Daniel Brockington

Daniel Brockington

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Social & Behavioural Sciences

I completed my PhD at UCL with Kathy Homewood in 1998, a post doc with Bill Adams at Cambridge and then a short lectureship at Oxford, before moving to Manchester (the Global Development Institute) in 2005. I was awarded a personal chair there in 2012. In 2015 I moved to the University of Sheffield as Director of the Sheffield Institute of International Development (now IGSD). I joined ICTA at UAB 2022.

I much enjoy anthropological research which involves living with rural communities for one to two years. I´ve been fortunate to undertake three such periods in Tanzania in the course of my career. I also enjoy writing children´s books. I am a member of the Tanzanian Writers´ Forum and am completing a trilogy for upper middle grade readers that will be published in 2023 by African Professional Education Network, in Dar es Salaam. I love walking and cycling and checking the wind conditions to see if the conditions are right for kite-surfing.

 

Research interests

My research covers many aspects of conservation social science, rural resource management and livelihood change. I have published on the social impacts of conservation, capitalism and conservation, media and celebrity and large-N studies of NGO sectors. As well as working in Tanzania, I have also conducted research in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India. I have published around 200 papers and chapters. My books include Fortress Conservation, Celebrity Advocacy and International Development, Celebrity and the Environment, Nature Unbound (with Rosaleen Duffy and Jim Igoe), The Anthropology of Conservation NGOs (with Peter Billie Larson), Prosperity in Rural Africa? (with Christine Noe) Prosperity in Rural Africa? and Contested Sustainability (with Stefano Ponte and Christine Noe) Contested Sustainability. In pursuit of this work have held 2 personal fellowships from the ESRC and was awarded an Advanced ERC in 2022 for work on Conservation Data Justice.

 

 

Selected publications

- Sandbrook C, Albury-Smith S, Allan JR, et al. 2023, 'Social considerations are crucial to success in implementing the 30x30 global conservation target', Nature Ecology & Evolution, 7, 6, 784-785.
- Zhang, Y et al., 2023 'Governance and Conservation Effectiveness in Protected Areas and Indigenous and Locally Managed Areas', Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 48 - 559 - 588.

- Li Q, Huang J, Zhang Y, et al. 2023, 'Spatial variation of perceived equity and its determinants in a gateway community of Giant Panda National Park, China', Frontiers In Ecology And Evolution, 11, 1129556.

- Adams VM, Chauvenet ALM, Stoudmann N, Gurney GG,
Brockington D, Kuempel CD 2023, 'Multiple-use protected areas are critical to equitable and effective conservation', One Earth, 6, 9, 1173 - 1189.

Selected research activities

2023 has been about settling into Spain, Barcelona, UAB and ICTA personally and professionally. This has meant building a new research team focussed on Conservation Data Justice. I am currently supervising five PhDs at ICTA, and mentoring four post-docs, with one more soon to join.
The major writing activity consisted of two international collaborations. One, in Nature Ecology & Evolution laid out a research agenda for understanding the impacts of the '30 by 30' agenda (ensuring the conservation of 30% of the planet's lands and seas by 2030). The second, in Annual Review of Environment and Resources with over 50 authors, examined the relative performance of state-protection compared to community-conservation. This proved, in fact, a difficult topic to examine because of the want of commensurate data, and because of the different reasons for which diverse interest groups wish to conserve anywhere in the first place.