Aidan Keane

Gardenwood North, 1.9

Silwood Park,

Imperial College London,

ASCOT,

Berkshire, SL5 7PY.

My interests centre around how the design and implementation of conservation projects in the developing world can be improved, particularly those which aim to protect exploited species.

Current research

Currently I am working on a PhD at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College, studying the role of monitoring and enforcement in securing compliance with the rules of conservation projects by local stakeholders.

Many approaches to the management of exploited species have been tried (e.g. catch and effort quotas in fisheries, protected areas and sustainable use in terrestrial wildlife conservation). Despite their differences, all of these approaches require a set of rules to govern harvesting. The success of management depends both on the suitability of the rules themselves (i.e. do they adequately protect the species in question) and the degree to which people comply with their requirements.

My research aims to explore how monitoring and enforcement may be used optimally in conservation projects to generate incentives for compliance with rules. I will be working with a variety of modelling techniques, including individual-based simulation and stochastic dynamic programming, and validating them with field data collected from conservation projects in Africa. Specific questions that I hope to address include:

Which factors can influence individual decisions about whether or not to engage in acts of non-compliance?
Do trade-offs exist between monitoring for the purpose of enforcement and monitoring to collect ecological data?
How do behavioural strategies adopted in response to enforcement affect its success?
How important for project design are the difficulties inherent in assessing the true level of illegal activity and how may they be circumvented?
Despite the complexity of the problem can simple rules of thumb be developed to guide resource managers and conservationists in designing robust management regimes?

This research is funded by the ESRC and supervised by Dr E.J. Milner-Gulland and Dr Julia Jones.

Publications

Peer reviewed

McConville, A.J., Grachev, Iu.A., Keane, A., Coulson, T., Bekenov, A.B. & Milner-Gulland, E.J. (in press). Reconstructing the observation process to correct for changing detection probability of a critically endangered species. Endangered Species Research.

Keane, A., Jones, J.P.G., Edwards-Jones, G. & Milner-Gulland. E.J. (2008). The sleeping policeman: understanding issues of enforcement and compliance in conservation. Animal Conservation 11: 75-82.

Keane, A., Brooke, M. de L. & McGowan, P.J.K. (2005) Correlates of extinction risk and hunting pressure in gamebirds (Galliformes). Biological Conservation 126: 216-233.

Other publications

Keane, A. (2007). Wise or foolish virgins? The Economist, 26th July 2007

Keane, A. (2005). Progress towards the 2005–2009 Galliform Action Plans. Species 43: 8