Imperial College London
Division of Biology and
Centre for Environmental Policy
Silwood Park Campus
Ascot
SL5 7PY

e: henry.travers08 @ imperial.ac.uk
t: +44 (0)7813 687159

Research overview

The overall aim of my research is to investigate the effectiveness of forest conservation policy interventions in delivering behavioural change by small-scale resource users, in the context of local social institutions.

Current research

Very little research has been targeted towards understanding how to facilitate the establishment of effective conservation institutions which govern human interactions, particularly in the face of social and environmental change. This is especially important since many conservation interventions act by applying incentives to local people whose actions may threaten or promote biodiversity conservation, in the hope of changing their behaviour. Implementation of such approaches, however, requires decisions on whether to structure incentives so that they target beneficiaries individually or collectively, how to relate the incentives to existing social norms and how to account for the differences in incentives between different social groups. Current international policy developments are likely to provide substantial additional funding for forest conservation in the next few years, but this will only be effective in tackling the widespread issue of small-scale forest destruction by rural communities if the incentives for behavioural change at the individual level are correctly structured.

Experimental games and agent-based modelling are two approaches with the potential to offer insights into the complex inter-relationships between small-scale resource use, local institutions and forest protection policies. Combining the two, with the experimental games providing insights used in the development of agent-based models, is a potentially powerful tool for predicting how individual-level behaviour is modulated by community-level institutions to produce landscape-level change in forest cover. My PhD applies this approach to a case study site in Cambodia in order to predict patterns of deforestation at the landscape scale under a range of potential scenarios of conservation action and policy context.

Supervision and funding

This PhD is supervised by Professor E.J. Milner-Gulland (Imperial College London) and is jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

I will be forever indebted to Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones, who very sadly passed away earlier this year.

Brief CV

2009-10 REDD Technical Advisor, Wildlife Conservation Society, Cambodia & Laos.
2008-09 MSc Conservation Science, Imperial College London, UK. Levelling the playing field: investigating the effects of institutional controls on common pool resource extraction.
2008 Field Assistant, Alentejo Otter Project, Portugal.
2005-08 Structural Design Engineer, Adams Kara Taylor, UK
2004 & 2005 Internship, Shelter Centre, UK.
2002 Internship, Engineers Without Borders, India.
2001-05 MEng Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK.

Publications

Travers, H., Clements, T., Keane, A., Milner-Gulland, E.J. (2011) Incentives for cooperation: The effects of institutional controls on common pool resource extraction in Cambodia. Ecological Economics, 71, 151-161.