Integrative Conservation Problem Solving Workshop: Methods to Bridge the Natural and Social Sciences
Session Organizers: Susan Clark, David Cherney, Kathryn Semmens, Kimberly Byrd, Richard L Wallace, and Seth Wilson

Description: GOAL: This workshop is designed to support the 2008 Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) selection criteria concerning conservation science, management, policy, and education. It is also broadly applicable to the overall meeting theme "From the Mountains to the Sea", as the workshop is designed to help practitioners better understand methods for making connections between disciplines and areas of conservation science and policy and will explicitly present cases that reflect the ecological diversity implied in the meeting theme.

We believe that the future of successful conservation is the integration of multiple disciplines, including those concerned with the science of biodiversity conservation and those that address the social and political processes that are necessary to effect conservation strategies and goals.

PROBLEM: While much has been written about the need for interdisciplinary integration, few professional societies or educational institutions offer systematic training in how it can be accomplished in practice. Few applied educational publications exist to guide professional practice.

OUR ALTERNATIVE: We intend to help fill this gap with this applied workshop.|
The workshop will be designed to help practitioners gain fluency in interdisciplinary conservation problem solving methods, based in the field of the policy sciences, and support and augment ongoing efforts in this area by SCB's Social Science Working Group (SSWG). This proposal was developed in response to a call from SSWG for inter-organizational alliances between SCB and social science professional societies. Two of the workshop organizers serve on the executive council of the Society for the Policy Sciences, and one of them (Wallace) is also a board member and vice president of SSWG. The policy sciences executive council and SSWG board both explicitly endorse this proposal. We hope that this proposal helps SSWG and SCB to illustrate the value of creating bridges between professional groups and coordinating practical efforts to conserve biodiversity.

TRENDS/CONDITIONS/PROJECTIONS: The concepts and tools of the policy sciences have been synthesized over five decades by scholars working on "the science of problems" concerning international governance and public policy. Policy sciences is an integrative, interdisciplinary field of scholarship and practice that is, like conservation biology, explicitly problem-oriented. Since its development in the early part of the 20th century, application of the policy sciences has expanded to many areas of concern, maintaining as its central theme and commitment the need for disciplinary integration to resolve complex problems. Among policy scientists' diverse interests, species and ecosystem conservation has been among the most active in recent years. The practitioners of these methods use cases to illustrate how knowledge from the natural and social sciences can be integrated in practice. This integration emphasizes the interplay between the natural sciences that form the basis for understanding conservation problems in a technical sense and the social sciences that describe human actions that cause conservation to succeed or fail. It allows for context-specific alternatives to flow from analysis, and provides a framework for comparing experiences across cases and drawing lessons for other settings. It is the capacity of the policy sciences to disentangle the complexity inherent in multidisciplinary problems that marks its value to conservation biology. As well, policy sciences' overarching goal is the furtherance of human dignity in the decision making processes in which practitioners engage. The integration of disciplines under the rubric of a dignified approach to collaboration distinguishes policy sciences and its value for improving the quality of decision making that bears on how we use our habitat. In this way, policy sciences' tools and methods can significantly aid conservation.