Imperial College London

Silwood Park Campus

Ascot, SL5 7PY

I am currently the Imperial College researcher on Darwin project 18-015,  ‘Addressing the illegal trade in the critically endangered Ustyurt saiga’, with Fauna & Flora International, and part funded through the USAID SCAPES Ustyurt Landscape Conservation Initiative. With Prof. EJ Milner-Gulland, our research aims to identify the drivers of the illegal trade in saiga products in both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, in particular through the investigation of the differing roles and perspectives both of individual households using saiga products and of the wider communities within which they live. By following the flow of saiga products from harvesting through to purchase one can potentially detail the number and nature of actor groups involved and their connections to one another along the chain. This pattern-based approach can then be complemented by an investigation of the socio-economic status of the actors, and their perceptions of the drivers of, and solutions to, illegal trade in wildlife products.

Research Interests

I am particularly interested in the cultural and thus behavioural traditions underlying the attitudes of resource users to their environments, the way this environmental knowledge is disseminated and utilised, and how it is influenced by the dynamics of unpredictable change. Defining local perspectives is essential to the kind of practical, bottom-up approach needed for successful conservation interventions, where attempting to find equilibrium between fragile human and natural communities entails managing the conflicts that arise from increasing populations and deteriorating livelihoods. Before this position I worked mainly in Africa, including projects with ZSL in Gabon and FZS in Ethiopia.