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Essay

Conservation Planning as a Transdisciplinary Process BELINDA REYERS,∗ DIRK J. ROUX,† RICHARD M. COWLING,‡ AIMEE E. GINSBURG,§ JEANNE L. NEL,∗ AND PATRICK O’ FARRELL∗ ∗

Natural Resources and the Environment, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, P.O. Box 320, Stellenbosch 7599, South Africa, email [email protected] †Water Research Node, Monash South Africa, Private Bag X60, Roodepoort 1725, South Africa ‡Department of Botany, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, P.O. Box 77000, Port Elizabeth 6031, South Africa §Prime Africa Research Consultants, P.O. Box 433, Garsfontein, Pretoria 0042, South Africa

Abstract: Despite substantial growth in the field of conservation planning, the speed and success with which conservation plans are converted into conservation action remains limited. This gap between science and action extends beyond conservation planning into many other applied sciences and has been linked to complexity of current societal problems, compartmentalization of knowledge and management sectors, and limited collaboration between scientists and decision makers. Transdisciplinary approaches have been proposed as a possible way to address these challenges and to bridge the gap between science and action. These approaches move beyond the bridging of disciplines to an approach in which science becomes a social process resolving problems through the participation and mutual learning of stakeholders. We explored the principles of transdisciplinarity, in light of our experiences as conservation-planning researchers working in South Africa, to better understand what is required to make conservation planning transdisciplinary and therefore more effective. Using the transdisciplinary hierarchy of knowledge (empirical, pragmatic, normative, and purposive), we found that conservation planning has succeeded in integrating many empirical disciplines into the pragmatic stakeholder-engaged process of strategy development and implementation. Nevertheless, challenges remain in engagement of the social sciences and in understanding the social context of implementation. Farther up this knowledge hierarchy, at the normative and purposive levels, we found that a lack of integrated land-use planning and policies (normative) and the dominant effect of national values (purposive) that prioritize growth and development limit the effectiveness and relevance of conservation plans. The transdisciplinary hierarchy of knowledge highlighted that we need to move beyond bridging the empirical and pragmatic disciplines into the complex normative world of laws, policies, and planning and become engaged in the purposive processes of decision making, behavior change, and value transfer. Although there are indications of progress in this direction, working at the normative and purposive levels requires time, leadership, resources, skills that are absent in conservation training and practice, and new forms of recognition in systems of scientific reward and funding.

Keywords: conservation planning, conservation implementation, science-action gap La Planificaci´ on de la Conservaci´ on como un Proceso Transdisciplinar

Resumen: No obstante el crecimiento sustancial del campo de la planificación de la conservación, la rapidez y éxito con el que los planes son convertidos en acciones de conservaci´ on permanece limitado. Esta brecha entre la ciencia y la acci´ on se extiende de la planificaci´ on de la conservaci´ on hacia otras ciencias aplicadas y ha sido relacionada con la complejidad de los problemas sociales actuales, la compartimentaci´ on del conocimiento y los sectores de manejo y la limitada colaboraci´ on entre cient´ıficos y tomadores de decisiones. Los enfoques transdisciplinares han sido propuestos como un posible método para atender estos retos y cerrar la brecha entre la ciencia y la acci´ on. Estos enfoques rebasan la uni´ on de disciplinas hacia un enfoque donde la ciencia

Paper submitted June 29, 2009; revised manuscript accepted November 27, 2009.

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Putting Conservation Plans to Work

se vuelve un proceso social que resuelve problemas mediante la participaci´ on y el aprendizaje mutuo de los sectores interesados. Exploramos los principios de la transdisciplinaridad, a la luz de nuestras experiencias ´ como investigadores de la planificaci´ on de la conservaci´ on en Africa del Sur, para un mejor entendimiento de lo que se requiere para que la planificaci´ on de la conservaci´ on sea transdisciplinar y por lo tanto m´ as efectiva. Utilizando la jerarqu´ıa transdisciplinar del conocimiento (emp´ırico, pragm´ atico, normativo, intencional), encontramos que la planificaci´ on de la conservaci´ on ha tenido éxito en la integraci´ on de muchas disciplinas emp´ıricas a un proceso pragm´ atico, conducido por los sectores interesados, de desarrollo e implementaci´ on de estrategias. Sin embargo, permanecen retos en el v´ınculo con las ciencias sociales y en la comprensi´ on del contexto social de la implementaci´ on. Hacia arriba en esta jerarqu´ıa del conocimiento, en los niveles normativo e intencional), encontramos que la falta de integraci´ on de la planificaci´ on y las pol´ıticas de uso de suelo (normativo) y el efecto dominante de los valores nacionales (intencional) que priorizan el crecimiento y desarrollo limitan la efectividad y relevancia de los planes de conservaci´ on. La jerarqu´ıa transdisciplinar del conocimiento puso de relieve que necesitamos movernos m´ as all´ a de combinar las disciplinas emp´ıricas y pragm´ aticas hacia el m´ as complejo mundo normativo de leyes, pol´ıticas y planificaci´ on y participar en los procesos intencionales de la toma de decisiones, cambio de conducta y transferencia de valores. Aunque hay indicios de progreso en ese sentido, el trabajo en los niveles normativo e intencional requiere de tiempo, liderazgo, recursos y habilidades que est´ an ausentes en la capacitaci´ on y pr´ actica de la conservaci´ on, as´ı como de reconocimiento en los sistemas de reconocimiento cient´ıfico y de financiamiento.

Palabras Clave: brecha ciencia-acción, implementación de la conservación, planificación de la conservación

The Gap between Science and Action in Conservation Planning Conservation planning—the science of identifying spatially explicit priorities and actions for the conservation of a region’s biodiversity (Margules & Pressey 2000)— has grown tremendously in the last 3 decades. This period has witnessed a proliferation of tools, techniques, software, databases, and research outputs devoted to the task of systematically identifying spatial priority areas for conservation action (Sarkar et al. 2006). Nevertheless, a number of conservation planners have begun to question the actual impact of all this science, and many are despondent about the extent to which the science leads to action and improvements in the state of biodiversity (e.g., Prendergast et al. 1999; Balmford & Cowling 2006; Knight et al. 2006). This gap between science and action is not unique to conservation planning. The 20th anniversary issue of Conservation Biology highlighted just how pervasive the problem is in conservation science: “Our collective influence on global conditions, policies, and quality of life for humans and nonhumans has been minimal as the world marches on, largely oblivious to our science. . .” (Meffe et al. 2006). The gap extends beyond the conservation sciences into many other applied sciences, including management and organizational science (Pfeffer & Sutton 1999), environmental psychology (Sommer 2003), restoration ecology (Higgs 2005), and ecosystem management (McNie 2007). In South Africa the science of conservation planning has been around since the late 1970s. In the early years it was the focus of much academic interest, generating data sets, techniques, papers, and sound local scientific capacity (e.g., van Jaarsveld 1995). The change to democ-

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racy in 1994 saw an increase in international donor interest and support for conservation planning in global priority areas. This investment in conservation planning programs such as the Cape Action Plan for People and the Environment (Cowling et al. 2003) saw South African conservation-planning research leave its ivory tower and venture into the real world of conservation decision making. These projects involved the broader community, including botanical and zoological experts, conservation practitioners, economists, managers, researchers, and a range of stakeholders (Frazee et al. 2003; Lochner et al. 2003; Pierce et al. 2005). More recently, we have witnessed two further developments: the emergence of freshwater conservation planning as an applied branch of research (Nel et al. 2009b), and the entrenchment of conservation planning in South African government departments, legislation, and approaches to biodiversity conservation at national (Reyers et al. 2007; Nel et al. 2009a) and provincial levels (e.g., Ferrar & L¨ otter 2007). This emergence was rapid, benefiting from the lessons learned by the conservation planning community (Knight et al. 2006) and the fact that these developments took place in the sectors responsible for biodiversity and water planning and management. This history and investment, together with an interactive community of practice and innovative legislation, has raised South Africa’s conservation planning profile and earned the country the reputation as a “conservation planning hotspot” (Knight et al. 2006) that is “showing the way” in “real world planning” (Balmford 2003). Despite this progress, the speed and success with which many conservation plans are converted into conservation action remain limited, and the search for new ways to develop conservation plans, which can be rapidly and effectively implemented is constant.

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As part of this search for new approaches, we reviewed the literature from a wide variety of disciplines, recognizing that the challenges of conservation planning are similar to those across a broad range of scientific fields. Here we summarize our findings, explore the potential of a transdisciplinary approach for conservation planning, and suggest a way forward for conservation planners. Although based on our experiences as conservation scientists in South Africa, we believe the lessons we learned through this exploration are applicable to the practice of conservation science internationally.

Complexity, Compartmentalization, and Collaboration According to several studies (Daily & Ehrlich 1999; Lawrence & Després 2004; Max-Neef 2005; Hadorn et al. 2006), our inability to deal with today’s major global problems (e.g., poverty, HIV/AIDS, biodiversity loss) relates to (1) the complexity of the problems themselves, (2) the way knowledge and sectoral responsibilities are compartmentalized, and (3) the failure to ensure effective collaboration between scientists, professionals, decision makers, and other stakeholders. The problems faced by conservation scientists are indeed complex. Balmford and Cowling (2006) point out, “conservation is primarily not about biology but about people and the choices they make” and is therefore influenced by an array of socioeconomic and political constraints and opportunities, such as opportunity costs, funding, incentives, willingness to participate, modes of governance, institutional capacity (Knight & Cowling 2007), and an underlying value system that determines the cultural legitimacy of certain social sacrifices and behaviors (Van Houtan 2006). Complex problems result in an inherent degree of unpredictability due to nonlinear interactions and feedbacks between components of the social and ecological systems of concern. The emergent properties of these complex systems make cause-andeffect relationships “knowable” only in retrospect. It is therefore unlikely that solutions to these complex problems will be contained within the boundaries of a single discipline (Lawrence & Després 2004; Max-Neef 2005). A failure to see conservation problems as multidimensional, requiring inputs from multiple disciplines, leads to poor decisions and policies with serious negative consequences for biodiversity and human wellbeing (Daily & Ehrlich 1999). The multidisciplinary nature of conservation science has long been recognized (Soulé 1985) but seldom achieved, and compartmentalization of disciplines and sectors responsible for conservation are an impediment to effective conservation (Ehrenfeld 2000; Mascia et al. 2003; Balmford & Cowling 2006; Robinson 2006).

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When it comes to bridging disciplines many terms are used including multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and more recently transdisciplinarity. Here, we used the definitions of Lengwiler (2006) and Max-Neef (2005), particularly the latter’s continuum of the discipline. Disciplinarity is about the monodiscipline and represents specialization in isolation. Multidisciplinarity is the next step along the discipline continuum and represents more than one discipline being studied or applied without actual integration of the respective concepts or findings. Lengwiler (2006) distinguishes between multidisciplinarity, meaning cooperation with little exchange between the disciplines, and interdisciplinarity, meaning crossdisciplinary cooperation feeding back into disciplinary knowledge. Max-Neef (2005) organizes interdisciplinarity at two levels in which the higher level coordinates and gives a purpose to the lower levels. He uses the field of medicine as an example. Medicine becomes interdisciplinary when it gives a purpose to and is informed by the disciplines of biology, chemistry, and psychology. Although the goals of interdisciplinary research remain within the scientific disciplines, transdisciplinary research forges linkages between scientific disciplines, as well as between different knowledge spheres. A transdisciplinary approach is a more integrated one in which the boundaries between science and society become more permeable (Horlick-Jones & Sime 2004). According to Lawrence and Després (2004) transdisciplinary approaches acknowledge complexity and reject fragmentation of knowledge, accept local contexts and uncertainty, rely on close collaboration and communication during all phases of work (referred to as “border work” (HorlickJones & Sime 2004) or working across disciplines and knowledge systems), and are action oriented in that they create linkages between science and practice and generate knowledge on societal problems and their solutions. Hadorn et al. (2006) argue that transdisciplinarity shifts the scientific process from a simple research process that provides a solution, to a social process that resolves problems through the participation and mutual learning of stakeholders. Transdisciplinary approaches have been adopted in applications as diverse as urban planning (Després et al. 2004), fire risk (Horlick-Jones & Sime 2004), health (Lawrence 2004), landscape studies (Tress et al. 2005), and sustainability research (Hadorn et al. 2006). The context and principles of these transdisciplinary approaches resonate with the problems conservation planners’ face, so we decided to explore them further. Although many scientists support a shift to transdisciplinarity, how to do so remains vague. In our search for how to achieve transdisciplinary conservation planning, we reviewed the principles and frameworks of transdisciplinarity and selected the knowledge hierarchies of Jantsch (1972), as depicted by Max-Neef (2005), as a useful description of the transition to transdisciplinarity.


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Conservation Planning as a Transdisciplinary Process Jantsch (1972) ordered knowledge into a four-level hierarchy: purposive (values), normative (social systems design), pragmatic (physical technology, social and natural ecology), and empirical (physical inanimate world, physical animal world, human psychological world). Jantsch (1972) saw transdisciplinarity as the ultimate coordination between horizontal and vertical levels of the knowledge hierarchy that leads to a common purpose. Max-Neef (2005) uses these levels in his pyramid of transdisciplinarity (Fig. 1). Each level is informed by underlying levels, but at the same time coordinates and gives purpose to the underlying disciplines—the links between all levels are therefore bidirectional. Empirical disciplines at the base of the pyramid describe what exists, those at the pragmatic level describe what is possible, those at the normative level describe what is desired, and the top purposive level deals with disciplines that describe what should be done. We envision that transdisciplinary conservation planning—as a pragmatic interdiscipline (Fig. 1)—


coordinates and defines the purpose of research in the empirical disciplines from the four major science domains: life, earth, engineering, and social (Redman 1999). At the same time, the empirical disciplines provide the conceptual building blocks required for progress at the pragmatic level. This horizontal and vertical cooperation and coordination requires close collaboration between the empirical and pragmatic levels equivalent to an interdisciplinary research program of universities or research institutions and conservation agencies jointly generating knowledge and understanding. Similarly, other pragmatic disciplines such as agriculture, forestry, and tourism direct the purpose of research specific to their needs at the empirical level. In this way, the pragmatic disciplines are enriched by understanding the biophysical and social factors underpinning sustainability of their respective sectors. The pragmatic disciplines are in turn directed by and feed into the normative process of land-use planning and its policies and laws. We base our ideas of transdisciplinary conservation planning on the premise that it should take place within the broader normative process of land-use planning in which plans and strategies from

Figure 1: The hierarchy of knowledge developed by Max-Neef (2005) applied to our illustration of conservation planning as a transdisciplinary process (agric, agriculture). Empirical disciplines at the base of the pyramid describe what exists, those at the pragmatic level describe what can be done, those at the normative level describe what is desired, and the top purposive level deals with disciplines that describe what should be done. The diagram demonstrates the vertical and horizontal coordination between the empirical disciplines and pragmatic sectors that in turn are directed by and feed into the normative process of land-use planning and its policies and laws. These normative land-use policies, laws, and planning should reflect spatially the values embedded in the country’s populace depicted by the ultimate level of the knowledge hierarchy—the purposive or value level.


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conservation and other sectors feed into and inform the land-use planning process (Fig. 1; Theobald et al. 2000; Pierce et al. 2005). Land-use planning refers to the allocation of land, water, resources, facilities, and services, with a view to securing human well-being, and is globally the location of all decisions that affect natural resources. It relies on pragmatic disciplines for data, knowledge, and support in the development of well-informed and effective land-use plans, policies, and laws. The bidirectionality of the links in Fig. 1 highlight the upward influence of the conservation sector on land-use planning and point out that land-use planning should direct how the pragmatic disciplines conduct their work to make it useful in the land-use planning process. This direction, like that between the pragmatic and empirical levels, requires close collaboration between the levels that is facilitated by joint projects and appointments, cofunding arrangements, and learning networks. An additional insight into the transdisciplinary perspective on conservation planning is provided by the top level of the knowledge hierarchy—the purposive or value level. The overarching influence of the purposive level implies that land-use policies, laws, and planning should spatially reflect values embedded in the country’s populace (Theobald et al. 2000), as guided by national institutions, such as policy and legislation. What this means is that for conservation and land-use planning to become transdisciplinary, they need to be coordinated in a way that interprets and reflects national values. At the same time, the bidirectionality of these links implies that these disciplines need to exert an upward influence on national values derived from new knowledge and improved understanding.

Examining Progress toward Transdisciplinarity In reviewing the current state of conservation planning in South Africa relative to our transdisciplinary vision (Fig. 1), it appears that in some ways planning is on the right track and in others there is a fair way to go. We determined what would be required at each level of the hierarchy to achieve transdisciplinary conservation planning, what progress has been made in this respect in South Africa, and finally what still remains to be done to make conservation planning a transdisciplinary process. Empirical Level of Conservation Planning At the empirical level, conservation planning would need to shift from its current focus on biophysical assessment to a broader assessment of the social, economic, and institutional environments. These assessments are essential if one is to understand the full range of opportunities and constraints for conservation in the region. Much has been said about the need for conservation science to embrace the social sciences (Daily & Ehrlich 1999; Mascia

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et al. 2003), and this transdisciplinary framework adds support to that requirement. Good progress has been made at this level in South Africa and elsewhere and conservation planning now often includes assessment of costs (Frazee et al. 2003; Naidoo et al. 2006), ecosystem services (Chan et al. 2006; Egoh et al. 2007), and landowner willingness to engage in conservation (Knight et al. 2009). To become transdisciplinary, however, conservation planning still requires a broader inclusion of social sciences and assessment (Cowling & WilhelmRechmann 2007), and a greater influence on the research conducted and data collected in the underlying empirical disciplines. Pragmatic Level of Conservation Planning At the pragmatic level conservation planners would be required to partner with other phases of sectoral strategy development and management that align with and are informed by all sectors responsible for natural resource management (Theobald et al. 2000; Pierce et al. 2005; Cowling et al. 2008). This forms part of a longer-term social process that requires effective and genuine stakeholder engagement to ensure buy-in and uptake (Hadorn et al. 2006). South African conservation planning has made good progress in engaging with the social process of strategy development and implementation at the pragmatic level, especially at the provincial and regional scale, (e.g., Lochner et al. 2003) and lessons have been documented and shared (Knight et al. 2006). This is also the case in freshwater conservation planning and includes experience gained in setting ecological water requirements (King & Brown 2006), water governance (Rogers 2006) and the development of multisectoral policy (Roux et al. 2008). Despite good progress, much of this potential still remains to be realized and work is still required in documenting, sharing, and piloting these pragmatic experiences with processes at a more local scale, as well as with other sectors, where limited planning and strategy development currently occur. Normative Level of Conservation Planning At the normative level, conservation planning requires effective and integrated land-use planning, policies, and legislation at the relevant local scales to integrate sectoral plans and strategies and to ensure they are implemented (Theobald et al. 2000; Pierce et al. 2005). This represents an enormous challenge when one considers the current structure of land-use planning in South Africa, and elsewhere, where multiple sectors are involved, often with conflicting plans and strategies. Added to this complexity are South Africa’s three spheres of governance in which national and provincial governments have concurrent legislative competence for environmental management, whereas land-use planning is a function of local municipalities (Pierce et al. 2005).



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Despite these complexities, conservation planning in South Africa has made good progress in penetrating the municipal and provincial land-use planning processes (Pierce et al. 2005). This has been supported by budgetary increases, development of some innovative legislation (e.g., The National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act of 2004), and establishment of new institutions (including the South African National Biodiversity Institute [SANBI]). The Biodiversity Act makes provision for conservation plans to be gazetted and thereafter become an entrenched part of the land-use and development planning processes. The SANBI plays an important bridging role between the empirical, pragmatic, and normative levels of conservation planning and engages with researchers, practitioners, implementers, and decision makers across multiple sectors. Nevertheless, finances, capacity, and multisectoral engagement are still insufficient to cater to the demands of the crosscutting cooperative governance required for integrated land-use planning (DEAT 2006). This is particularly the case at local levels of governance and remains a major obstacle for achieving sustainable-development targets. These financial and capacity constraints also place a reliance on consultants to create local land-use plans, where consultants (with notable exceptions) often have limited training and access to information and data. Therefore, more effort is required (much of it outside the conservation sector) to strengthen and integrate informed and effective land use if conservation plans are to have a long-lasting effect.

In fact, the value or purposive level permeates all levels of the knowledge hierarchy necessitating, as Hadorn et al. (2006) point out, that research become a social process making explicit the values and norms in society and science. In this context, the conservation planning process will be required to change from one in which scientists ask the questions and provide the answer in the form of a spatial plan and a strategy, to one in which the questions are user driven and valued and the answer is a social process aimed at transforming attitudes and developing capacity, technology, ownership, and institutional change (Hadorn et al. 2006; Cowling et al. 2008). South African conservation planners have made progress in better understanding the role of national values and the implementation context in their work through, for example, the development of userdemanded and useful products (e.g., Pierce et al. 2005; Reyers et al. 2007) and the inclusion of socially relevant data (e.g., ecosystem services or cost data) into conservation plans (Egoh et al. 2010). Nevertheless, we propose that a lot of work remains to be done at this purposive level to better understand, enhance, and document the relevance of conservation plans to national values. We explored two main mechanisms for becoming more relevant: developing plans that reflect national values, and ways to influence national values and behavior.

Becoming More Relevant Purposive Level of Conservation Planning At the purposive (or value) level, the challenge revolves around understanding and incorporating national values into the normative land-use planning processes. These values—as enshrined in national institutions—should define the purpose of land-use planning. South Africans, with their focus on equity, emphasize national values of environmental and social equity in their constitution and legislation. In practice, however, these values are often contradictory, and achieving them simultaneously appears impossible. Currently, social equity takes priority over environmental concerns and results in national values that are focused on the plight of South Africa’s poor, growing the country’s economy, creating jobs, and alleviating poverty. Given the dreadful poverty that pervades, this priority is critical. The problem from the conservation perspective is that these values are largely short term, development and growth focused, and many people, including influential politicians and businesspeople, see the environment and its regulations as a constraint to national values rather than an aid. National values, further emphasized by business and industry’s influence and focus on economic growth, feed down into the normative level and determine policy.


Although many of the requirements of becoming transdisciplinary have been put forward and into practice by conservation planners in South Africa and elsewhere, the documentation of the importance of values in our research is relatively new (Wilson 2008; van Wyk et al. 2008). Incorporating values into conservation science as a case is built for the conservation of biodiversity is essential if conservation is to become relevant and important to societies (Robinson 2006). Although we are aware that not everyone shares our appreciation of nature and conservation and that conservation is a value-laden field (Soulé 1985), the fact that different value systems might be making our conservation plans irrelevant to decision makers and therefore easily ignored (despite supportive legislation), presents an enormous challenge for conservation planning. Looking around it is clear that some conservation scientists have recognized this barrier and its implications, and have built up conservation programs that reflect national values. These include programs that combine natural and social capital into their projects, such as the Working for Water program in South Africa, which packages alien plant removal and its positive implications for biodiversity under the umbrella of job creation, training,

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and water conservation (van Wilgen et al. 1998). This program receives over US$400 million/year from the South African government, more than half of what gets spent on all national and provincial parks, and has cleared over 1 million ha of land of invasive non-native plants since its inception in 1995 (Turpie et al. 2008). Other programs on fire management, wetland and woodland restoration, viticulture, and flower harvesting have followed suit with similar successes. The global move by conservation planners to include ecosystem services in their conservation plans has also been largely in response to this realization (e.g., Chan et al. 2006; Egoh et al. 2007; Ferrar & L¨ otter 2007). It appears that where biodiversity objectives align with socioeconomic ones, the speed and success of turning conservation science into action might be improved. Nevertheless, this cannot always be the case. Some areas, species, and habitats are currently little valued by society. In these cases it is important to recognize the bidirectionality of the links illustrated in Figure 1, which highlight the influence the empirical, pragmatic, and normative levels can have on the purposive level of national values. Environmental and conservation psychology have long known that information alone does not change behavior or decisions; rather, a suite of factors, including beliefs, values, norms, and knowledge, influence the choices people make. The evolution of norms and values, likened to the spreading of diseases, appears to take place through “infectious transfer mediated by webs of contact and influence” (Ehrlich & Levin 2005). The degree of contact and influence conservation scientists bring to bear at the value level is currently minimal and, although an area that most conservation scientists shy away from, is an essential point of collaboration and engagement. This does not necessarily imply a return to the culture of a crisis discipline and our “forge of despair” (Redford & Sanjayan 2003); rather, it means the conservationplanning community must learn how to influence behaviors, decisions, and how humans interact with their environment. Authors have pointed to the use of religious-moral interventions, education-information approaches, incentive-based approaches, and communitymanagement approaches to influence behavior. More recently, social marketing has been proposed as an intervention that uses any number of the above to shape human behavior. Defined as approaches that use marketing and other approaches for the benefit of people rather than financial gain, successful examples include use of child car seats, drunk-driving programs, and childhoodobesity programs (Wilhelm-Rechman & Cowling 2008). Whatever the appropriate approach turns out to be, it appears that the conservation-planning community will need move beyond its comfort zone of biology, even beyond the need to engage with other empirical disciplines, all the way to the complex world of politics and decision

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making. This requires trust building, patient persistence, long-time frames, and a host of skills not part of the usual conservation scientist training. It also brings with it the usual challenges associated with funding, recognition, and reward that drive so much of the scientific endeavor.

Conclusion Our exploration into the emerging process of transdisciplinary science has introduced new frameworks, concepts, and studies from other disciplines that face challenges similar to the ones faced by conservation scientists. More importantly, it provides a new way of visualizing conservation planning, its challenges, and potential ways to address these challenges. Although focused on conservation planning in South Africa, we think the lessons we extracted from this foray into the concepts and frameworks of transdisciplinarity apply more broadly to the field of conservation science and beyond the borders of South Africa. Whether or not transdisciplinarity is the solution to all conservation problems remains to be seen, but the challenges it has highlighted in our current approach to conservation planning appear relevant and real. These challenges reveal that conservation science is not yet sufficiently widely engaged in the entire messy social process of assessment, planning, stakeholder engagement, value transfer and behavior change, and that this limits our effectiveness as applied scientists. Becoming engaged in this social process will require mutual learning, spanning relevant disciplines at all levels of the transdisciplinary hierarchy. This will not necessarily be efficient and may require some parties to slow down their own learning and become listeners. Once a proper understanding (not necessarily agreement) of one another’s contexts and perspectives, basic trust, and a common language exist, parties are ready to transform knowledge produced at one disciplinary level to have meaning at another level and co-produce new knowledge that truly transcends disciplines. Essential ingredients to achieving mutual learning within the diverse transdisciplinary team include face-to-face practice time (Senge 1990) and an appropriately experienced and skilful leader(s) who will facilitate the process (Clark & Stankey 2006). We echo calls made by other authors to start thinking beyond disciplines toward a social process of integrated research, practice, and learning (Blackmore et al. 2007). From our experience, we think it is important that these concepts are translated into useful guidelines and examples of best practice for researchers and practitioners like ourselves, who might not have the luxury of wading through all the (often dense) literature that exists on the topic. Syntheses like those by Després and Lawrence (2004), Max-Neef (2005), and Hadorn et al. (2006) were


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immensely useful to our work and could form a useful input into the development of such guidelines.

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