James McNamara
Principal Consultant
James is an interdisciplinary conservation scientist with over ten years’ experience in Africa and Asia. He has expertise in the human dimensions of conservation, working with communities to integrate their needs into conservation planning and decision making.
He has led the development of a range of conservation socio-ecological research programmes, including working with farmers in Gabon to understand how the adoption of wildlife friendly farming practices could reduce human-elephant conflict, using fishers’ local ecological knowledge to map the distribution of crocodiles, and with livestock herders in India to develop solutions to reduce accidental poisoning of Critically Endangered vultures. He is well versed in a range of technical skills including the design of socioeconomic surveys, measuring wellbeing, project impact evaluations as well as R and GIS.
He holds a PhD from Imperial College, London, where he studied the economic and social dynamics of the wild meat trade in Ghana in collaboration with ZSL, and is a Research Associate with the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
