Social dimensions of biodiversity conservation programs

Abstract

Key lessons • Respond to landholder motivations for biodiversity conservation. • Understand the socio-demographic profile of potential participants. • Support those already making the change. • Design programs to achieve compatibility between financial and biodiversity outcomes. Social dimensions play an important role in landholder participation in natural resource management (NRM) programs. Many regional-and community-based NRM organisations have a good understanding of landholder characteristics and capacity from data collected through national, regional, or catchment scale landholder surveys and other social studies. But, often, NRM plans only include aspirations for integrating this data into program design, project communications and evaluation. While various frameworks have been developed to do this (Fenton 2004; Robins and Dovers 2007), there are few recorded cases where integration of social, environmental and economic information has been used to support successful implementation of NRM programs (Bammer et al. 2005). This content downloaded from 41.90.237.105 on Wed, 06 Jun 2018 11:09:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms