Deepen Your Impact
with people, for the planet.
Human Nature specialises in helping conservation organisations connect deeply with the people they work with, creating inclusive and lasting solutions that balance the needs of people and nature.
Understanding Societies
We dive deep into the social fabric and contexts of the people you work with, ensuring that your conservation practice and policies are rooted in social science and reflect the real values and needs of people. This leads to strategies that resonate on a local level and build stronger, more cooperative relationships.
Conflict Resolution
Whether it's between stakeholders in dispute or broader societal groups, we use expert mediation and restorative dialogue to transform conflicts, turning tension into opportunities for collaboration and long-term success.
Improve your outreach with our guidance on Nonviolent Communication (NVC). This transformative method emphasises empathy and understanding that human needs are universal, helping you to connect meaningfully with people and foster trust through every interaction.
Effective Communication
Training
Equip yourself or your team with practical tools to enhance your ability to communicate, collaborate, and engage. With our tailored training, you will be better equipped to involve people in conservation, ensuring that people and nature thrive together.
The Context for Our Work
The conservation sector has come under increased scrutiny and criticism for its lack of inclusivity based on its colonial roots and history of excluding or limiting people’s interactions with nature.
Its focus tends to be on wildlife and biodiversity, rather than on the societies it affects. Practitioners are invariably trained in natural science and often lack the skills to fully engage with people and their complexity.
As a result, conservation practice can at best, fail to understand, and at worst, exclude and negatively impact people's lives.
However conservation is ultimately about managing people’s behaviour: in terms of how people interact with nature and each other.
The actions and inactions of people shape outcomes for nature. Nature is human. Humans are nature.
Understanding and engaging with people, and all of their diversity and complexity, should lie at the core of conservation work.
This is why Human Nature exists.
People
Dr Lauren Evans
has worked in conservation research and practice in East Africa for 15 years, where tensions between social justice and conservation are glaring and often uncomfortable.
Lauren's PhD and post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge looked at the political ecology of electrified 'elephant' fences in Laikipia, Kenya: the politics they both represent and create. Lauren delved into issues of identity and access in relation to land by pastoralists and conservationists. She then directed the conservation science department for an international NGO for six years.
Increasingly Lauren felt a drive away from the market-based, protectionist, sometimes militarised solutions she faced. Lauren is now a practitioner in Nonviolent Communication and an accredited mediator (with CEDR and Conflict Dynamics) and experienced in using and thinking about social science and political ecology.
