Paul Jepson

Paul Jepson is course director of the MSc in Nature, Society and in Environmental Policy. Prior to this appointment in January 2007, he held Senior Research Fellowships with the Environmental Change Institute and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School. Paul transferred into academia from a successful career in conservation management and policy. He has consulted for a wide range of inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations and was Indonesia Programme Coordinator for BirdLife International (1991-1997). He started his career as a local government countryside officer developing new urban conservation initiatives in Manchester and Shrewsbury (UK). His research interests span protected area planning, wildlife trade, conservation history, attitudes, values and practices, media representations of conservation issues, and the role, accountability and legitimacy of conservation NGOs.

Current Research: Conservation Governance Lab

Paul leads an interdisciplinary research group working to generate richer conceptualizations of how conservation actors build, extend and legitimate their influence. The identity of the Conservation Governance Lab is founded on the belief that important insights lie at the interfaces of the natural and social science and of theory and practice. To this end, lab members collectively explore the efficacy of Human Geography theory and analytics for generating novel and useful insights on questions relating to conservation governance.

Paul's current research centres on four related aspects of conservation governance. One is self-governance, and in particular how conservation might build influence in situations where the engagement governmental or corporate bodies is absent. A second strand is an investigation of the agency of 'biocultural' terms and phenomena in conservation (e.g. extinction, flagships, rediscovery) and their role in producing the institutional practices and actor assemblages of conservation. A third, related strand is the role of non-human actors (species, technologies and devices) in the assembly and behavior of conservation networks. A forth concerns the interplay of western-formulated conservation logics and policy instruments with local cultural and resource management institutions. These themes interplay with older interests in conservation biogeography, NGO accountability and newer interests in eco-informatics.