Social participation in the design and implementation of conservation policies has become increasingly relevant. Despite the recognition of the importance of local communities' perspectives in the design and implementation of conservation policies, participation mechanisms are usually deficient. Simplification of socioecological complexity in policy design has been documented as one of the most salient challenges limiting policies' success. We examined conservation policies, objectives and implementation in an urban wetland of high biocultural importance in Mexico City, and contrasted them with local community perspectives about the causes and solutions of socioecological problems in the wetland. We documented policies developed for the wetland conservation since 1989, and interviewed local inhabitants whose livelihoods depend directly on the wetland, governmental officials, and non-governmental organisations representatives. Our results showed that policies' design simplify complex socioecological reality in the Xochimilco wetland. This complex reality, as perceived by local communities, is not represented nor addressed by governmental programmes, which systematically avoid dealing with the most urgent processes linked to wetland degradation and have exacerbated local social asymmetries. This study emphasises the need to develop and evaluate policies through transdisciplinary strategies and participatory processes, which include all social actors involved, particularly those that depend directly on ecosystems.

For many researchers, particularly in academia, publishing in peer-reviewed journals is a necessity, with major implications for their career progression. Yet, it is increasingly recognised that the current scientific publishing model is not fair and equitable, which can have severe consequences for the way science is accessed and used in nature conservation. We evaluated the publishing model of 426 conservation science journals against the Fair Open Access (FOA) principles. Two-thirds of journals, together publishing nearly half of all articles, complied with only two or fewer FOA principles. Only twenty journals (5%), publishing 485 articles per year (<1%), complied with all five principles. We uncovered a weak negative correlation between journal impact factor and the number of FOA principles fulfilled. Lastly, we found that Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Springer represented 48% of all journals, but 80% of the 25 journals with the highest impact factor. Our results show that conservation science journals largely fail to meet the FOA standards. Conservation researchers are likely to face obstacles such as limited access to published literature, high publishing charges, and lack of ownership of their research outputs.

Many governments and conservation organisations have argued that hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists are responsible, in considerable part, for environmental degradation and biodiversity losses in southern Africa. Particular attention has been paid to alleged wildlife losses, especially elephants in Botswana. This article considers some of the issues surrounding hunting bans and protected areas with a view to conserving elephants. In Botswana, local people were removed from protected areas after being blamed for declines in wildlife numbers. Utilising government and other scientific wildlife data, the hunting ban cannot be shown to have had any significant impact on the conservation of elephants and other game species. Local people argue that many of their activities are sustainable, maintaining that they are generally not responsible for biodiversity losses and environmental degradation. Population growth, the expansion of agricultural, livestock and mining activities, the construction of veterinary cordon fences and increases in water point distribution have led to localised environmental degradation. The 'great elephant debate' became an important political issue during the run-up to the Botswana elections of October 2019. Local communities sought to ensure that they would be able to obtain benefits from wildlife tourism which had been denied them during the hunting ban.

Based on their world view, indigenous and local communities may have their own concepts of conservation, which may be different from Western ideas of conservation. Here we report the results of a photovoice study with a Caiçara community in the Juatinga Ecological Reserve, a protected area in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest region. Participants were asked to take photos of their landscape/seascape to illustrate what they understand as conservation. Photos produced by the participants served as 'boundary objects' that helped to evoke feelings, ideas, and thoughts of people-nature relationships during individual interviews, and finally during a group discussion. The results helped to explore ways to frame a Caiçara concept of conservation and highlight the importance of developing place-based conservation projects and approaches meaningful for Caiçara people. Such initiatives can help in understanding Caiçara motivations for conservation, aid partnership-building, and promote knowledge co-production between community, government managers and other stakeholders.

This article argues on the basis of a comparative study in floodplain areas in Cameroon, Tanzania, and Zambia that land tenure issues have to be related to historical institutional changes not only to property rights in land, but also to land related common pool resources. It further outlines that in addition to privatisation of resources, pastoralists face challenges from the fragmentation of cultural landscape ecosystems, which serves to undermine local common property institutions and their reciprocal resource management arrangements that provided resilience in floodplain ecosystems. Colonisation and postcolonial constellations led to a major institutional change from common to state property in African rangelands, and created legal and institutional pluralism which enabled more powerful state and wealthy actors to shop for institutions that suit them best, especially privatisation and open access constellations (Haller 2010). The article argues that it is this institutional change that transformed the previous cultural landscape ecosystems, that conservationists and governments now want to protect by excluding pastoralists. It will analyse how governments and environmentalists increase their bargaining power in order to appropriate these landscapes in the form of land as commons and green grabbing. It will do so by combining a New Institutionalism and Political Ecology approach (NIPE) with Appadurai's notion of scapes (1996) in a way that unpacks power dynamics for legitimacy-based governmentalities that link global and local scales. The article unpacks the idea of ideoscapes and adds a four-step historical phases model to the concept. This illustrates the scapes pastoralists are in (state, neoliberal, neoliberal applied including investment and conservation, and terrorism and control scapes). These scapes provide legitimacy capital for powerful actors, shape platforms for strategic selection of institutions (institution shopping) and act as Anti-Politics Machines (APM).

While the economic and ecological benefits of private land conservation (PLC) programmes are well known, their contribution to socio-psychological well-being is less understood. Thus we applied the concept of basic psychological needs (BPN) from self-determination theory (SDT) to document these well-being impacts and understand the experience of landowners engaged in PLC programmes in Tasmania, Australia. We developed and administered an online survey (n = 193) that adapted items from SDT scales and used SDT as a framework to code data derived from semi-structured landowner interviews (n = 60). The interviews explored the ways in which participation in PLC supported the three basic needs of autonomy (the need to act according to personal values and desires), competence (the need for perceived efficacy), and relatedness (caring relationships and social belonging). PLC programmes supported autonomy by helping landowners align private land management decisions with deeply held environmental values. These programmes fostered competence and relatedness by developing trust and shared purpose amongst the people engaged in PLC, enabling personal and social learning, and enhancing life purpose and belonging. The scale and longevity of PLC programmes, and thus, the ecological and economic benefits flowing from them, may be increased through attending to, documenting and communicating the well-being benefits of participation.

Jamaica's Blue Mountains are heralded as one of the world's premier coffee growing regions. Previous ecological research in Jamaica has demonstrated that shade-grown coffee practices provide beneficial ecosystem services for farmers, yet most coffee farms in the Blue Mountains have very little shade. The socio-ecological factors that influence coffee cultivation choices in Jamaica have not been analysed. Using chains of explanation, the aim of this project was to unearth the political, economic and ecological drivers and constraints that inform and influence farmers' decisions for intercropping shade trees amongst their coffee plants. Semi-structured interviews were conducted on farm-sites in the three parishes of the Blue Mountains: Portland, St. Andrew, and St. Thomas. Results from this project reveal that the human-environment interactions of coffee producers are impacted by the interplay of on-farm, on-island, and global forces. This necessitates reframing the value of ecosystem services provided by shade trees into a cohesive argument that resonates with Jamaican coffee industry specialists and the specific regional socio-ecological needs of Blue Mountain coffee farmers. Priorities for change should include: encouraging communities to re-learn the benefits and applications of organic soil fertility and the values of shade trees while exposing farmers to marketing research and strategies for pursuing conservation of coffee niche markets.

Militarisation of conservation (sometimes known as 'green militarisation') is an issue of growing international interest. Rhino horn is immensely valuable (in 2013 its value exceeded that of gold or cocaine), and its illegal trade has attracted widespread attention. Conservationists have declared a 'war' on poaching, with extensive military resources deployed to combat it. This sometimes includes operations which are referred to, particularly in the media, as 'shoot-to-kill'. These can be tantamount to extra-judicial killings. We scrutinise this issue using 'Just War' principles, to explore whether the 'war' on poaching meets the criteria expected of armed conflict. Our perspective suggests that it fails both ethical and pragmatic examination. This piece encourages conservation scientists, and the public, to consider which actions are justified in protecting wildlife, and how we should rethink conservation policy to achieve ethical, successful outcomes for both people and wildlife.

To determine global trends in ecological restoration (ER) research, we conducted a geographically-explicit English-language literature review. We assessed a representative sample (n=603) of publications that use the ER concept (n=8,678). Only 19.2% (n=118) were explicit ER studies, and these were evaluated to determine geographic location, research framework, ER paradigm, journal disciplinary orientation, article type, disturbance factor studied, and ER-response measurements. The Global North produced 2x more studies than the South, and ecological research frameworks predominated overall. However, significantly more Southern studies operated under a postmodern paradigm (i.e., addressing ecosystem processes, functions and health) than in the North, where more studies sought to reconstitute pre-disturbance biotic assemblages (i.e., classical paradigm). Both regions published mostly in natural science journals, but significantly more in the North; in the South, there were significantly more publications in engineering journals. An incipient socio-ecological research framework was detected in the North (23.1%) and South (32.5%), but social science studies were only found in the North (11.5%). Plus, the North had significantly more conceptual publications. Opportunities exist in both regions to enhance a holistic ER perspective. Southern scientists and practitioners could pay attention to context-specific concepts and approaches. Understanding global and regional ER research trends can contribute to improving theoretical, practical and ethical outcomes.