African wildlife conservation has been transformed, shifting from a traditional, state-managed
government approach to a broader governance approach with a wide range of actors designing and
implementing wildlife policy. The most widely popularized approach has been that of community managed
nature conservancies. The knowledge of how institutions function in relation to humans
and their use of the environment is critical to the design and implementation of effective conservation.

Traditional sectors such as agriculture and fishing often receive special treatment from policymakers because such sectors are perceived to be associated with traditional cultural public good values. However, these values are often difficult to measure and few attempts have been made to do so.

This paper reviews and in part extends an emerging literature that integrates development and environmental thinking. It focuses on a small part of the literature: economic evaluation, and goes on to develop the notion of sustainable development and construct a unified language for sustainability and policy analyses.

Many protected areas or parks in developing countries have buffer zones at their boundaries to achieve the dual goals of protecting park resources and providing resource benefits to neighbouring people.

This paper provides an overview of social science research in the marine environment of South Africa for the period 1994–2012. A bibliography based on a review of relevant literature and social science projects funded under the SEAChange programme of the South African Network for Coastal and Oceanic Research (SANCOR) was used to identify nine main themes that capture the knowledge generated in the marine social science field. Within these themes, a wide diversity of topics has been explored, covering a wide geographic area.