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Human–wildlife conflict (HWC) presents a growing challenge to conservation and development worldwide. World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and experts on human–wildlife coexistence strategies have responded to this challenge by developing a holistic, globally applicable approach to HWC management that can be tailored to specific local, regional, or national contexts. Its framework addresses the complexity of essential HWC management and long‐term coexistence strategies and is implemented in a structured yet contextualized step‐by‐step sequence by a team of facilitators and multiple stakeholders. The C2C: Conflict to Coexistence Approach centers on four principles (tolerance is maintained, responsibility is shared, resilience is built, holism is fundamental), four outcomes (wildlife thrives alongside human presence, habitat sufficient to maintain viable wildlife populations, people able and willing to live alongside wildlife, livelihoods/assets secured against presence of wildlife), and six HWC management elements (policy and governance, understanding interactions, prevention, response, mitigation, monitoring) that are to be implemented in an integrated way. It is currently undergoing testing in diverse pilot sites across three continents and demonstrating positive initial results. Here, we share the framework and methodology of the approach and initial results and experiences from these pilot sites. We introduce the C2C:Conflict to Coexistence Approach, with its holistic and integrated framework and globally applicable methodology for the management of human–wildlife conflict (HWC) that can be tailored to specific local, regional, or national contexts. Its framework addresses the complexity of essential HWC management and long‐term coexistence strategies and is implemented in a structured yet contextualized step‐by‐step sequence by a team of process facilitators involving multiple stakeholders. The video summary is uploaded to our website on human‐wildlife conflict, which can be found here: Human Wildlife Conflict

Capacity building has become the centerpiece of recent attempts to strengthen regional biodiversity conservation. Many conservation organizations aim to increase this capacity by training local conservation professionals. While many practitioners will agree that these trainings presumably have a psychological effect on their participants that may benefit long-term local action toward conservation goals, there also seems to be a resignation that these effects are difficult if not impossible to measure and target, especially within diverse cultures. The common result is a perfunctory evaluation of observable behaviors or basic knowledge, which may be easy to count but undoubtedly fails to represent the nuance of complex psychological variables associated with long-term capacity to conserve biodiversity. My dissertation is fundamentally aimed at investigating capacity for biodiversity conservation at this psychological level. Specifically, I explored the current understanding of capacity for biodiversity conservation and how this understanding can be supplemented by psychological theory to strengthen the development, evaluation, and prediction of this capacity over time. I did this within the context of case studies that focus on three separate populations of conservation professionals who participated in capacity building trainings in Africa and North America between 1994 and 2014. I administered surveys to these conservation professionals to create and validate an instrument that measures the construct I call psychological capacity for biodiversity conservation (PCBC). PCBC includes psychological dimensions such as meaningful ownership, effective autonomy, being needed, group effectiveness, and understanding. I administered the PCBC survey instrument to training alumni and conducted interviews with their trainers to the evaluate the effectiveness of the capacity building methods at increasing PCBC directly after and two to ten years after a training. I found that meaningful ownership, effective autonomy, and being needed predicted 34% of the variance in long-term capacity behavior in conservation professionals after training. I recommend specific training methods that I found to significantly increase these dimensions of PCBC. Together, these results offer a novel approach to capacity development and evaluation and a psychometric instrument that can be used to predict long-term capacity for biodiversity conservation in a diverse population of conservation professionals.

How can psychoanalytic, social, cognitive, and behavioral theory and methodology propose relevant and practical sustainable community development techniques to strengthen sustainable action at the community level? The purpose of this investigation was to explore a framework within which psychological theory is put into action in the practice of sustainable community development to answer this question. This text includes the proposal and analysis of a sustainable community development framework called Theory in Action (TIA). TIA was built from a psychological perspective, synthesizing the author’s four years of study in psychoanalytic, social, cognitive, and behavioral theory, six years of experience as a psychological researcher, and two years of graduate level research in sustainability theory and action. This report offers a detailed description of the theoretical underpinnings of the TIA framework as well as an in-depth analysis of the theoretical relevance and perceived practicality of the proposed framework within the field of sustainable community development. After reporting and analyzing the results from a literature review of two theoretical sustainable community development models and an interview from a real-world sustainable community development practice, exploration of the relevance and practicality of the TIA framework is discussed, recommendations are made, and conclusions are proposed regarding the importance of future collaborative efforts between theory and action.