Castillo, Oscar, Connie Clark, Peter Coppolillo, Heidi Kretser, Roan McNab, Andrew Noss, Helder Quieroz, Yemeserach Tessema, Amy Vedder, Robert Wallace, Joseph Walston, and David Wilkie. (2006) Casting for Conservation Actors: People, Partnerships and Wildlife.

 

The WCS Working Paper Series, produced through the WCS Institute, is designed to share with the conservation and development communities, in a timely fashion, information from the various settings where WCS works. These Papers address issues that are of immediate importance to helping conserve wildlife and wildlands either through offering new data or analyses relevant to specific conservation settings, or through offering new methods, approaches, or perspectives on rapidly evolving conservation issues. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in the Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

 

WCS Working Paper No.28 was generated by WCS field staff during a “writers workshop” conceived and organized by the Living Landscapes Program (LLP) to address the following question:

 

How can management systems and manager competencies be used to identify the best possible mix of actors to tackle different challenges in conserving wildlife across different contexts?

 

Field practitioners around the world regularly struggle with this issue, and though many have found novel answers, rarely, if ever, have these been captured and made available to others. To address this gap, the Living Landscapes Program assembled conservationists from WCS projects in Latin America, Asia, Africa and North America, along with WCS program staff, to draw on their collective experience in addressing the following questions:

 

     1. How do we identify an appropriate mix and arrangement of actors and institutions to effect conservation?

     2. How do ecological, socio-economic, and political factors influence the mix of effective actors and institutions?

 

Casting for Conservation Actors attempts to articulate the logic underlying the identification of the most appropriate mix of actors for wildlife conservation under different contexts. This paper is derived from the point of view of field practitioners who focus specifically on wildlife. While it distills some best practices, it is not intended to be a prescriptive methodology for choosing management actors with whom to work. Instead, it is offered as a heuristic device to help those who practice, participate in, and fund conservation to talk more explicitly about these issues, and thus enable more effective groups of conservation actors, by:

 

     (a) describing the logic behind identifying the most appropriate mix of actors and institutions, based on ecological, socio-economic, and political conditions; and

     (b) presenting a suite of eight case studies that illustrates the use of this logic in field-based conservation efforts.