Blog Contributor: Editrudith Lukanga
Editrudith Lukanga with olive baboons on the grounds of Makerere University Biological Field Station, Kibale National Park, Uganda — a daily reminder that the nature-society interface is not abstract.
“Conservation is not just a biological problem. It is a social one — and East Africa needs its own scholars to lead the science that proves it.”
Something remarkable happened in Kibale National Park, Uganda, in the last week of March 2026. Twenty-six researchers, early career scholars, practitioners, and senior academics gathered inside a tropical rainforest field station with a shared and ambitious purpose: to write the first conservation social science research agenda for East Africa, led by Africans, grounded in African realities.
I was one of those twenty-six. Selected from a competitive pool of more than 200 applicants across the region, I traveled from Tanzania, where I was preparing for my PhD fieldwork, to take part in five days that have already reshaped how I think about my research, my role as a scholar, and the possibilities ahead for conservation on this continent.
This article is my attempt to share what we built together, what it felt like to participate in that process, and why I think moments like this matter not just for conservation but for every early-career researcher who wonders whether their voice belongs at the table where big ideas are made.
The Gap That Brought Us Together
For decades, the literature on conservation social science, the field that asks how people, power, culture, governance, and livelihoods intersect with the natural world, has been dominated by scholars based in the Global North. The questions asked, the frameworks applied, and the agendas set have too often reflected priorities that are distant from the lived realities of East African communities, ecosystems, and governance systems.
My own PhD research sits squarely within this tension. I examine how conservation and blue economy interventions interact with gender norms, power relations, and social structures in small-scale fisheries and coastal social-ecological systems in Tanzania. What I find, again and again, is that policies designed primarily with ecological goals produce uneven and sometimes harmful social outcomes, particularly for women. These are not marginal questions. They are central to whether conservation works at all.
A group photo of participants during the workshop to develop the conservation social science Research Agenda for East Africa.
The workshop, co-convened by Professors Chris Sandbrook (University of Cambridge) and David Mwesigye Tumusiime (Makerere University), and funded by the Mastercard Foundation through the University of Cambridge Climate Resilience and Sustainability Research Fund, was designed precisely to address this gap. Not to import a framework from elsewhere, but to build one here, with scholars who know this region, its histories, its politics, and its people.
Applying When You Are Mid-PhD and Mid-Doubt
I applied to this workshop while I was preparing to conduct fieldwork in Tanzania, working with fishing communities in Lake Victoria. My supervisor at Brock University, Associate Professor Jessica Blythe of the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre, wrote my reference letter and backed my application with conviction. Her support, as a scholar who deeply understands the nature-society interface, gave me the confidence to submit and to believe that my mix of practitioner experience and emerging academic work was precisely what the organizers were looking for.
I want to say something plainly to other early career researchers who may be reading this: apply, even when your timing feels imperfect. I was in the field. I was stretched thin. The pool of applicants was formidable. But my background, a decade working with civil society organizations, government institutions, and fishing communities across Tanzania and the wider region, combined with a PhD research focus on governance, gender, and justice in inland and coastal social-ecological systems, turned out to be exactly the blend of experience and emerging scholarship the workshop was designed to bring together. You will not always know when you are the right fit. Submit the application and let the committee decide.
What Happens When 26 Researchers Build Something Together
The workshop was held at the Makerere University Biological Field Station, a research campus nestled within Kibale National Park, one of Africa’s most biodiverse tropical forests. Baboons moved through the grounds. Rain fell hard on some afternoons. The setting was not incidental; it anchored us in exactly the kind of nature-society interface we were there to discuss.
What made the process work was that it never felt like a conference. There were no passive audiences, no lecturers at the front of the room while the rest of us took notes. From the first evening, we were in structured conversation, in pairs, breakout groups, and plenary, generating ideas together and building on each other’s thinking. The facilitators trusted the group, and the group rose to it.
We began by asking ourselves what a research agenda for conservation social science in East Africa should even contain and for whom. The answers were not obvious. Should it target government agencies? International NGOs? Funders? Local communities themselves? Academic journals? Intergovernmental bodies? We identified all of these as audiences, and recognised that different outputs might be needed for different groups. We also wrestled with something more fundamental: is what we are producing a research agenda, or an agenda more broadly, or perhaps even a manifesto?
“People and nature thriving together — not as competing priorities, but as inseparable ones. That was the vision the group converged on, almost instinctively.”
The question of vision was one we returned to throughout the week. Imagining a future in which our research agenda had been fully adopted and implemented, we asked: what would success look like? The responses were strikingly coherent. Success would mean equity and justice, not just as outcomes but as the organizing logic of conservation itself. It would mean African-led research, with local knowledge formally integrated into decision-making. It would mean conservation organizations that genuinely, not rhetorically, center people. And it would mean power structures within the field are more evenly distributed, including who designs the research, who is listed as an author, and who holds the funding.
A field trip to Bigodi, a community at the edge of Kibale National Park, produced the single most clarifying moment of the week. We visited KAFRED (Kibale Association for Rural and Environmental Development), a community-based conservation and tourism initiative, and spent time with Byaruhanga, a long-term member and secretary of the organization. When we raised the topic of social science research, he paused. He associated ‘research’ with biology i.e. frogs, reptiles, species inventories. The idea of research that focuses on people, governance, and power was genuinely new to him. That gap between what social scientists know matters and what communities understand research to be is not a footnote. It is itself a research agenda item.
Group photo at Bigodi Wetland Sanctuary (KAFRED); the field visit that produced the week’s most clarifying moment
Participants at the KAFRED entrance sign, the community visit that sparked the conversation about what “research” means
By the final days of the workshop, the group had mapped a rich terrain of priority research themes covering history and power, conservation governance and tenure, human-nature interactions, and indigenous knowledge and marginal identities, and had turned its attention to a harder question: what do we actually do next?
We voted. Each participant had five votes to allocate across a long list of possible actions. Three emerged as the group’s clear priorities and became the focus of dedicated breakout groups on the last day.
The first: writing up the research agenda and publishing it. A group committed to producing two documents, a formal agenda paper and a journal article, likely targeting People and Nature. Sections were allocated to specific authors, with zero drafts due by April 15th and a first full draft by April 30th. I am part of the team working on the Big Picture and Framing section.
The second: capacity building through short courses. A dedicated group mapped out what this would require, beginning with a Training Needs Assessment across the region, followed by a Training of Trainers process to develop and contextualize materials for East African institutions. The audience for these short courses is broad: researchers, practitioners, academics, from lecturers to undergraduates, and Ministry of Education actors. The group identified specific points of contact and began discussing budget requirements.
The third: establishing a regional network for conservation social science in East Africa. This was perhaps the most architecturally ambitious of the three. The group designed a CSSR Agenda-EA Network with thematic groups organized around the research priority areas, an open-source repository of research by members, a membership structure open to individuals, students, and conservation organizations, and a resource mobilization strategy linking online presence, mailing lists, and social media.
Cutting across all three actions was a fourth commitment that the full group adopted together: promoting narrative change. This means actively contacting deans and departments at universities and research institutions across the region, offering guest lectures and seminars on conservation social science, and challenging the persistent institutional bias that positions STEM as the default language of conservation.
We also agreed, collectively, on two things that belong not in any working group but in each of our individual practices: actually doing conservation social science research, and modeling inclusive, ethical, and community-engaged research in how we do it. These are not strategies. They are commitments.
What Kibale Changes About a PhD in Sustainability Science
My doctoral research is rooted in sustainability science, a field grounded in the conviction that understanding the world’s most pressing problems requires crossing disciplinary boundaries, taking local context seriously, and asking who bears the costs and who holds power. Kibale compressed all of that into five days of unusually honest conversation.
The debates about indigeneity and recognition, the SWOT-B analysis of what is holding conservation social science back across the region, the walk through a selectively logged forest with researchers who could explain the social history behind every cleared patch, these did not give me new data points. They gave me a sharper sense of the landscape my research is part of. They made explicit the political and institutional forces that shape which questions get asked, which voices get cited, and which communities get studied versus consulted.
I return to Brock with something more than notes. I return with co-authors, collaborators, and colleagues. I return as a contributor to a document that will shape the direction of conservation social science Research in East Africa. And I return with a clearer understanding of what it means to position research not just as knowledge production, but as a form of advocacy for more just and inclusive ways of living with nature.
To the Early Career Researcher Wondering Whether to Apply
I want to end with something direct, because it is what I wish someone had said to me more clearly earlier in my career.
Apply to things that stretch you. Not the things you are perfectly positioned for, but the ones that are one step further than where you think you currently stand. The selection committees for workshops like this one are not looking for finished scholars. They are looking for emerging ones, researchers who bring genuine curiosity, field experience, real questions, and the intellectual courage to sit in a room with people who know more than they do and contribute something anyway.
Ask for the reference letter. The support of a supervisor who believes in your work matters enormously, not just to the application, but to your own sense of whether you belong in the room. I am grateful to Prof. Jessica Blythe, whose letter highlighted my strengths with specificity and whose encouragement made the application feel worthwhile.
Be in the field. Some of the most important things I know about conservation and society, I learned not from journal articles but from spending time with fishing communities on the Tanzanian coast. That knowledge, qualitative, contextual, and relational, is not a lesser form of expertise. At a workshop like Kibale, it is exactly what is needed.
Let the experience change your questions. I came to Kibale with a research agenda. I left with a sharper one. The conversations, the field visit, the disagreements, the surprising consensus, all of it refined what I think matters and why. That kind of recalibration is worth more than any single paper.
The Conservation Social Science Research Agenda for East Africa will be published later this year. It will be African-led, community-grounded, and theoretically ambitious. When it arrives, I hope it opens doors for researchers across the region, for communities who have long been studied but rarely heard, and for a generation of early-career scholars who have been waiting for a seat at the table where the questions are set.
That table now exists. Pull up a chair.
Editrudith Lukanga is a PhD Candidate in the Sustainability Program at the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre (ESRC), Brock University, supervised by Associate Professor Jessica Blythe. Her doctoral research examines governance, gender, and justice in small-scale fisheries and coastal social-ecological systems in East Africa. She participated in the Nature-Society Research Workshop, Makerere University Biological Field Station, Kibale National Park, Uganda, 23–27 March 2026.
The workshop was co-convened by Makerere University and the University of Cambridge (Professors David Mwesigye Tumusiime and Chris Sandbrook), with funding from the Mastercard Foundation through the University of Cambridge Climate Resilience and Sustainability Research Fund.
