Bill Adams’ scholarship has profoundly changed the way conservationists see the world
J ULIA P.G. JONES * 1 , 2 and E . J . MILNER-GULLAND3
It is unusual for academic writing, in and of itself, to funda- mentally change policy and practice. However, Bill Adams’ highly original and influential writing about conservation has demonstrated how this can be done. Bill retired as the Moran Professor of Conservation and Development at the University of Cambridge in 2022 and this year he stands down as a Senior Editor of Oryx after more than 25 years. Now is a good time to reflect on his extraordinary body of work and, we hope, introduce a newaudience to his writing. Reading Bill’s extensive back catalogue is to have a wise
and often sharply humorous voice talk you through the major debates in conservation over the last quarter of a cen- tury. He is incredibly well-read, and erudite in his refer- ences, but his writing has a light touch that is a pleasure to read. From amongst Bill’s varied writings we highlight some key pieces that illustrate the breadth of his thinking. All are worth reading (or re-reading) in their own right, but they also illustrate four lessons that shine through.
Conservation needs a diversity of perspectives
Bill was ahead of his time in advocating for conservation to be interdisciplinary, to draw on relevant theories and in- sights from across scholarship. Unlike most conservationists of his generation, he came into conservation from geography (a discipline that combines social and natural sciences) rather than from a background in ecology or biology. His 2007 editorial (Adams, 2007) is an insightful take on interdisciplinarity. Bill values disciplinary expertise, stating “without taxonomy, Tardigrades are just ‘bugs’; without anthropology, ethnicity is just ‘tribe’, and any intelligent detailed discussion of biodiversity and society is stillborn”. He notes that conservation needs to break free of the bound- aries that traditionally constrain academic research, and that biologically trained conservationists need to engage with social sciences if they are to address the causes and consequences of biodiversity loss, which are embedded in political, economic and societal contexts. This may not be a surprising insight nowadays, but its importance was not then widely recognized. Bill’s scholarship takes the long view: exploring where conservation is coming from, and how its past shapes
*Corresponding author,
julia.jones@
bangor.ac.uk 1School of the Environment and Natural Resources, University of Wales,
Bangor, UK 2Department of Biology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands 3Department of Biology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
current institutions, relationships and worldviews. He was one of the first to think about the influence of conservation’s colonial past, with his book Decolonizing Nature (Adams & Mulligan, 2003). Similarly, his masterful account of the his- tory of Fauna & Flora, a conservation NGO with which he has worked closely as a Board member and as an editor of this journal, explores the transition of penitent hunters into nature conservationists (Adams, 2004). Bill’s writing chal- lenges us as readers both to take the long viewon the context within which conservationists operate, and to consider how our own backgrounds affect the way we engage with nature and the people and institutions with which we interact.
Trade-offs must be recognized and negotiated
Bill’s writing often cuts through a debate to the heart of an
issue.Agood example is his classic essay ‘If community con- servation is the answer for Africa, what is the question?’ (Adams & Hulme, 2001), which feels as fresh today as when it was published 23 years ago. The piece caricatures different stances on community conservation: the preserva- tionists whose focus is instrumental—working with commu- nities to make biodiversity objectives more achievable—and those who focus on using conservation to generate benefits for people. Bill and his co-author reject uncritical expecta- tions that community conservation is able to deliver wholly on either of these agendas. In a beautifully constructed piece they point out that the appropriate question is not whether community conservation works, but who gets to de- cide how the inevitable trade-offs between the objectives of different groups are negotiated. The inevitability of trade-offs is a recurring theme: Bill
has no patience for attractive but overly simple stories about win-wins for people and nature. In a review in Science (Adams et al., 2004) he and his co-authors present a helpful typology of four ways of looking at links between poverty reduction and conservation. This piece continues to be highly read and cited 2 decades later.
Conservation is inherently political
In the 1990s Bill started to identify with the emerging discip- line of political ecology, which wrestles with the way power dynamics shape nature and how that intersects with human justice. He has been influential in critical social science ever since. Bill once wrote that he is often asked why he insists on ‘making conservation political’ (Adams, 2015,p. 64).
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. Oryx, 2024, 58(5), 547–548 © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605324001273
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