Bridging Conservation and Development in Latin America and Africa: Changing Contexts, Changing Strategies
Tropical Conservation and Development (TCD) Program
59th Annual Center for Latin American Studies Conference
24th Annual Center for African Studies Gwendolen M. Carter Lectures
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
January 28-30, 2010
Conference Website
Conference Announcement
Latin American and African countries house some of the planet’s most diverse ecosystems, yet possess some of the world’s lowest standards of living. Expanding human populations, widespread poverty, the complexity of tropical ecosystems, and economies strongly dependent on natural resources make these regions and their inhabitants particularly sensitive to the inextricable linkages and tradeoffs between conservation and development. Especially in these settings, biodiversity conservation and sustainable development are complex, and range from synergistic to conflicting efforts, depending on how they are implemented.
The search for strategies to advance societal well-being without imperiling natural resources and associated ecosystem services has stimulated the emergence of diverse approaches to the conservation-development dilemma. The contrasting cultural, ecological, and institutional characteristics of African and Latin American realities have led to a range of development and conservation experiments at diverse scales, which provide rich opportunities for analysis, comparison and learning.
The purpose of this conference is to bring together conservation and development experiences from Africa and Latin America to discuss and compare emerging trends, and stories of success and failure. These exchanges will not only facilitate mutual learning among the participants, but also serve as a foundation to strengthen collaboration between the regions, and the definition of long-lasting solutions to advance conservation and economic development in its multiple dimensions.
The TCD program, host of the conference in conjunction with the Center for Latin American Studies and the Center for African Studies, draws on an extensive network of alumni and collaborating partners in Latin America and, more recently, Africa. Since its beginnings in the 1980s, the TCD program has trained approximately 350 alumni from 34 countries plus the U.S. Over 90% of the non-U.S. alumni came from developing countries in Latin America and Africa.
TCD’s mission is to bridge theory and practice to advance biodiversity conservation, sustainable resource use, and human well-being in the tropics. TCD’s main goals are:
- To train graduate-level professionals, particularly those from developing countries, to bridge theory and practice and learn across disciplines;
- To promote cross-national, integrative, comparative problem-centered research;
- To strengthen and expand learning and action networks.