By Martina Di Fonzo
About two weeks ago, a few of us from CEED’s early career leadership training programme had the good fortune of escaping the southern hemisphere winter to attend the 27th International Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB) in Montpellier, France.
In addition to presenting talks and posters on our own research, networking with old and new colleagues (while enjoying French food and wine!), we took the opportunity to catch up with one another on how our leadership plans were progressing and share our impressions on an ICCB symposium we had attended about “Building Conservation Leadership Capacity” (see table below) organised by Dr. Chris Sandbrook.
The first few presentations of the symposium described a range of specialised Masters in Conservation Leadership at the University of Cambridge (by Prof. Nigel Leader-Williams), the University of Wisconsin-Madison (by Dr. Janet Silbernagel), and Colorado State University (by Dr. Brett Bruyere). All three highlighted the importance of engaging in conservation practice during the Masters course through placement schemes, the need for strengthening project management skills within conservation science, and the importance of alumni networks in fostering new collaborations. Most of us had already heard of the speaker from Colorado State University, Brett Bruyere, through his recent article in Conservation Letters on “Giving direction and clarity to Conservation Leadership”, which, we found out, he wrote following a sabbatical year dedicated to learning about conservation leadership. What I found particularly interesting about his presentation were the results of a survey he conducted, which showed that “research skills” were consistently ranked at the bottom in terms of their relative importance within a conservation leadership programme, with “partnership building”, “setting a vision”, “conflict management”, “situation assessment”, and “strategic planning” being the top five required skills (see slides below). In short, conservation leaders don’t necessarily have to be experts in the science involved: they need to have a general understanding of what is going on, but their key skills must lie elsewhere in order to successfully drive a conservation project forward.
Marianne Carter, from the Cambridge-based NGO “Flora and Fauna International”, provided an introduction to the ‘Conservation Leadership Programme (CLP)’ organised by a partnership of three international NGOs: BirdLife International, Fauna and Flora International, and the Wildlife Conservation Society. This programme is focussed on identifying “sparky” conservation leaders from developing countries, and then training them to become better leaders who can implement conservation activities more successfully. I was pleased to hear that the programme mainly conducts its work through national training programmes and a peer-support network, taking into account the fact that most conservation practitioners are unable to take time out from their jobs and family lives, or can afford to spend a lengthy period abroad learning about conservation leadership. One of the principal aims of the ‘Conservation Leadership Programme’ is to encourage young conservationists to continue with their careers in conservation, in societies where it is mainly regarded as a secondary career choice.
One presentation which stood out from the rest was by Dr. Krithi Karanth, from the Wildlife Conservation Society, on the importance of citizen science in instigating conservation leadership. Her talk described how involving local people in tiger population monitoring has been instrumental to building public support for tiger conservation in India: 5000 citizen scientists were gathered over 30 years, of which ten percent became professional conservation biologists, with many others still engaged in conservation activities. Krithi concluded that “we need to move beyond just holding graduate programmes in conservation leadership”.
On the whole, I found it was a useful session, giving a broad overview of the key topics covered by courses on Conservation Leadership around the world (which we had also covered in our CEED training course), as well as providing new ideas on how conservation leadership can be fostered through NGO-based programmes and within the general public itself. I was particularly interested in the talks by Marianne Carter and Krithi Karanth, which gave some clear case-studies of conservation leadership skills in action. The main message that I took away from the session was that there is a growing recognition that conservation practitioners need extra training in leadership skills in order to make their conservation activities more effective. Being an expert conservation scientist is just not enough!
Here are some tweets about the symposium from fellow CEED early-career leader Megan Evans:
One presentation which stood out from the rest was by Dr. Krithi Karanth, from the Wildlife Conservation Society, on the importance of citizen science in instigating conservation leadership. Her talk described how involving local people in tiger population monitoring has been instrumental to building public support for tiger conservation in India: 5000 citizen scientists were gathered over 30 years, of which ten percent became professional conservation biologists, with many others still engaged in conservation activities. Krithi concluded that “we need to move beyond just holding graduate programmes in conservation leadership”.
On the whole, I found it was a useful session, giving a broad overview of the key topics covered by courses on Conservation Leadership around the world (which we had also covered in our CEED training course), as well as providing new ideas on how conservation leadership can be fostered through NGO-based programmes and within the general public itself. I was particularly interested in the talks by Marianne Carter and Krithi Karanth, which gave some clear case-studies of conservation leadership skills in action. The main message that I took away from the session was that there is a growing recognition that conservation practitioners need extra training in leadership skills in order to make their conservation activities more effective. Being an expert conservation scientist is just not enough!
Here are some tweets about the symposium from fellow CEED early-career leader Megan Evans: