Mike Jones

Uppsala

Mike Jones trained as a wildlife ecologist in Zimbabwe and was employed by Zimbabwe’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management for 25 years. Much of his work was focused on large mammal population monitoring, sport hunting management, rangeland ecology, protected area management planning, community-based natural resource management and environmental assessment. Mike began a second career in conservation in 1995, leading community-based natural resource management programs for different small US-based non-profit organisations, working with farmers, foresters and fishermen in several countries within southern and eastern Africa. This work also entailed engagement with farmers and ranchers in the United States in various projects that enabled peer-to-peer learning among natural resource practitioners on two continents. The purpose of this work was to improve the capacity of natural resource managers on private land and enable them to share authority to manage natural resources with central government agencies. In 2009, Mike moved to Sweden, where, as an associate of the Resilience Alliance, he had an unpaid position at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, developing networks of practitioners willing to experiment with the application of social-ecological system science to natural resource stewardship. With its holistic view of nature in the context of complex adaptive systems, simple qualitative mental models based on the social-ecological system framework provide a new and more useful way of understanding and managing change in living systems than previous approaches based on linear models. Mike’s work at CBM includes teaching complex systems and social-ecological systems thinking in the Society and Environment course of the Master’s in Sustainable Development programme; linking CBM scientists to opportunities for international collaborative research; developing an interdisciplinary network of scientists interested in applying social-ecological system thinking to landscape scale action research projects; and enhancing teaching methods for sustainable development. Mike’s research is focused on synthesising scientific papers for policy audiences.