Conflicts in wildlife conservation, including increasingly polarized human-wildlife conflicts, have become one of the most urgent and high-profile concerns in biodiversity conservation globally. Such conflicts, whether they are about wildlife, protected areas, or wider biodiversity conservation issues, are complex, dynamic situations shaped by ecological, behavioural, social, political, economic and cultural factors. At the heart of these often lie unresolved tensions and disputes emerging out of incompatible needs and interests of different groups of people. Some of these issues appear to be negotiable, while others are deep-rooted or highly polarised and impossible to resolve.
How can we make sense of these complexities and untangle the causes, triggers, stages, and cycles in conflicts? What are the key negotiation and conflict resolution skills that can help conservation professionals develop and participate in constructive ways forward ? Managing conflicts over wildlife and biodiversity and maintaining a sustainable level of coexistence requires a sound understanding of conflict dynamics and an ability to transfer these skills and insights into real world situations and practice.
Course Aims
This course focuses on the social dimensions of conflicts in biodiversity, i.e. on working with and resolving conflicts between people. It will equip participants with the fundamentals of negotiation skills and insights into conflict resolution methods for a range of situations, from minor disputes to deeply polarised and intractable conflicts.
In this course participants will learn the following:
- how to deconstruct and analyse complex conflict situations
- understand the actions and behaviours of actors involved
- become aware of patterns of escalation and how to prevent these.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, the participants will be able to:
- Understand underlying causes of a given conflict and know how to identify hidden and underlying drivers
- Identify the level of conflict carry out a situation analysis, knowing symptoms and appropriate response approaches for different contexts
- Be able to design and conduct issue and stakeholder mapping to identify the positions, interests and relationships of the parties involved
- Use key skills in negotiation to manage, de-escalate and address disputes and tensions
- Know when to use third party impartial support and understand how mediation and dialogue processes work
- Know how to engage with communities effectively to build rapport, create co-ownership and enable sustainable collaborations
- Understand how people’s attitudes, behaviour, beliefs, and values are formed and shape interactions between groups of people
- Know how to develop a coexistence strategy or theory of change for project planning and monitoring that includes addressing or preventing conflict
Venue details
The course will be held at the in the H B Allen Centre, the graduate centre of Keble College.
The H B Allen Centre is located within easy walking distance of the center of Oxford, and is only 300 metres north of the original college.