Collaborative governance in the face of global change: a social science approach to working effectively at the human-wildlife-environment interface

Abstract

This dissertation explores the use of a collaborative governance framework for addressing a range of wildlife and environmental conservation issues. Conservation threats in general are often wide-reaching and interdisciplinary, meaning their impacts extend beyond what one organization or field has the resources and capacity to manage. Collaborative governance, a framework that outlines conditions and stakeholders necessary to work effectively across various boundaries like discipline, scale, and sector, is often used to address such conservation issues because of its ability to overcome such challenges. This dissertation comprises three standalone papers exploring the use of collaborative governance in three separate wildlife and environmental contexts. The first paper focused on the State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) update process in the Southeastern United States leading up to the 2025 submission deadline. Using a qualitative semi-structured interview approach, this study explored how different agencies, organizations, and other entities collaborate to develop plan changes. This study focused particularly on how these plans address the movement of threatened and endangered species across state lines and how they incorporate climate change information as these are expected to worsen in coming years. Findings include the importance of trust, avenues for future collaborations, and the importance of regional agencies. The second paper explored the development of an ecotourism circuit in Sierra Leone, with a focus on collaboration with local communities. Because tourism development has a strong history of excluding these groups, along with their wants, needs, and concerns, this study focused on assessing these constructs in two potential ecotourism development sites using a qualitative semi-structured interview approach. This ecotourism circuit development represents a unique opportunity to incorporate principles of collaborative governance and community engagement as there is not currently a well-established tourism sector in Sierra Leone. Most work on these concepts in tourism is done retroactively but employing them in Sierra Leone's tourism development can provide valuable information on the benefits and challenges of doing so more proactively. Findings include a desire among all groups for economic and infrastructure benefits, communication challenges between local communities and other stakeholders, and the importance of keeping ecotourism development in Sierra Leone manageable. The third paper in this dissertation examined the use of the One Health framework in Sierra Leone. This framework emphasizes strong interconnections among human, animal, and environmental health, yet has historically overemphasized human health, particularly zoonotic disease transmission to humans. This imbalance is also present in Sierra Leone's use of One Health, which was formalized immediately after the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic. The One Health framework, however, has much potential to effectively address other health and safety threats. In fact, expanding its use into other health and safety sectors will be necessary to take the holistic approach to health the framework strives for. This need is especially apparent in places like Sierra Leone, where environmental health threats like climate change, deforestation, urbanization, and natural disasters are rapidly increasing and pose a major threat to health and safety for humans, wildlife, livestock, and the environment. Collaborative governance represents a valuable tool for better integrating these threats and the organizations tasked with addressing them into One Health. This study utilized a qualitative semi-structured interview and focus group approach to explore potential cross-boundary collaborations to initiate or strengthen, challenges to such collaborations, and the most significant health and safety threats. Findings confirm environmental health threats that are rapidly growing, willingness to better incorporate said threats into One Health work, and challenges in putting collaborative plans and policies into action. Taken as a whole, this dissertation identifies valuable, novel uses of the collaborative governance framework to improve management of threats at the human-animal-environment interface. It explores trends in collaborative governance drivers and challenges, contributing to more effective work in both the specific study settings and in general.