Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Painting a Brighter Picture and Identifying the Real Problem

Conservation Biology 21(4): 903-904. Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Painting a Brighter Picture and Identifying the Real Problem Monique Borgerhoff Mulder Department of Anthropology UC Davis CA 95616, USA Chan et al (2007) summarize well the issues entailed in combining conservation and development, whether this is finessed through packaging biodiversity as an ecosystem service or promoting community-driven initiatives. They touch sensitively on all the salient pitfalls, and highlight opportunities for optimism. So it is with a certain anticipation that the reader turns to their recommendations: collaboration of conservation biologists with social scientists (McNeely 1995), recognition of the distinct scales (both spatial and temporal) at which the costs and benefits of conservation strategies impact people and nature (Wells 1992), and appreciation of the fact that different conservation dilemmas will require unique solutions (Robinson and Redford 2004). The authors are right to re-emphasize old (and good) ideas. Surely, however, we can go beyond exhorting conservation biologists to “make earnest efforts to understand the concerns of people and institutions relevant to areas of conservation significance”, and to “work with social scientists”? Chan et al. appreciate that such collaboration is already advanced with economists, but suggest that with social historians, human geographers, cultural anthropologists and others it has been limited, reflecting (they suspect) “divergent philosophies and research styles”. The picture is in fact far brighter (Borgerhoff Mulder and Coppolillo 2005). Social scientists conduct analyses at individual, community and (inter)national levels, and many employ concepts and terminology familiar to population biologists and evolutionary ecologists. Indeed across the disciplines you can find studies that answer