Johan A Oldekop

The University of Manchester · The Global Development Institute

Protected areas (PAs) are a key strategy for protecting biological resources, but they vary considerably in their effectiveness, and are frequently reported as having negative impacts on local people. This has contributed to a divisive and unresolved debate concerning the compatibility of environmental and socioeconomic development goals. Elucidati...

Since the 1980’s, decentralized forest management has been promoted as a way to enhance sustainable forest use and reduce rural poverty. Rural communities manage increasing amounts of the world’s forests, yet rigorous evidence using large-N data on whether community-based forest management (CFM) can jointly reduce both deforestation and poverty rem...

Significance Meeting SDGs requires assessing trade-offs and synergies across divergent goals and robust policy impact evaluation. Using quasi-experimental inference methods, we assess impacts of Brazil’s Zero Hunger (ZH) social protection programs. ZH investment increased per capita calorie and protein productions. Social impacts (multidimensional...

Forest restoration occupies centre stage in global conversations about carbon removal and biodiversity conservation, but recent research rarely acknowledges social dimensions or environmental justice implications related to its implementation. We find that 294.5 million people live on tropical forest restoration opportunity land in the Global South...

Community forest management (CFM) has been promoted for decades as a way to merge environmental conservation with economic development and natural resource rights agendas. Yet many of these initiatives have also led to substantial socioeconomic and environmental trade-offs. We present a comprehensive global analysis of environmental, income and nat...

Food security policies often overlook the potential of trees to provide micronutrient-rich foods. Here, through causal mediation analysis, we show the positive effect of tree cover on micronutrient adequacy, explained by people sourcing food from on-farm trees. Detailed survey data (n = 460 households with repeated surveys) from Malawi were linked...

Protected area (PA) assessments rarely evaluate socio-economic and environmental impacts relative to competing land uses, limiting understanding of socio-environmental trade-offs from efforts to protect 30% of the globe by 2030. Here we assess deforestation and poverty outcomes (fiscal income, income inequality, sanitation and literacy) between 200...

Increased conservation action to protect more habitat and species is fueling a vigorous debate about the relative effectiveness of different sorts of protected areas. Here we review the literature that compares the effectiveness of protected areas managed by states and areas managed by Indigenous peoples and/or local communities. We argue that thes...

Secure rights and tenure are considered essential components for socially just forest landscape restoration (FLR). Through a content analysis of India's forest policies, we identify enabling factors and challenges for rights based FLR. We discuss the practical implications of these enabling factors and barriers for FLR in India using evidence from...

We fully endorse Rasolofoson’s (2022) main point in his comment on our essay “Statistical matching for conservation science” (Schleicher et al., 2020): scientists and practitioners using observational data for conservation impact evaluation need to pay careful attention to the process by which some units came to be exposed to the intervention and o...

Increases in data availability coupled with enhanced computational capacities are revolutionizing conservation. But in the excitement over the opportunities afforded by new data, there has been less discussion of the justice implications of data used in conservation, that is, how people and environments are represented through data, the conservatio...

Privately protected areas (PPAs) are increasing in number and extent. Yet, we know little about their contribution to conservation and how this compares to other forms of protected area (PA). We address this gap by assessing the contribution of 17,561 PPAs to the coverage, complementarity and connectivity of existing PA networks in 15 countries acr...

This research looks at the contributions of privately protected areas to the global protected network.

Forest and tree-based landscapes represent complex social-ecological systems. In tropical and subtropical regions, these landscapes are home to hundreds of millions of resource-poor people. Gaining a better understanding of how contextual factors influence forest-poverty dynamics is essential for the design, targeting and implementation of effectiv...

Major advances have been made over the past two decades in our understanding of the contribution forests and trees outside forests make to human well-being across the globe. Yet this knowledge has not always been incorporated into broader poverty and development policy agendas. The result is a missed opportunity to effectively and sustainably reach...

Community forests (CFs) aim to improve human wellbeing and conservation effectiveness, though their performance remains contested. A recent innovation in protected area (PA) governance is to combine CFs with forest certification. We assess (1) the impact of certified CFs on wellbeing and conservation effectiveness ; (2) gender inequality and elite...

Forests and trees provide a range of goods and services vital for human well-being, particularly for people who live below the poverty line. Yet a number of important knowledge gaps remain regarding the relationship between forests, trees, and poverty dynamics. Here, we highlight five research priorities that require urgent attention if policy make...

Government administered protected areas (PAs) have dominated conservation strategies, discourse, and research, yet private actors are increasingly managing land for conservation. Little is known about the social and environmental outcomes of these privately protected areas (PPAs). We searched the global literature in English on PPAs and their envir...

Despite ongoing debates about the viability of sustaining economic growth while maintaining environmental integrity, international sustainability agendas increasingly propose reconciling socio-economic development and global environmental goals. Achieving these goals is impeded by limited funding and a lack of information on where financial flows t...

Forests have re-taken centre stage in global conversations about sustainability, climate and biodiversity. Here, we use a horizon scanning approach to identify five large-scale trends that are likely to have substantial medium- and long-term effects on forests and forest livelihoods: forest megadisturbances; changing rural demographics; the rise of...

Forests and tree-based systems represent complex social-ecological systems. Gaining a better understanding of how contextual factors influence forest-poverty dynamics is essential for the design, targeting and implementation of policy instruments and interventions to alleviate poverty. In this chapter we explore key social, economic, political and...

Forest landscapes are complex socio-environmental systems. The degree to which forests support human livelihoods, and humans affect forest ecology, depends in part on the spatial relationship between people and forests. Here, we estimate the number of people who live in and around forests globally. We combined forest cover and human population dens...

COVID-19 accentuates the case for a global, rather than an international, development paradigm. The novel disease is a prime example of a development challenge for all countries, through the failure of public health as a global public good. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the falsity of any assumption that the global North has all the experti...

The awareness of the need for robust impact evaluations in conservation is growing and statistical matching techniques are increasingly being used to assess the impacts of conservation interventions. Used appropriately matching approaches are powerful tools, but they also pose potential pitfalls. We outlined important considerations and best practi...

Halting and reversing global forest loss is a key priority for sustainable development pathways. Multiple countries in the Global South have recently transitioned from net forest loss to net forest gain. Understanding and explaining reforestation patterns is necessary to better understand land cover dynamics and create more effective sustainability...

Protected areas (PAs) are key for biodiversity conservation, but there are concerns that they can exacerbate poverty or unequal access to potential benefits, such as those aris- ing from tourism. We assess how Nepalese PAs influence poverty, extreme poverty, and inequality using a multidimensional poverty index, and a quasi-experimental design that...

The scope and current investment for forest landscape restoration (FLR) is great, as are the demands put upon it for improving livelihoods and well-being. International leaders have pledged 350 Mha for FLR as part of international sustainability agendas. FLR is implemented primarily through incentives and institutions, with an emphasis on the role...

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) initiatives aim to link socioeconomic development with sustainable natural resource use and the conservation of biodiversity of natural resources. CBNRM relies on the concept that rights, responsibilities, and authority for natural resource management decisions should rest with local communities;...

Renewable resources have the potential to be used sustainably but typically are not, often due to the existence of exploiters or free riders. This chapter analyzes free-riding behavior using the prisoner’s dilemma-based public goods model and the producer–scrounger model. Overuse of renewable resources is examined under four investor–exploiter scen...

Agricultural systems, with their links to human wellbeing, have been at the heart of sustainability debates for decades. But there is only limited agreement among scientists and stakeholders about the indicators needed to measure the sustainability of agricultural commodity production. We analyze the metrics and indicators of sustainability used in...

Conservation and development practitioners increasingly promote community forestry as a way to conserve ecosystem services, consolidate resource rights, and reduce poverty. However, outcomes of community forestry have been mixed, with many initiatives failing to achieve intended objectives. There is a rich literature on community forestry instituti...

Understanding the relationships and tradeoffs among management outcomes in forest commons has assumed new weight in the context of parallels between the objectives of community forest management and those of reduced emissions for deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) programs to reduce carbon emissions while supporting local livelihoods. We...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) herald a new phase for international development. This article presents the results of a consultative exercise to collaboratively identify 100 research questions of critical importance for the post-2015 international development agenda. The final shortlist is grouped into nine thematic areas and was selected...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) herald a new phase for international development. This article presents the results of a consultative exercise to collaboratively identify 100 research questions of critical importance for the post-2015 international development agenda. The final shortlist is grouped into nine thematic areas and was selected...

Conservation and development practitioners increasingly promote community forestry as a way to conserve ecosystem services, consolidate resource rights, and reduce poverty. However, outcomes of community forestry have been mixed; many initiatives failed to achieve intended objectives. There is a rich literature on institutional arrangements of comm...

Executive summary in Portuguese-BR of the paper "Linking Brazil’s food security policies to agricultural change". Intended audiences were policy makers and farmers.

On the 25 – 27 September 2015, the Post-2015 Development Agenda will be launched at a meeting of the United Nations (UN) Summit in New York. The outcome of this process will be to define the future global development framework that will succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In this crucial phase for the for the global development agenda,...

With a new development framework under way and an increasingly urgent need to address political, socioeconomic and environmental issues on a global scale, this is a critical moment for the international development agenda. Almost 15 years after the Millennium Declaration, a new phase for international development is about to begin and, with it, com...

Poverty, food security, and sustainability are intimately intertwined, driving conflict and synergy between environmental and societal concerns. Brazil's flagship food security policies were implemented over a decade ago to address these issues simultaneously. Global institutions have pledged over 2 million US$ to develop similar programs in sub-Sa...

Community-managed forests can secure greater sustainability of forests and more equitable livelihood outcomes for stakeholders than centralized forest management. However, there remains an inadequate understanding of whether environmental and socioeconomic outcomes are synergistic or trade-offs, and how they vary in relation to biophysical, institu...

Habitat fragmentation studies have produced complex results that are challenging to synthesize. Inconsistencies among studies may result from variation in the choice of landscape metrics and response variables, which is often compounded by a lack of key statistical or methodological information. Collating primary datasets on biodiversity responses...

Host-parasite interactions are a key paradigm for understanding the process of coevolution. Central to coevolution is how genetic variation in interacting species allows parasites to evolve manipulative strategies. However, genetic variation in the parasite may also be associated with host phenotype changes, thereby changing the selection on both s...

We compare conservation outcomes between a protected area (PA) and four indigenous common-property regimes (CPRs) under differing degrees of mar-ket integration in the Ecuadorian Amazon. We first assess how market forces and common-pool resource institutions governing processes of forest conver-sion affect biodiversity and forest cover, and whether...

Community-based monitoring schemes provide alternatives to costly scientific monitoring projects. While evidence shows that local community inhabitants can consistently measure environmental changes, few studies have examined how learned monitoring skills get passed on within communities. Here, we trained members of indigenous Kichwa communities in...

Indicator taxa are commonly used to identify priority areas for conservation or to measure biological responses to environmental change. Despite their widespread use, there is no general consensus about the ability of indicator taxa to predict wider trends in biodiversity. Many studies have focused on large-scale patterns of species co-occurrence t...

Species saturation curves for A) epiphytic ferns, B) leaf litter frogs and C) dung beetles. Open circles represent individual data points. Black lines represent quadratic polynomial lines of best fit. Shaded areas represent 95% confidence intervals. (TIF)

Much of the literature on common-pool resources has focused on elucidating the social mechanisms and local institutions that lead to the regulation of common-pool resources. There is much less information about how man-agement regimes translate into environmental impacts or how environmental impacts influence the emergence of management decisions....

Assessing environmental change is often constrained by time, money and expertise. Community-based monitoring schemes attempt to address these limitations by providing local communities with the skills to measure changes in natural resources and contribute locally relevant information for local and regional management decisions. Despite the increasi...

The lack of concrete instances in which conservation and development have been successfully merged has strengthened arguments for strict exclusionist conservation policies. Research has focused more on social cooperation and conflict of different management regimes and less on how these factors actually affect the natural environments they seek to...

In species where parents may commit infanticide, temporal kin recognition can help ensure parents kill unrelated young but care for their own offspring. This is not true recognition, but rather depends on accurate timing of the arrival of young and a behavioural switch from killing to caring for offspring. Mistakes have clear fitness consequences;...

Peer assessment provides a useful mechanism to develop many positive qualities in students studying in higher education (HE). Potential influences on peer‐awarded marks include student qualities such as gender, HE background (e.g. university affiliation) and participation in the development of the assessment criteria. Many studies that have investi...