Open Forum

Dear colleagues,

I have been thinking a lot about durability in conservation.

Many conservation projects can look successful for a while. A species may receive more attention, a community may participate, a policy may be approved, or a local project may work well under normal conditions. But I think one of the harder questions is what remains when conditions change.

What makes conservation continue when funding becomes uncertain, institutions become weaker, people face new pressures, or the original project team is no longer there?

If conservation remains only a project, it may disappear when the project ends.

For me, this is not only an ecological or institutional question. It is also a psychological and social one.

Conservation psychology can help us ask whether conservation has become connected to people's identity, values, habits, emotional attachment, sense of responsibility, and relationship with place. In other words, is conservation only something people support when there is an external incentive, or has it become part of how they see themselves and their community?

This is one area where I feel psychology can contribute more deeply to conservation. Not only by measuring attitudes or awareness, but by helping us understand what kind of relationship people have with conservation, how stable that relationship is, and how we might design better interventions to strengthen it.

I would be very interested to hear from others working on conservation psychology, human dimensions, community conservation, social norms, or long-term conservation outcomes:

How do you think we can understand and measure whether conservation has become durable in people and communities?

For colleagues who are also members of SSWG, I am currently a candidate for the SSWG board. The official candidate statements and voting link are available here.

Best,
Iman Ebrahimi

To begin with: Is the durability here meant just addressing people's minds, or is it (also) conservation success, i.e. a longlasting success that, for example, the species is, after all efforts, classified as Least concern in the national redlist?

As part of a government commission in 2002, I made a governance/management Systems Analysis of the work with recovery plans for threatened species and habitats in Sweden. I used the leverage-points approach coined by Donella Meadows

http://drbalcom.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/35173014/Leverage_Points.pdf

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Per Sjogren-Gulve
Senior Adviser
Emeritus From Swedish EPA
Uppsala
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This is a useful conversation. I offer four citations below in my subfield of human-carnivore coexistence and conflict, which I  believe address the issue of durability of interventions. I want to emphasize the word interventions because the other concepts in Iman Ebrahimi's post are in my opinion bundles of actions and interventions, some of which might be durable and others not. Take for instance a project. We don't want all aspects of a project to be durable, to last forever, do we? I think we want the functionally effective ones to be durable. Similarly, unless we define conservation, it is unclear what should be durable. I'll note here that the Society for Conservation Biology North America chapter has adopted a definition of conservation it will roll out officially during the North American Congress July 12-17, 2026. Once it is "live", you can see how conservation has different targets and even includes diverse actions so we need to define what we wish to be durable, don't we?

Thanks for starting a useful discussion Iman Ebrahimi.

Best wishes

Adrian Treves, PhD

https://faculty.nelson.wisc.edu/treves/

McManus, J., A. Dickman, D. Gaynor, B. Smuts, and D. Macdonald, 2015.  Dead or alive? Comparing costs and benefits of lethal and non-lethal human-wildlife conflict mitigation on livestock farms.  Oryx 49:  687-695.

McManus, J., L. Faraut, V. Couldridge, J. van Deventer, I. Samuels, D. Cilliers, C. Deven, P. Vorster, and B. Smuts, 2022.  Assessment of leopard translocations in south africa.  Frontiers in Conservation Science 3:  943078. 10.3389/fcosc.2022.943078.

Khorozyan, I., and M. Waltert, 2019.  How long do anti-predator interventions remain effective? Patterns, thresholds and uncertainty.  Royal Society Open Science 6:  e190826.  10.1098/rsos.190826.

Treves, A., and I. Khorozyan, 2025.  Robust inference and errors in studies of wildlife control.  Scientific Reports 15:  33131.  10.1038/s41598-025-18497-7.

A conservation system that only functions under stable funding, favorable politics, or exceptional leadership may not actually be resilient - just temporarily successful. Durability requires ecological, institutional, economic, and psychological endurance all at once.

I explored some of these ideas recently in a piece for The Revelator, drawing from my work in ocean conservation, though I think many of the lessons apply broadly across conservation fields. The essay looks at institutional memory, continuity, and what conservation systems carry forward through change and disruption:

https://therevelator.org/reflections-what-endures-conservation/

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Rick MacPherson
Oakland CA
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Hello Rick,

Thank you for writing this up. This post made me pause in the middle of reading it, not because it astonished me, but because it described exactly something I have been attempting to study in my PhD chapters which also aligns with my values and identity as Indigenous woman.

I am a PhD student working on relational governance and community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). The statement that really stuck with me was this: "When modern conservation engages these systems as living frameworks rather than cultural artifacts, authority becomes relational. "Compliance becomes collective."  This approach goes through a social-psychological phenomena termed as sense of belonging to institution which is feeling insider, psychological ownership and organizational identification, widely studied in organizational psychology to understand the employee behavior. However, it is rarely used in CBNRM. This sounds very simple idea but it has profound impact on how individual think, feel and act. The foundation of this concept starts with the "need to belong theory" by Baumeister and Leary, 1995. 

I think along with other factors, it is highly important to focus on the relational aspect of CBNRM as well. 

Thanks again!!

I also think durable conservation becomes stronger when ecological outcomes are visible to local communities and connected to long-term regional priorities. In the Middle East, and particularly in Saudi Arabia, freshwater biodiversity conservation is becoming an increasingly important focus due to water scarcity, habitat change, and the vulnerability of native aquatic species. Long-term conservation in these systems will likely depend not only on policy and funding, but also on building stronger relationships between communities, scientists, and freshwater ecosystems through continuous monitoring, education, and local engagement.

Hi Iman,

I think you pose a critical question. I also read other members' answers. All seem to focus on actions and interventions. However, in my opinion, durable conservation requires nonaction, a Daoist approach. In other words, conservation should strive to shift the society to the dynamic equilibrium point where humans and wildlife can coexist harmoniously with each other. And, this approach will need cultivativation of Nature Quotient across the society (perhaps, this is the psychological aspect that you're seeking for). Otherwise, actions and interventions are short-life.

I agree Minh-Hoang Nguyen

But I live in a society (and I think many of us do) in which government or interest groups are constantly taking actions that harm wild lives (and domestic animal lives). So much of my focus is on interventions to prevent harm by the status quo. Still I agree with you. Adrian

I share the same view with you, Adrian. This issue is also happening in my society, where the economic growth and wealth accumulation are prioritized. So, I think that we still initially need actions and interventions to help shift society toward a trajectory of nonaction, where such actions/interventions eventually become "useless," in the sense that conservation is already embedded in our daily lives, values, and social norms. It is certainly a challenging goal, but worth striving for.

Hoang