PhD Candidate: Emmanuel Uchenna Ugwu

PhD Supervisors: Professor Neil Perry (WSU), Associate Professor Paul Rymer (WSU), Professor Juan Francisco Salazar Sutil (WSU), Dr Stephanie Hernandez (DCCEEW)

Project Summary: Landholders are the core target adopters of conservation programs intended to protect, restore, and manage biodiversity on private lands. Obtaining the requisite enrolments for PLC programs is a perennial challenge for conservation agencies. Myriad social, cultural, and political factors deter and encourage enrolment. In strong property rights jurisdictions like Australia, enrolment uncertainty is particularly high as landowners re-assess the highest and best use of their properties with evolving economic, environmental, and cultural values of lands. Consequently, the pool from which high-quality enrolments may be drawn is in constant flux. Thus, who will enrol, what land parcel they will enrol, and how long the land will be enrolled constitute a consequential uncertainty in PLC.

The vagaries of enrolment impede the planning of multi-year and decadal investments in PLC programs. However, enrolment uncertainty is often an overlooked issue for AM. The AM approach could enhance responsiveness to emergent properties of SES, including enrolment behaviours and feedback.

Here, we explore how to orient AM to iteratively attract, support, retain, and broaden the base of high-quality enrolments in PLC.

Individual enrolment decisions differ in their potential to translate into ecological and social outcomes that would not have occurred without conservation intervention. Our goal is to demonstrate that the quality of landholder participation can be enhanced by real-time modulation of enrolment management strategies to accord with the evolving social context and the program’s outlook.

The deconstructs enrolment quality. Then, discusses the enrolment scenarios that could result from the voluntary uptake of conservation programs. And shows how to orient the AM approach to improve the quality of landholder participation in PLC amid uncertainty.