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Department of Geography College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Research

“When people feel that conservation is something done by them and not to them, they are empowered.”1

Research Statement

My research examines how communities build, govern, and change institutions for managing wildlife and other natural resources. Working across human-environment geography, conservation social science, and institutional economics, I am especially interested in the decentralization of environmental governance: when states transfer authority to local resource users, what determines whether those reforms produce meaningful local control, and with what consequences for conservation, livelihoods, and environmental justice?

I study these questions primarily through community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) in Southern and Eastern Africa. CBNRM emerged partly in response to the ecological failures and social injustices of exclusionary conservation, with the promise that rural communities would gain greater authority, responsibility, and benefits from wildlife and other natural resources. Yet these programs have produced uneven results. My dissertation, Institutions, Authority, and Governance: Understanding the Performance of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Southern Africa, examines this problem as a process of institutional development. I argue that many of CBNRM’s persistent shortcomings are rooted in what Marshall Murphree termed “aborted devolution,” which is decentralization that transfers responsibilities to communities without sufficiently transferring the rights and authority necessary for meaningful self-governance.

I approach this problem by measuring the gap between representation and proprietorship across 20 CBNRM programs in five countries. We find that CBNRM has often created broadly representative organizations, taken important steps toward incorporating historically marginalized groups into formal governance, and above all, maintained substantial public attachment to wildlife and biodiversity goals. At the same time, they have been largely unsuccessful in converting representation into authority and proprietorship, operationalized as the exercise of consequential management rights, informed participation in resource allocation, and equitable distribution of benefits to user communities.

A second strand of my research examines participation and inclusivity within community governance institutions once they are established. Using household surveys, institutional data, and spatial analysis from communal conservancies in Namibia, I study why some people participate more actively in conservation governance than others and why ostensibly similar communities develop very different institutional dynamics. This work emphasizes the importance of social trust, associational life, perceptions of fairness, local institutional histories, and spatial inequalities in access to decision-making. It also examines how these dynamics differ across social groups, particularly women. Together, these findings suggest that inclusive governance depends not only on creating opportunities to participate, but on the social and institutional conditions that facilitate genuine decision-making authority for community members.

Related comparative work asks how the scale and structure of governance shape these outcomes. With collaborators, I examine variation among community conservation organizations across Southern Africa, including the distinction between smaller, single-village organizations based on face-to-face decision-making and larger, multi-village organizations governed primarily through representative committees. Our research finds that respondents in single-village organizations report greater satisfaction and are more likely to possess robust participatory rights, reinforcing longstanding arguments by Elinor Ostrom and Marshall Murphree about the importance of scale, social capital, local deliberation, and aligning authority with resource users.

My current research increasingly turns from diagnosing institutional shortcomings to studying pathways of institutional change. Through collaborative research with the LifeThroughWildlife Lab and partners in Africa, I am examining reforms such as participatory budgeting, village-level decision-making, community monitoring, and other efforts to deepen devolution. This work treats institutional reform at “anchor sites” as an opportunity to study how changes in rights, participation, and organizational design affect governance, livelihoods, attitudes toward wildlife, and ecological outcomes. Ultimately, beyond determining why community conservation institutions succeed or fail, I am interested in understanding how Indigenous peoples and local communities can deliberately build more effective, inclusive, and locally accountable systems of natural resource governance.

At my core, I am a environmental social scientist. All of my research is interdisciplinary, incorporating human-environment interactions, social-ecological systems, political ecology, critical environmental justice, and natural resource economics. My methodological approach is similarly varied, making use of spatial statistics, GIS analysis, survey data, focus groups, and interviews, often conducted as community-based participatory research.

Research Themes

community & participatory governance; decentralization & devolution; institutional development; local authority & common-pool resources; collective action; environmental justice

Publications

Child, B., King, A.R., Chidakel, A., & Shimansky, T. (2027). What is CBNRM and has it been tried? Past, present, and future in Africa. In M. Bollig, R.D. Kiaka, R.V. Nghitevelekwa, E. Rothfuss, & C. Samimi (Eds.), Community-based natural resource management in Southern and Eastern Africa: Past, present, and futures. James Currey. (PDF available upon request)

King, A. R. (2013). [Review of the book Nigeria: After the Nightmare, by I. Hagher]. African Studies Quarterly 13(4), 109-110. (PDF)

Current Research

Shimansky, T., King, A.R., Merz, L., Muyengwa, S., & Child, B. The effects of governance structure and scale on community conservation in Southern Africa. Manuscript in preparation. (PDF available upon request)

This study examines the impact of governance structure and scale on the effectiveness of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) in Southern Africa. Drawing on survey data from 857 respondents in 15 CBNRM communities across Botswana, Namibia, and Zambia, we find that single-village organizations—characterized by inclusive, face-to-face governance—yield significantly higher satisfaction levels compared to multi-village organizations. Logistic regression results indicate that the enjoyment of robust participatory rights, such as the ability to demand meetings or influence financial decisions, is positively associated with program satisfaction. Furthermore, individuals in single-village organizations are more likely to possess these robust rights. These findings highlight the governance advantages of smaller-scale, single-community CBNRM structures, suggesting that aligning management units with social and ecological contexts enhances both governance outcomes and local participation. This study re-affirms key, yet overlooked, insights from commons scholars such as Ostrom and Murphree. For practitioners and policymakers, we demonstrate the need for robust devolution and prioritization of design principles focused on microgovernance and local deliberative institutions.

King, A.R. Drivers of communal conservancy governance participation Namibia. Manuscript in preparation. (PDF available upon request)

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) depends on meaningful community participation in governance, yet participation often varies sharply within and among conservancies. This chapter examines the correlates of governance participation across six communal conservancies in Namibia’s Kunene and Zambezi regions using original geocoded household survey data. I develop a Participatory Governance Index (PGI) that captures three observable forms of engagement: attendance at annual general meetings, participation in leadership selection, and reported involvement in community decision-making. I then analyze variation in PGI using descriptive statistics, hierarchical OLS models, a multilevel model with conservancy random intercepts, and exploratory spatial analysis. The results show that participation is associated primarily with the institutional and social conditions that make devolution meaningful in practice. Information access is the strongest and most consistent predictor of participation, followed by associational membership and the exercise of robust proprietorship rights. By contrast, most livelihoods and benefit variables contribute little explanatory leverage, suggesting that governance participation is driven less by transactional incentives than by institutional access, social embeddedness, and the meaningful possession of proprietorship rights. Participation also varies substantially across conservancies, indicating that important dimensions of governance are shaped by distinct local social and institutional contexts. Spatial analysis further reveals clustered patterns of participation, especially in Kunene, and a significant gender-by-distance interaction indicating that remoteness is associated with sharper declines in women’s participation. Although participation exhibits spatial autocorrelation, the substantive findings are stable across OLS, multilevel, and spatial lag models. This study reinforces that participation is both an outcome of institutional development and an indicator of whether devolved conservancy governance has become socially operative at the household level.

Child, B., Chidakel, A., & King, A.R. Can foraging societies compete in a modern economy? An economic and institutional analysis of land use in Sankuyo community, Botswana. Manuscript in preparation.

This paper explores the economic and institutional dynamics of a forager community in Botswana, focusing on how land use in the Sankuyo community intersects with farming, hunting, and tourism under a devolved governance model. Using detailed analyses of household surveys and community financial data, we evaluate the impacts of government policies and power differentials on the economic performance of Sankuyo’s wildlife-based economy. Our findings reveal that while devolved rights over wildlife have allowed for substantial community benefits through hunting and tourism, institutional constraints, particularly centralized quota setting and weak tourism contracting, significantly undermine the community’s income potential. These results underscore the critical role that well-structured institutions play in enabling foraging societies to compete in modern economies, highlighting the need for more comprehensive devolution of economic rights to local communities to support sustainable livelihoods and conservation outcomes.

Field Research Experience

My field research is grounded in long-term collaboration with community conservation organizations, local researchers, and practitioners. I use household surveys, focus groups, and interviews to study community governance of conservation and resource management. Since 2023, I have conducted this work across communal conservancies in Namibia and through comparative projects elsewhere in Southern and Eastern Africa.

In keeping with the standard practices of our lab group, we use participatory research methods when feasible and other community-engaged approaches, including role playing scenarios (e.g., based on participatory budgeting exercises). We also insist that our data ultimately belongs to the people and communities with whom we work through a process akin to participatory rural appraisal. We present all data and findings back to community members to (1) validate and interpret findings and (2) generate information that communities can use in decision-making and adaptive management.

  • Surveys and capacity building in Zambezi Region, Namibia (February 2024)
    • Kwandu, Mashi, and Wuparo conservancies
  • Surveys and focus group in Kunene Region, Namibia (June – August 2023)
    • Ehi-Rovipuka, ≠Khoadi-//Hôas, and Doro !nawas conservancies
  • Surveys and health services needs assessment in Cross River State, Nigeria (June – August 2008)
  1. Scanlon, L.J. and Kull C.A. (2009). Untangling the links between wildlife benefits and community-based conservation at Torra Conservancy, Namibia, Development Southern Africa 26(1), 75-93. ↩︎