Emily Woodhouse

• Lecturer at University College London

Representations of Green Tibetans connected to Buddhism and indigenous wisdom have been deployed by a variety of actors and persist in popular consciousness. Through interviews, participatory mapping and observation, we explored how these ideas relate to people’s notions about the natural environment in a rural community on the Eastern Tibetan plat...

Measures of socio-economic impacts of conservation interventions have largely been restricted to externally defined indicators focused on income, which do not reflect people's priorities. Using a holistic, locally grounded conceptualization of human well-being instead provides a way to understand the multi-faceted impacts of conservation on aspects...

The Simanjiro plains, east of Tarangire National Park in Northern Tanzania are a key dispersal area for wildlife, and are of vital importance to Maasai pastoral livelihoods, which are rapidly diversifying. Diversification is coupled with fragmentation of the rangelands as agriculture expands and multiple actors compete for land. These changes refle...

Attempts to link human development and biodiversity conservation goals remain a constant feature of policy and practice related to protected areas (PAs). Underlying these approaches are narratives that simplify assumptions, shaping how interventions are designed and implemented. We examine evidence for five key narratives: 1) conservation is pro-po...

Recognition of the value of multidisciplinary research that bridges natural and social science perspectives has come with calls for conservation scientists to reflect critically on underlying assumptions and power relations involved in the production of knowledge and its application. We propose that improving transparency in conservation social sci...

Despite the extensive scholarship on women's empowerment and gender equality in the Global South, few studies have examined how changing livelihoods create new challenges and opportunities for women seeking access to intra-household decision-making. Here we examine pastoralist Maasai women's access to a range of household-level decisions that span...

Globally, land and seascapes across the bioculturally diverse tropics are in transition. Impacted by the demands of distant consumers, the processes of global environmental change and numerous interventions seeking climate, conservation and development goals, these transitions have the potential to impact the relationships and plurality of values h...

Attempts to link human development and biodiversity conservation goals remain a constant feature of policy and practice related to protected areas (PAs). Underlying these approaches are narratives that simplify assumptions, shaping how interventions are designed and implemented. We examine evidence for five key narratives: 1) conservation is pro-po...

A multi-dimensional, locally grounded conceptualisation of human wellbeing provides a way to understand the complexity of people’s lives, incentives and aspirations with the potential to inform socially just conservation interventions that have local legitimacy. Based on semi-structured group interviews and a survey at the household level, we discu...

The IPBES Scoping document for the values assessment highlights the need to assess the types of values of nature that have (or have not) been incorporated into decision-making, the types of valuation approaches incorporated into decision-making, the challenges that have hindered the incorporation of diverse conceptualizations of values of nature in...

Mobile phones are recognized as important new tools for rural development in the Global South, but few studies have examined how phones can shape social networks. This study documents a new type of social tie, enabled by mobile phones, that to our knowledge has not previously been discussed in academic literature. In 2018, we discovered that Maasai...

Book details Tan, G.G. Pastures of Change: Contemporary Adaptations and Transformations among Nomadic Pastoralists of Eastern Tibet Cham: Springer; 2018. 200 pages 978-3-319-76552-5

Mobile phones have been heralded by many as promising new tools to empower women throughout the Global South. However, some have asserted that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) may serve to amplify disparities between more powerful and less powerful people. Few studies have examined which women stand to benefit and under what co...

Conservation practice has sometimes been criticized for relying on simplistic assumptions about social contexts in natural resource management. Despite recent advances conceptualizing the interface between human well-being and the environment, very few studies moving from theory to practice exist. We address this gap by providing one of the first c...

Protected area objectives commonly emphasise pro-poor and equitable management with participation by local communities. However, win-wins for conservation and development are elusive and the social impacts remain contentious. Protected areas have positive and negative impacts on multiple components of wellbeing by changing the availability of and a...

Protected areas often aim to improve the wellbeing of local people as well as achieve ecological goals. To date, they have often failed to do so. Can rethinking the widespread assumptions underlying protected areas support more equitable conservation?

Making decisions about the management and conservation of nature is necessarily complex, with many competing pressures on natural systems, opportunities and benefits for different groups of people and a varying, uncertain social and ecological environment. An approach which is narrowly focused on either human development or environmental protection...

Conservationists are increasingly seeing the importance of carrying out social impact evaluation to ensure accountability and to learn what works for both biodiversity and human wellbeing. A single toolkit or blueprint method cannot fit the diversity of intervention types and evaluation questions, and conservationists are faced with an array of dec...

Conservationists are increasingly seeing the importance of carrying out social impact evaluation to ensure accountability and to learn what works for both biodiversity and human wellbeing. A single toolkit or blueprint method cannot fit the diversity of intervention types and evaluation questions, and conservationists are faced with an array of dec...

Background Global policy initiatives and international conservation organizations have sought to emphasize and strengthen the link between the conservation of natural ecosystems and human development. While many indices have been developed to measure various social outcomes to conservation interventions, the quantity and strength of evidence to sup...

Protected areas are a key strategy in conserving biodiversity, and there is a pressing need to evaluate their social impacts. Though the social impacts of development interventions are widely assessed, the conservation literature is limited and methodological guidance is lacking. Using a systematic literature search, which found 95 relevant studies...

The Sloping Land Conversion Programme (SLCP or 'Grain for Green') forms one part in a suite of programmes focused on 'ecological construction' in minority areas of Western China. It aims to increase vegetation and reduce poverty by providing payments to households for retiring agricultural and grazing land to plant trees and grass. This paper exami...

Provisioning ecosystem services include wild products that form an integral part of rural economies. Using quantitative and qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 50 households in a Tibetan community in Western Sichuan, China, we explored the relationships of households with three diverse provisioning services on the Eastern Tibetan...