to foster culturally adequate, socially equitable and ecologically sustainable conservation responses. As ecosystem assessments are influential frameworks to diagnose environmental issues and inform conservation strategies, recognizing the shortcomings of monetary valuations and biodiversity offsetting strategies requires discarding their economic frameworks and develop relational and place-based approaches to human-environment relationships which support struggles for environmental justice. Thus, enquiring which overlooked dimensions of human-environment relationships need to be considered and how can these be systematically integrated in ecosystem assessments, this thesis seeks to develop a framework for Cultural Ecosystem Assessments which conveys the context-specific dimensions of human-environment relationships, unveils their influence on complex social-ecological dynamics and assists developing effective, equitable and representative community-based strategies for the conservation of biocultural diversity. Following an inductive approach, based on ethnographic and interpretive mixed methods research, the thesis explores the cultural, political and storied landscapes of local human-environment relationships in two contrasting case-studies: first, with local and indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon; and, second, with the provisional multi-ethnic communities of Ascension Island, in the South Atlantic. The results provide supporting evidence that (1) cultural practices (e.g. land management), benefits (e.g. identities) and values (e.g. ethical principles) are interdependent and mediate the co-production of all 'ecosystem services'; (2) relational values convey distinct articulations of reciprocity in human-environment relationships that regulate feedback processes between the social and ecological systems; (3) local and indigenous knowledge systems influence all dimensions of human-environment relationships, including cultural modes of production, consumption, representation and regulation of ecological processes; and (4) considering the sociocultural and spatio-temporal variability of human-environment relationships, including underlying social structures and power relationships, reveals the unequal social and geographical distribution of 'ecosystem services' supply and demand. The analysis demonstrates that Cultural Ecosystem Assessments may contribute to disclose complex socio-ecological dynamics from local to global scale, including ecosystem services flows, drivers of social and ecological change, feedback processes and emergent regulation mechanisms. Then, through developing a biocultural and relational approach to socio-ecological systems, the thesis advances a conceptual, analytical and methodological framework for Cultural Ecosystem Assessments which contributes to address key knowledge gaps in sustainability sciences, by revealing: (1) the role of diverse worldviews, knowledge systems and relational values influencing the co-production of ES/NCP and shaping wider socio-ecological dynamics; (2) the influence of social structures, governance systems and power relationships in the distribution of ES/NCP and their role driving socio-ecological changes; (3) the unequal social and geographical distribution of ES/NCP supply and demand which underlies ES/NCP flows both within and across regions and society; and (4) the spatial and temporal dynamics of socio-ecological change, including trade-offs between distinct ES/NCP, feedback process and direct or indirect drivers of socio-ecological change. Ultimately, the framework recasts ecosystem assessments around context-specific perspectives, fostering assessments' ability to bridge diverse worldviews and knowledge systems, support struggles for environmental justice and inform community-based strategies for the conservation of biocultural diversity.

The growth and expansion of human populations and resource demands is driving large scale fragmentation and loss of wildlife habitat, isolating wildlife populations and pushing many species towards extinction at local to global scales. Attempts to promote connectivity between wildlife managed areas at transboundary scales has been proposed as a solution to negative effects associated with population isolation. Such approaches commonly require the maintenance of wildlife populations throughout human-dominated landscapes subject to various degrees of effective protection. The aims of this study are to (1) assess the status of the large carnivore guild throughout ten wildlife managed areas comprising the Zambian component of Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area between Kafue National Park and the Simalaha Wildlife Recovery Sanctuary on the Zambezi River; (2) model habitat suitability and connectivity in this landscape for Lion, Leopard and Spotted hyena; and (3) develop a site-specific map of human footprint pressure for the landscape and test if it can be used a proxy for determining the occurrence of these three species. And further, explore if there are thresholds in human footprint pressure beyond which species are likely extirpated from wildlife managed areas. Methods included library studies to determine historical status of the large carnivore guild and twenty-six common prey species, spoor tracking in conjunction with qualitative surveys and supplemental data analysis to ascertain species current distribution, remote sensing with ground-truthing to build landcover maps, Maximum Entropy and Current Flow models, and extensive use of Geographic Information Systems. The findings conclude that there have been large scale losses in species assemblages throughout majority of southern wildlife managed areas, including the Simalaha Wildlife Recovery Sanctuary. However, no detectable changes were evident in Kafue National Park and surrounding Game Management Areas. Human activities are limiting habitat suitability and scope for occurrence in central southern areas of the landscape, with the likelihood of a connectivity bottleneck occurring. There is significant overlap in habitat requirements and scope for species movement. Human footprint pressure models appear to demonstrate utility as a proxy measure for occurrence of our large carnivore subset, though require some refinements and supplemental data layers to increase predictive power. Human footprint pressure at the wildlife managed area scale indicates threshold levels at which target species occur or are locally extirpated. Analyses have identified important additions to the existing wildlife managed area network in Open communal land that could provide valuable habitat and connectivity for target species given effective management and finance, including containment of negative human disturbance variables modelled (agro-pastoralist activities and infrastructure development). The effects of poaching are also hypothesized to be a significant driver limiting species persistence. Continued expansion of human population, settlement and agro-pastoralist activities will limit scope for expansion of large carnivores and their principle prey throughout the Kafue-Zambezi interface, effectively severing connectivity and isolating the Greater Kafue System from adjacent wildlife managed areas in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. Narratives surrounding the development of wildlife-based land uses and species-level connectivity benefit from the application of conservation science and generation of empirical data to guide management.

This research aims to study the social, historical and environmental dynamics around forests fires in Serra de Tramuntana, a protected area and UNESCO World Heritage Site in the island of Mallorca, in the Spanish state. From the second half of the twentieth century, and like in other Mediterranean rural areas, Serra de Tramuntana entered into a process of de-agrarisation, which led to the abandonment of many cultivated, pasture and forest lands. Moreover, in 2007, Serra de Tramuntana was conferred the status of Natural Site (Paratge Natural), resulting in the implementation of new land-use regulations and prohibitions which often conflict with local people's land-uses and agroforestry management practices. Due to the changes in land-use and management, the landscape of Serra de Tramuntana has transformed by increased woodland and accumulated dead and living forest biomass. This combination of factors, together with the hot and dry summers, have enhanced an upsurge of large forest fires. In 2013, the largest forest fire ever recorded in the Balearic Islands burned 2,400 hectares of Serra de Tramuntana. Large forest fires, particularly from the 2013 fire, have galvanised public, media, scientific and governmental attention, highlighting the diversity and conflict of perspectives between a wide range of social actors. They have also become a focus for social conflict, and a locus for broader processes of social contestation, negotiation and cooperation linked to environmental change, to land-use and environmental management of the protected area. Combining an analysis of ethnographic, historical and geographical data, this research project aims to understand the social, historical and environmental dimensions of forest fires in Serra de Tramuntana. My research seeks to understand (1) the varying social perspectives about the factors that today contribute to the incidence of large forest fires in Serra de Tramuntana and the possible management solutions for this issue; and (2) how the presence of fire reflects the convergence of multiple social perspectives and actions associated with the use and management of the protected area.

Achieving sustainable use of natural resources is the greatest challenge facing humanity today. Rangelands, which cover one-third to one-half of the earth's ice-free surface, are frequently mismanaged, vulnerable to climate change, and in a degraded state, and their inhabitants are some of the poorest and most marginalized communities on earth. Despite over a century of scientific attention, we still lack an adequate understanding of how rangeland socio-ecological systems operate and how rangeland vegetation responds to abiotic and biotic variables. The Dhofar Mountains represent a rather unique rangeland case study, with atypical social, cultural, political, economic and ecological situations, which could provide valuable insights for rangeland science. Moreover, the Dhofar mountain region is understudied, globally unique, supports a wealth of biodiversity and provides valuable ecosystem services to the local population, yet the threat of overstocking, despite being well-recognised, has received little scientific attention. Therefore, this interdisciplinary research which utilises contemporary methods from the social, ecological and rangeland sciences, aims to firstly understand the social processes driving overstocking in rural Dhofar and secondly, assess the impacts of overstocking on vegetation communities. Data collection methods included interviews, questionnaires, participatory mapping exercises, vegetation sampling and remote sensing. Analytical procedures included qualitative coding, the application of a socio-ecological systems framework, multivariate analysis of vegetation communities and GIS spatial analysis. The results provide the first detailed analysis of the socio-ecological system surrounding pastoralism in Dhofar. We find that livestock ownership is principally motivated by strong pastoral values rooted in cultural norms. But livestock ownership is expensive due to the requirement for daily feedstuff provisioning, which in turn makes local livestock prices uncompetitive against imported livestock. Few livestock are sold and the expense means some better-educated or wealthier individuals are losing interest. By applying a socio-ecological system framework we identify variables inhibiting self-organization, which can be summarised as too many resource users in an unproductive system with undervalued resources. Feedstuff provision is found to be a critical variable which deems many rangeland concepts inapplicable and maintains livestock populations beyond the carrying capacity of the environment. Subsequently, the rangelands, which receive reliable precipitation, exhibit equilibrium properties. Several decades of overbrowsing has increased the frequency of unpalatable species, decreased plant density, reduced advanced growth, altered population age structures, and altered plant phytomorphology through the damaging effects of management practises, bark stripping and browsing. We identify six new variants and a pre-described seventh variant of the Anogeissus forest. Our results suggest that two variants are the result of historical agricultural practises and deforestation, and long-term stocking rates are the primary driver of vegetation change across all variants. Finally, using a novel method, we calculate that seventeen percent of continuous-canopy forest has been lost in the study area and provide further evidence that unforested areas are the result of anthropogenic deforestation. Our findings contribute valuable insights for rangeland science and demonstrate the need for new case studies, and synthesis of concepts and theories, specific to pastoralism in the Middle East. Our findings highlight a requirement for an intervention to reduce livestock pressure on the rangelands in Dhofar. We propose a shift away from the status quo of unmanaged and unproductive overstocking to an economically and environmentally sustainable rural livestock production system through certification, sustainable intensification and marketization.

Biodiversity is an important provider of ecosystem services. There is a sense of urgency running through the scientific community regarding its protection and conservation. This urgency is fuelled by a wealth of research into the effects of habitat destruction, intensive agriculture, destructive industries (such as mining and oil exploration) and the insidious threat of climate change. It might reasonably be suggested that the biodiversity crisis we are facing today is in large part due to a lack of regulation around human-activities with regard to biodiversity impacts. In order to impose regulations, protecting biodiversity has been incentivised through various governmental and non-profit private-sector certification initiatives that aim to minimise the negative impacts that industry can have on the environment. Agri-environment schemes are largely governmental initiatives that aim to enhance the biodiversity and societal values of farmland. Timber certification initiatives, such as the Forest Stewardship Council, promote woodland management that takes into account the economic, environmental and social aspects of forestry with equal measure. Protection and enhancement of biodiversity is integral to achieving the environmental aims of certification. However, several studies have highlighted that many schemes (notably agri-environment schemes and some timber certification schemes) ultimately fall short of their projected targets, which is often due to a lack of suitable monitoring with regard to biodiversity. This is unsurprising since biodiversity monitoring is not a straightforward process. Many considerations need to be made when choosing suitable indicators of ecosystem health such as whether to measure species diversity or functional diversity. But perhaps one of the biggest issues is the ability of landowners and managers to contribute to efficient, objective, standardised data collection. Acoustic monitoring offers a means of producing unbiased data that can be analysed objectively and stored indefinitely. With significant advances in hardware and software technologies, the proliferation of acoustic monitoring is evident in the scientific literature. The field of soundscape ecology was in many respects borne out of these technological advances. It has since been usurped by the newer field of ecoacoustics (I use these two terms interchangeably throughout this thesis). Ecoacoustics offers a range of soundscape analytical techniques that aim to understand the spectral and temporal composition of the soundscape. As such a number of acoustic indices can be used to measure different facets of acoustic diversity. This study offers an overview of the current literature in bioacoustics and ecoacoustics. It applies several of these indices to studying the soundscape of Forest Stewardship Council certified plantation forests in the UK. Specifically it investigates the soundscape in relation to habitat and landscape metrics and explores temporal variation in acoustic activity. It offers insights into the relationship between man-made/machine noise (technophony) and biological sounds (biophony) and suggests future directions for research and large-scale monitoring of habitats. Finally it provides a set of instructions on how to build an automated recording unit using readily available parts and provides links to necessary software and guidance on types of hardware available. The key findings indicate that the use of acoustic indices for monitoring landscapes could be a useful tool. Clear relationships were observed between forest structure and stand age, and vegetation structure, with acoustic diversity in Thetford forest over two consecutive years. Although these relationships were not clear in Bedgebury forest, the effects of landscape structure were statistically significant, particularly when using automated recording units. Road proximity had a strong influence on the soundscape in all study sites. And the use of ecoacoustic methods to explore this offers an insight into a new means of investigating the impact of roads on acoustic biodiversity. The development of a low-cost automated recording unit is a significant contribution to the field of soundscape ecology in terms of encouraging participation by the non-governmental organisation (NGO) sector. Likewise, the use of a handheld recording unit and the application of traditional ecological survey methods provide evidence that soundscape/ecoacoustic studies that yield interesting, informative and biologically meaningful results can be done on a relatively low budget. As such this thesis offers a significant contribution to the field of soundscape ecology in terms of both data and logistics. It may be particularly relevant to researchers on a limited budget and/or the NGO and citizen science sector.

Climate change has been recognized as one of the causes of global amphibian population declines. Amphibians may be particularly susceptible to climatic changes, as a result of their ectothermic life style and dependence on moisture. Climatic factors may affect amphibian population dynamics deterministically or stochastically, and can act at both local and regional levels. Using capture-mark- recapture (CMR) methods, population dynamics of great crested newts over two decades were compared between two separate populations in Canterbury, Kent in order to explore local and regional drivers of population change. Accurate individual identification is a basic assumption of capture-mark-recapture methods. A comparison of manual and computer-assisted photo identification programs verified that the spot patterns of individual newts did not change significantly through time, and were sufficiently varied to reliably identify individual newts. At a metapopulation located within an agricultural landscape, capture-mark-recapture modelling revealed variations in survival, detectability, and population size between years. Low annual survival of adult newts was related to mild, wet winters which impacted the metapopulation at the regional level. Therefore, survival varied between years but not between subpopulations. Regardless of this regional effect, the four subpopulations were generally asynchronous in their dynamics, but the persistence of the metapopulation depended on a single source pond that was the smallest water body within the system. At a further population two miles away, survival since 2001 was constant and high every year despite mild, wet winters. Management practised through draining and refilling the ponds did have an apparent effect on the number of newts captured over the subsequent years. Population increase could be due to the decrease in predatory invertebrates following pond desiccation and a subsequent increase in recruitment levels. Body condition may be linked to the survival of amphibians. However, there was no influence of climatic conditions on the body condition at either of the populations studied. Nevertheless, body condition was related to survival at one of the populations, and body condition was lower in ponds with high densities of newts. Consequently, the persistence of the two populations relies on a combination of (1) local, population-specific factors - such as population density and pond desiccation, and (2) regional factors, such as climate that affect recruitment and survival from each pond. However, conservation actions at the local scale may offset reduced larval recruitment and adult survival at the regional scale.

This thesis explores how the Maltese fishing sector has been affected by the regulatory framework emanating from the European Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) and the Habitats' Directive. An interdisciplinary approach was adopted to identify how the multi-scalar governance structures and management system have influenced the social, economic, political and environmental elements of the Maltese fisheries sector. Management frameworks hailing from the CFP and the Habitats' Directive were analysed to elicit knowledge about the resource governance, socio-economic and socio-ecological resilience, and sustainable livelihoods in the context of small-scale and artisanal fisheries. By focusing on Malta's two main fishing villages - Marsaxlokk and Mgarr (Gozo), I seek to highlight how the ratification of the various policies has affected the sustainability of the heterogeneous fishing communities that inhabit the island. To do this, I have used a grounded theory approach to investigate the incremental implications deriving from the policy changes dawning onto the endogenous Maltese fishing patterns since EU accession in 2004. The research, which is based on a year of contact, interaction and participant observation with fishers, explores and describes how fishers experience and respond to conservation and neo-liberal policy shifts, and such findings are represented through a series of publishable case studies (chapters). In Chapter 4, I describe how the capitalistic nature of the Bluefin tuna fishery policy has facilitated the plight of the artisanal fishing sector due to privatisation schemes that enabled the concentration of quotas into fewer hands. In Chapter 5, I investigate the role of the Maltese open-access fisheries policy on the livelihood of fishers, and ultimately, in Chapter 6, I look into the sustainability implications of marine protected areas on the inshore fishing communities. Through these case studies, I provide a wide-ranging and analytical outlook of how small-scale fishers are implicated in the dynamics of fisheries management and governance. Based on these observations I provide feasible context-specific recommendations for the continuation of small-scale fishing communities.

Climate change is a global issue; one whose perception involves an ontological status whereby multiple perspectives enact its existence. Whilst biophysical scientific disciplines, such oceanography or conservation biology, have presented objective evidence of this climatic phenomenon, social science disciplines, such as sociology, politics, or psychology, have sought to explain how climate change is perceived and addressed by people. This thesis is about this subjective facet of climate change. It endeavours to engage with the worldwide interest in comprehending how people build their understanding and knowledge of climate change, but also takes a step further to investigate peoples' perception of climate change adaptation and look at emotional responses in respect to this climate issue. The specific aim of my research is therefore to provide insights that could be of value in enhancing our understanding of how people engage with climate change. Because most studies of peoples' knowledge and perceptions of climate change have been conducted with segments of the general public in the United States, Europe, and Australia, I decided to focus my study on a rather different society, namely that of my own nation, Ecuador. Moreover, here the interest was to investigate a rural community and to contrast the resulting data with those gathered from a sample of academic conservationists worldwide. In terms of the approach to the study, in being committed to allowing participants the agency to define how they themselves understand this climatic phenomenon, I employed a mixed-mode approach that incorporated qualitative and quantitative data gathering instruments, including face-to-face and online questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and participant observation. My findings provide a unique insight into the perspectives and realities that form the study populations' understandings of climate change. They suggest that despite the global nature of climate change, it is multiple local and individual realities that ultimately determine peoples' engagement with it. I conclude that action preferences, namely mitigation or adaptation to climate change, tend to be predominantly moderated by people's demographic background. I also suggest a tendency among urban dwellers to perceive climate change as an issue that cannot be tackled individually. Furthermore, because the international trend to cope with climate change highlights the relevance of 'resilience thinking', I argue that the results of my thesis can usefully inform the process of advising policy makers and when developing awareness-raising and educational programmes on climate change.

For over a century there has been a push to preserve the areas of nature where the human impact is the smallest, often referred to as wilderness. In Europe the suitability of the concept is debated, as the entire continent has been heavily modified by humans, and the areas without visible human impacts are small and fragmented. At the same time there is a strong push for preserving these areas, including the areas at sea. At sea the wilderness concept faces unique challenges, as the environment is less understood than the terrestrial, and the potential wilderness areas are not necessarily accessible for recreational purposes. This thesis examines the use of the wilderness concept, especially as it relates to the marine environment, in both policy and common use. The aim is to contribute to the conceptual framework for marine wilderness, by studying how the concept of wilderness is understood and used by policymakers and stakeholders. The research is conducted using discourse analysis on legal texts and newspapers, and surveys, interviews, and social network analysis to examine the views of individual stakeholders. The results show that while there is political will in Scotland to conserve wild areas, which are more modest in size than wilderness but provide the wildness quality and its beneficial effects, the concept of wilderness has multiple interpretations, and can be rather political. To address the consequent issues, participation of stakeholders is considered vital for successful management. Marine wilderness remains a particularly ambiguous concept, and considering the ongoing tensions in marine resources management, it is suggested that marine wilderness is more useful if seen as an added benefit than the ultimate goal.

'Conservation is about people, not just animals' argued Prince William in a letter to The Financial Times , written to gather support for ending ivory poaching and trading. This truism is often repeated by conservationists; we are frequently reminded that what we do - as humans - influences nature 'out there'. Nevertheless, conservation science often hesitates to interrogate what we do as organised human societies. Time and again, that leads to somewhat simplifying analyses of humanity's enormous power in shaping the whole Earth System -currently argued to surpass the power of geological forces. A case in point could be the isolation of corruption in Africa as the main driver for ivory market explosion in the last decade. Without considering the political-economy not just of ivory, but of the global-to-local societal organisation that allows for thousands of elephants and rhinos to be killed - for something of so low use-value such as ivory - little understanding can be shed on this alarming trend. I argue, and hope I have shown in this thesis, that we should aim towards enriching what conservation understands as its field of vision and allow the latter to encompass not just human and nonhuman nature and societies, as Prince William rightfully argues, but also the political and societal. I would be satisfied if by going through this thesis the reader would be convinced of just this argument. I am not claiming to be the first to identify this contradiction within conservation, but contra a sizeable number of scientists who work on similar subjects, I am normatively for conservation. A wealth of research has been published on conservation-society relationships that interrogates wider political, societal and economic constrains and opportunities as they relate to conservation. Usually though, research on what could be called critical conservation studies is (a) published in journals that conservationists do not read, and (b) is conducted by non-conservationists, often critical of conservation as a science and praxis per se. Thus all this wealth has little import to wider discussions about the future of conservation science and practice, and is even considered by conservationists as hostile to their agenda. I hope it is obvious from the above that I place this piece of research within the wide field of conservation science - despite drawing from a variety of disciplines. In essence, this piece of work looks at the relation between political-economic transformations and the way societies think about, manage and regulate nature. Geographically, my focus is on England, but with a sideways glance to developments at the EU level. Historically, the scope is circumscribed by two years: 1981, the year of the Toxteth riots in Liverpool, and 2015, the year I submitted. Naturally, in this country-wide, 24 year study I have not even attempted to include 'everything'. I focused on what after examination of empirical data I considered to be key moments and places in the evolution of English conservation. I begin with a section that introduces the reader into the area of study , followed and a brief literature-based summary of conservation in England from the beginning of the 20th century. The next three chapters should be read as a small trilogy that discusses the general trends in conservation policy and governance in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis (Chapter 3), followed by two smaller chapters (vignettes) that study post-financial crisis landscape scale conservation from: (a) a policy and governance perspective (Chapter 4); a use of science and scientific metaphors perspective (Chapter 5). The following two chapters try to reconstruct the where and when (geography and history are important) specific conservation policies and practices emerge, always in relation to economic and political changes. Chapter 6 is a genealogy of green infrastructure, from its emergence in the post-riot Liverpool landscape of 1981, to its current amalgamation with ecosystem services and monetary-valuation-of-nature milieu. Chapter 7 looks at biodiversity offsetting and argues that changing economic and transport geographies are crucial in understanding why biodiversity offsetting emerged as a solution to wildlife-development conflict in this instance and in the South East of England in particular. I conclude with a proposal for a new conservation that places utopia at the centre of its methodology (Chapter 8).

Many carnivore populations were in decline throughout much of the 20th century, but due to recent conservation policies, their numbers are stabilising or even increasing in some areas of the world. This, compounded with human population growth, has caused increased livestock depredation by carnivores, which threatens farmer livelihoods, particularly those in developing countries such as Namibia. How to resolve this so-called “conflict” between carnivores and livestock farmers remains challenging, in part because some mitigation strategies have proven somewhat ineffective or unacceptable. By using a case-study approach on the commercial farmlands of northcentral Namibia, I aimed to understand the complexity of the human dimensions affecting coexistence between carnivores and people in an unprotected working landscape. Specifically, my objectives were to 1) develop a participatory decisionmaking exercise to analyse the views of stakeholders on how they would like carnivores to be managed in unprotected lands, 2) understand how the media framed financial incentives to improve human-carnivore coexistence, and 3) determine if there were any underlying social, economic or political causes of negative human-carnivore interactions on commercial livestock farms. To answer objective 1, I developed a new decision-making exercise that combined Q-methodology and the Delphi technique to determine whether a diverse group of stakeholders could agree on how to manage carnivores on commercial farmland. A strong agreement was reached by participants: providing conservation education and training on livestock husbandry were acceptable and effective ways to improve coexistence with carnivores. This new also method highlighted areas of disagreement between stakeholders and showed that there were two different narratives on how carnivores should be managed. This method could be used by policy makers to help with participatory decision-making for resolving other conservation conflicts. To answer objective 2, I undertook content analysis of national newspapers to determine how the media framed articles on financial incentives to mitigate this conservation conflict. The most common (30%) financial incentive discussed was compensation - many (61%) of these articles framed compensation positively. However, upon categorising these articles into those where respondents were enrolled in compensation schemes compared with those who were not, a clear pattern emerged: articles were more likely (89%) to be framed ambivalently or negatively when respondents had experience of this financial incentive compared with respondents that did not. These results can help conservationists plan more effective communication interventions and anticipate issues that can affect the success of mitigation strategies. To answer objective 3, I undertook eight months of participant observation on livestock farms and interviewed 69 respondents and found that reported livestock depredation was associated with increased instances of poaching of wildlife and stealing of livestock. This association appeared to be partly due to farmer-worker relations: when employees felt happy, respected and were paid a liveable wage, they were incentivised to perform well in their job. This resulted in livestock that were managed more effectively and therefore less likely to be killed by predators. Furthermore, these well-paid employees were not incentivised to steal or poach to supplement their income, which limited the extent of game poaching and livestock theft on the farm. These findings underline the fact that this conservation conflict is extremely complicated, driven by many social, economic and political factors that may not be apparent initially. In conclusion, this thesis has found that the conflict between carnivores and livestock farmers is a truly wicked problem, affected by a multitude of complex layers. Only by exploring the entangled web of drivers will we ever begin to create positive, lasting change for both people and predators.