I’m thrilled to share that I have been awarded an Early Career Grant of $9,685 by the National Geographic Society, for my project title ‘Improving conservation behaviour-change communications’.
This will be used to conduct research in collaboration with WCS Cambodia, to understand how communications influence behaviour.
An update on Emiel’s PhD research as he heads back out to Cambodia. This post was originally published on the Edinburgh Conservation Science website.
I’m on my way to Cambodia once again so it’s time to give an update! After I arrived back last November it took me a while to get back into the swing of things. I’d had a little accident driving my motorbike in Vietnam which left me with scars down one leg, and a foot that was swelling. I moved into a new flat, with new flatmates, and by the time I’d recovered, settled, and caught up with everyone and all my other hobbies, it was Christmas.
The New Year started on the right foot (no pun intended). My first act after returning to work was to make a pre-submission to a journal, hoping to persuade them to consider publishing the first paper of my PhD. The paper itself still needed some polishing so I spent quite a bit of time getting it into shape over the following months. Unfortunately, we still don’t know whether they want to take it, so the paper is just sat on my desktop waiting for a home. If you want to know what it’s about I’m afraid you’ll have to be as patient as I am trying to be!
In the meantime, I started talks with WCS about what comes next. When I left, I’d given them a brief presentation about what I was finding as I investigated poisoning in Preah Vihear. They then asked me to start thinking about interventions to reduce wildlife poisoning. Of course, this isn’t something I could do without significant input from WCS, but, as they were going through some staff changes, it took a while before we could seriously talk and start to make plans. As the plans did start to materialise, the amount of work I would have to do to ready those plans became clearer, and kicked me out of my post-Christmas complacency.
We’ll think about the different types of people that engage in wildlife poisoning, the behavioural change we want them to make, and the strategies or messages that could get them there.
So, what are the plans? Firstly, we’ll be organising a three-day intervention-planning workshop involving WCS staff, and facilitated by me. This will take a social marketing approach, and I’ve been fortunate to receive guidance from experienced social marketers like Diogo Verissimo, a colleague in Oxford. We’ll start by clearly identifying the problem of wildlife poisoning, the behaviours, motivations and other factors that contribute to this issue. Then, we’ll think about the different types of people that engage in wildlife poisoning, the behavioural change we want them to make, and the strategies or messages that could get them there. Of course, for this to work we need to have a clear understanding of wildlife poisoning, who does it, and why, as well as the social norms surrounding its use. This is where the data I collected last year comes in, and I’ve been working hard to write up a report to share with my WCS colleagues.
I want to know whether the villagers care about this information, whether they pass it on to their friends and family, and whether they can remember it after a while.
I’ll also be conducting another study while I’m in Preah Vihear. WCS runs awareness-raising workshops in villages across Preah Vihear, informing villagers about the endangered species that live around them, their importance, and the laws that protect them. I want to know whether the villagers care about this information, whether they pass it on to their friends and family, and whether they can remember it after a while. These things would all be necessary for awareness-raising workshops like this to have a conservation impact, but they’ve never been tested. WCS have kindly agreed to modify the workshop that they’ll run in my study village. Instead of inviting the whole village, we’ll just invite a few select individuals, on the basis of the social network data I collected last year. We’ll also simplify it and include a few key messages that we’ll be able to track, and test knowledge on.
But all that’s for later… stay tuned! The first thing I’ll do when I arrive is travel to Kampong Thom to take part in the wedding of a good friend of mine. We both started our work with WCS as young graduates back in 2016, and I’m honoured to be a groomsman. Photos to follow!
This post originally published on the ICCS website.
Conservation happens all over the world and, by partnering with local organisations, ICCS researchers get to work in many different places. Conservation also often occurs in remote areas with sparse populations and poor infrastructure, which can make working there very challenging. But getting to the places where conservation happens, collecting data, and understanding what is going on is an essential part of conservation science. For my PhD, I’m working in Cambodia to understand the issue of wildlife poisoning, and working with the Wildlife Conservation Society to develop strategies for persuading local communities to stop doing it. Having just returned from a five-month stint in the woods, I thought I’d share five thoughts I have about making fieldwork a success.
1. Plan ahead – Having a plan reduces risk and provides peace of mind. It is especially important to have an idea of where you’ll eat and sleep each night! Take risk assessments seriously, make sure you know how to access emergency services, and make sure you have a first aid kit and that you know how to use it. Similarly, if you’re using vehicles, make sure you have the knowledge and tools to do basic maintenance if you won’t be able to access a garage. Finally, think about a small bottle of hand sanitizer for those bush toilets!
2. Go with the flow – Nothing ever goes perfectly to plan: there are always things that no amount of planning can prepare you for. The only way to deal with that is to keep calm and have a sense of humour. Remember: it’s very difficult to die. Solutions almost always present themselves, especially in the developing world where people are incredibly resourceful. One dark rainy night each of our three motorbikes had a breakdown and each time a kind passer-by rescued us!
3. Use local knowledge – Local help isn’t just important in emergencies but in every stage of fieldwork from planning to execution. Local collaborators can give you the best planning information and guide you through bureaucracy, I wouldn’t attempt any sort of work without one. Learning the local language is invaluable as talking to locals will give you the most up to date and detailed information. Even just taking a moment to ask about the road ahead can save you hours of headache.
4. Manage your stress – Even if you are a zen-master and follow all of the above, fieldwork is bound to cause you stress at times. Often there is a lot of time and money invested and, especially as a PhD student, it can feel like you’re in it on your own. Make sure you find time and opportunities to do the things you usually love like sport, reading, or listening to music. Keep in touch with your loved ones, and those that can give you moral support – you’ll be surprised where you can get mobile coverage these days!
5. Enjoy yourself –Despite the stress and shock, working in such a different environment and culture is a rare privilege and an amazing adventure. Remember to live in the moment, enjoy the food, take pictures, be curious and learn from the people around you, enjoy each sunrise and sunset and keep a journal. Soon you’ll be back home with a treasure-trove of stories to tell, and maybe feeling just a little wiser.
Emiel’s latest update about his fieldwork and all the challenges of surveying households in rural Cambodia. This post was originally published on the Edinburgh Conservation Science website.
I’m writing from Phnom Penh, fieldwork is done and I feel a great sense of relief. Everything worked out in the end, and within the time available, and it didn’t always seem like it would. Since I last wrote to you, the challenges of working in the Northern Plains of Cambodia only seemed to grow, the toughest times were still ahead. So let me start where we left off.
Everything worked out in the end, and within the time available, and it didn’t always seem like it would.
After about a week of limbo waiting and clearing some administrative hurdles, we finally got our letter of permission from the governor. We wasted no time and set off to the field the very next morning. A few days later, returning from the first village after a morning of heavy rains, we found ourselves cut off by water pouring across an otherwise good gravel road, and the bridges that had recently been installed to cope with flooding were underwater. I walked ahead along the sunken road and felt my way across the bridge step by step and, although the knee-high water was flowing fast, I wasn’t swept away, nor did the bridge collapse underneath me. Having completed this short pilot study, we pushed our baggage-laden motorbikes through slowly, staying well away from the edges.
No disaster then, but as the rains didn’t stop in the following days I began to imagine Atlantean villages accessible only by propeller-powered motorbikes and specialist diving equipment. These worries weren’t completely unjustified, for although the villages were unlikely to have been built on land susceptible to that level of flooding, those remaining on my list were among the hardest to access, and required water crossings even in the dustiest of dry seasons. I consulted with colleagues at WCS and they agreed a different plan was needed, especially, they were sure to add, given our lack of skill in forest-riding, which they had all noticed. The plan was to take a boat to the first of three villages and walk the four or five kilometres between each of the remaining two. When we were done, the boat would come back for us.
The plan was to take a boat to the first of three villages and walk the four or five kilometres between the remaining two.
Walking for me means packing light. I cut the non-essentials and managed to fit everything needed, including my hammock, the tablets and solar panels, into my 40L backpack. I had clothes for a few days and soap to wash them. The only extra weight I would have to carry by hand were the boxes of soap that we give to our respondents as thanks. On the morning of departure, I met Vichet and Theavy each heaving two bulging backpacks which they insisted couldn’t be cut down further. We met our boatsman at his village and from there walked 2km in the rain to where he kept his boat in a canal – a steely taste of what was to come. The boat was a narrow wooden curve, filled with murky water that glistened with oil. Using cut plastic containers we began scooping the water out and didn’t stop until we got to our destination.
The journey itself was fascinating and gave us a glimpse of many different landscapes. First, we passed through vast flooded grasslands, the boat sticking to deeper channels and occasionally cutting through thick clusters of bushes and bamboo along passages marked by plastic bags tied onto branches requiring us to duck for cover. After about four hours we heaved the boat onto a shallow mound of earth and dragged it across to a channel on the other side. We had reached the Stung Sen, one of the largest rivers in Cambodia that drains the forests of the Northern Plains into the vast Tonle Sap lake. The Stung Sen made for a more pleasant journey as we wound our way through the deep forest with tall trees towering along the banks. As we got deeper into the forest the banks gave way until it seemed like we were within a flooded forest, dodging trees, the water stretching into the murky undergrowth. We saw snakes floating on the water, giant monitor lizards resting on branches, and scores of birds overhead.
Earlier in the day our boatman had sprung us with the news that we wouldn’t be able to make it in one day and that we’d have to find somewhere to sleep in the forest. Not keen on a hungry night in the rain, we reached a compromise to try and reach one of the small, illegal settlements that are cropping up along the river together with the economic land concessions and enabled by the road access that they bring. It was close to darkness by the time we scrambled onto the riverbank and emerged between a small cluster of wooden houses, where we were gratefully fed, and allowed to wash and sleep. We completed our journey early the next morning, said goodbye to our boatman at the shore and began lugging our boxes down the narrow path passing the occasional boy herding cows. As the path widened houses began to appear and it started to rain. When we arrived at the main dirt road leading into the village we were greeted by a slightly intimidating group of about two dozen men standing around a broken bridge, but as we approached a couple of them came towards us, smiling, and carried our bags across for us.
My assistants asked around and found a ‘kor-yun’, a motorised ox-cart, to carry us to the next village for a small fee.
The next few days proceeded as they usually do, walking through the village surveying households, and inviting people to focus groups with the chief’s help. Khmer villages are laid out along roads so this involved a lot of walking, and without our motorbikes, reaching the farthest households took some time. It was also very wet, and, as I discovered one agonising and wakeful night, the constant squelch of mud between the toes eventually inflicted a cost in the form of trench-foot (maybe jungle-rot is more accurate): the skin between my toes dissolving away, leaving inflamed and infected openings. With this on our minds my assistants asked around and found a ‘kor-yun’, a motorised ox-cart, to carry us to the next village for a small fee. Along the way we got stuck multiple times and the wheels churned the mud and grass roots, making the roads even more treacherous for those that followed. We were warned that reaching the final village would be even more difficult and that walking was our only option, but luckily the village sub-chief volunteered to take us half of the way and show us a shorter route through the rice fields. He rested with us a short while in one of the thatch shelters that farmers use when they work their fields, and miraculously for such a remote place started streaming youtube on his phone.
We survived this saga and made it safely back to town just in time for the Pchum Ben national holidays. It was an important chance for Vichet and Theavy to return home, and for me to catch up on some writing and relaxation after more than two continuous months of fieldwork. I even found the time to hop the border to Ho Chi Minh city and explore a little bit of Vietnam. Having planned ahead and piloted the next survey in the last couple of villages, we returned well rested and prepared to enter phase two of our work.
Phase two was us returning to one village and doing a full Social Network Analysis. This meant we had to (try to) interview every adult in the village – so we settled in for a long-term stay at the house of the bemused village chief, bringing vegetables and meat from the distant market. After a few days we reverted back to the village standard of rice and fried fish which were in great abundance after the heavy rains. Each day we would visit new households and explain what we were doing, and after receiving their consent we would take down a list of the members of that household. We would then interview each of the adults separately, asking them to tell us who they go to talk to in the village, who they go to for advice, and who they interact with in a number of different ways. Very often not everyone was home so we would either arrange a good time to come back, having left a packet of soaps as a thank you and incentive, or visit again each morning until we found them. We continued this pattern for close to three weeks of hard work, starting at 7am and finishing after dark, with a short siesta in the middle. The evenings are when the men return home from the rice fields so we would try to take advantage of that time. By the end we knew everyone in the village and they knew us, and we had friendly people letting us know who was home in their neighbourhood, or waving us over to interview a neighbour that we’d been hoping to meet. With almost 400 interviews done, I think only two people refusing to be interviewed says a lot about the character of the people here!
Having finished slightly ahead of schedule, we had some valuable time left for my assistants to check through the thousands of names that we had recorded. Using a list provided by the village chief, we checked each of them and made sure the spelling was consistent. Names aren’t used in Cambodia as frequently as we use them and it’s quite common for people not to know the full names of even their close friends. Instead, people address each other as ‘brother’, ‘aunty’, and so forth, or use nicknames. This made the job more difficult than it could have been, but diligent questioning and time spent cross-checking meant we now have a really excellent dataset. I cant imagine if I’d had to check all those names myself in a script I can barely even read! Luckily, the hard work of Vichet and Theavy enabled me to focus on writing reports and preparing for my presentations to the Ministry of Environment.
A colleague asked me why I wasn’t having a going-away party.
A colleague asked me why I wasn’t having a going-away party. To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about it. Knowing that I will be back here soon means I haven’t let myself get too sentimental, and it feels like I’ll hardly be gone at all – so I’ve kept working right up to departure. On my last evening in Preah Vihear I became aware of this, and tore myself away from the computer for a short time. I took my motorbike and rode the loop around town, a route that I often run in the cooler evenings. The town quickly falls away, leaving swampy lagoons on either side, filled with lotus, and as you follow its’ circular bend, the massive ridge of Tbeng mountain dominates your view, silhouetted below a blazing sky. The town lies sprawled out in front beyond the water, with stilted houses lining up along the road. I’ve spent so much of the past four months speeding my moto down these roads, and now, as I felt the familiar blast of air from a passing truck, a bit of nostalgia began to creep in. It felt like I was seeing things for the first time, it all seemed unfamiliar and new. I saw the families and groups of friends making the same evening ride, three or four to a bike. Every evening they park up along the water and watch the sunset, now turning purple, peeking through the lotus leaves. I felt I was riding into that sunset, a character who has survived to the end of an adventure movie. The hundreds of days spent facing new challenges in new environments were receding into the twilight of memory, too vast to for me to grasp. I turned back into town along the chaotic boulevard where the citizens of Preah Vihear gather to stroll, throw balls, and eat barbecue – the humming of life goes on.
This post was originally published on the Edinburgh Conservation Science website.
Emiel describes the first phase of his PhD fieldwork: a survey of ten villages, spread across two protected areas in Cambodia’s Preah Vihear province.
I’m writing this from the provincial town as we take a short break. After surveying six villages across three districts without any issue, we were turned back from the most recent village we attempted to survey. We had already spent the night at the chief’s house, but in the morning the news came from the district that we didn’t have permission to work there. The letters of support we carried from the Ministry of Environment and frantic phone calls with WCS were unfortunately not sufficient to resolve the issue, and we were forced to make the long and difficult trip back through the forest, empty handed. Waiting in town for bureaucratic reasons is a good excuse to write a blog post!
My two assistants, Vichet and Chantheavy, and I have now surveyed six of the ten villages. As we gain experience, things seem to be going more smoothly and, for me at least, are becoming more enjoyable. Those two have become real professionals which makes life easy for me. When we arrive in a village they know what needs to be done and what needs to be organised and I can take a step back while they sort it out. While we administer the questionnaire, my job is just to keep an eye on things and select the households to sample. It’s only in the interviews and focus groups that I take a more active role – directing the discussions while Vichet translates for me.
The pattern of activity in each village is, by now, predictable and familiar. We usually arrive some time in the afternoon, after a journey that has been unexpectedly challenging in some way (more on that later), and ask our way to the house of the village chief. Sometimes we then have to wait for him to return home, but otherwise we can introduce ourselves and ask his permission to do our work in his village. In addition to granting permission, they also generously allow us to make ourselves at home underneath their house (Khmer houses are raised on stilts) so that we can put up our hammocks, and, most importantly, feed us for the duration of our stay. Although it is never requested, we always give them a small payment for this when we leave.
Staying with these families has been a real pleasure and has offered me a great insight into their daily lives. Some of the chiefs are elderly and spend most of the day resting while their grandchildren run about, others have young families and shy teenagers. It’s the wives that are really in charge though, running the household and taking care of us. Some take a backseat after providing the meals, and others sit with us and chat and tell stories late into the evening. The last village was like this, and the young children gathered round to listen. In the day we had a little dance party where the kids taught me how to dance the Khmer way, and in the evening the two boys took us to the ancient temples, lying in ruins, smothered by the forest that surrounds the village. Pushing aside lianas to admire the beautiful stone carvings with our young guides was a unique privilege.
We spend most of the day walking the village and administering our survey, starting from around seven in the morning. As we walk I draw a little map in my notebook and check off the houses that we visit. We’ve now visited almost 300 households and this has also been a wonderful experience. As we approach and give the traditional greeting, hands together in front of our face, the villagers often smile and immediately begin to sweep their tables so that we have a clean place to sit – before they even know what we’re coming for! Certainly, the nature of our questions might be a bit sensitive for some of them, but on the whole everyone has been so gracious and patient. Seeing such a huge variety of households has also been fascinating in itself – I’d almost like to visit 300 households in the UK just to see the way that people differ in producing the space called ‘home’. I guess my inner anthropologist is emerging.
We’ve devoted considerable time and attention to one of the most important aspects of preparing for these meetings – the purchasing of snacks
In the evening, when the chief is free, we ask him to help us invite people to the focus group discussions. We’ve found that early in the morning is a good time for the men to join us as they are free before they go to work the farms, and the women find the early afternoon a good time after they’ve prepared lunch. We explain to the chief what sort of mix of families we would like to have in our discussion, and then we ride around the village together selecting the households at his advice. The chief will often, playfully, warn the villagers not to forget! When the time comes to start our discussion there is usually some waiting involved. We gather at a comfortable place, perhaps a village meeting house if there is one, or if the chief’s house has a table and some chairs we can meet there. Beforehand we’ve devoted considerable time and attention to one of the most important aspects of preparing for these meetings – the purchasing of snacks. In some villages there are little shops that may sell a few fried bananas in the morning, or perhaps a family that occasionally sells some fried doughballs with coconut or palm-sugar glazed doughnuts. Once our participants arrive, sometimes more than we expected and sometimes fewer, we start our discussions.
About those roads. I should mention that we drive three old moto’s (125cc mopeds), that require constant attention. The first set of four villages we visited are all in Chheb Wildlife Sanctuary, which is some distance from town, towards the Laos border. We visited all four in one large circular tour that took us two weeks. The roads were wide gravel, which makes for smooth driving, but that didn’t stop us from having various issues. We set off to the second village in the afternoon, but didn’t get there till the next morning. Don’t worry, we had a safe place to sleep, but not before a dramatic and stressful evening. To sum up our evening: all three of the motorbikes had an issue, one after the other, and each time we were rescued miraculously by a kind stranger who happened to be coming by. The night ended with us abandoning hope of reaching the village that day, and loading our motorbikes into an empty ice truck that was heading back towards the main road, where we were graciously invited to sleep underneath a local house.
The key lessons here were to brush up on some basic vehicle repair skills before undertaking such a voyage, and to always check the fuel tank before leaving. More importantly, I also learned about the huge generosity that people are capable of, and I will never forget the three people who helped us escape a dark night spent in the wilderness. After unloading our moto, the ice-truck driver scrawled his name in the mud on the side of his truck, so that we might find him on Facebook. It was really unfortunate then, that, the next morning after realising we’d left a set of keys in his truck, we were unable to find any trace of him. I left my phone number with the house we’d stayed at, and miraculously a day later we got a call that the keys had been returned.
The remainder of our time in Chheb went more smoothly as we’d learnt our lesson. Driving down the wide roads for hours at a time and passing nothing but the forests and grasslands on either side, gave a great sense of freedom and adventure! A recent camera trap survey showed that the area is still inhabited by wild cattle, elephants, leopards and wild dogs. Although we never saw any of these, it definitely felt like a very wild place.
Kulen Promtep, the other protected area we are surveying, is a different story. Rather than wide gravel roads, the villages are reached by ox-cart tracks which wind through the forest. At this time of year they are frequently flooded, prompting dozens of narrow moto tracks carved into the mud to scatter through the bushes, bypassing the flood. The trick must be to know which of these tracks is the right one to take, but as first-time visitors we clearly lack this knowledge. Often we’d get stuck, and have to push our motos through one at a time. While doing so, as the mud sprayed onto our clothes and the sweat soaked our shirts, a local youth might happily skirt around us and whizz off into the distance.
The first phase of my fieldwork is a survey of ten villages, spread across two protected areas in Cambodia’s Preah Vihear province. We’re trying to understand the ways that people learn about and make use of pesticides, and how this varies from village to village. In particular, we’re interested in the misuse of these poisons as a tool for killing and eating wildlife – a practice with obvious conservation and public health implications. Much of the conservation work here is focussed on a handful of critically endangered species, so the poisoning of just a few individuals (as has been documented in the past) could be catastrophic. In each village, we administer a structured survey to a sample of households, and hold focus group discussions for both men and women. We also interview and talk to anyone who might know something more about these issues in their village.
The second pilot village was very different to the first, so a lot of the things we thought we’d learned were thrown into question once again.
As you will know if you read my previous blog post, we had the opportunity to pilot our instruments in two villages before starting out – this was incredibly valuable. The second pilot village was very different to the first, so a lot of the things we thought we’d learned were thrown into question once again. To recap – the first village was quite isolated, and the villagers (belonging to the Khoy ethnic minority) were largely subsistence farmers. Our data suggested that pesticides were not commonly used for agricultural purposes, but there was a common practice of using poisons to hunt wildlife in the forest, especially in the dry season. The second village was bigger, more connected, and generally more developed. The villagers had large farms, and used modern tools such as tractors, as well as pesticides and fertilisers, and produced crops for sale to middlemen. Our data suggested that there was very little use of wild meats, let alone use of poisons for hunting – a practice that shocked the villagers due to its obvious health risks. On the other hand, we learned that poisons can also be used to defend against the flocks of birds that raid the rice fields.
The key lesson, I think, was the need for some flexibility in our questioning. The nature of the focus group discussion or the unstructured interview means that these methods can easily adapt to the kinds of information they generate. If new behaviours come up in the discussion, we can flexibly ask and get more information about that new behaviour. So, rather than have a set protocol for the discussion, I decided to generate a bank of questions covering all foreseeable avenues of inquiry, which we could refer to during the discussion. This has worked really well, and to date most discussions haven’t strayed too far from those avenues. The structured questionnaire was trickier to adapt. Naturally, if a respondent tells us he engages in behaviour ‘X’ we can still ask him specific questions about this behaviour that we couldn’t ask another respondent, but if we want to get some quantitative data that we can use to make comparisons between villages, we need to have a fixed set of questions that will make sense when asked in all villages, and to all people.
The final questionnaire we’ve been using contains a number of sections. We begin with some basic demographic questions, asking about the respondents age, gender, position in the household, and whether they participate in any conservation activities. Next is a simple set of wealth indicators, adapted from a Basic Necessities Survey dataset carried out previously in these villages. We ask respondents whether they own a number of objects, all of which are considered necessities by most people in the village, but some of which are easily acquired by most people and others which only the wealthy can acquire. Our first questions about poisoning practices are asked indirectly, using a technique called the Unmatched Count Technique. As some of these practices are illegal and sensitive, respondents may not be truthful when we ask directly, so instead we show half of them a list of five activities, including the poisoning practice, and ask them how many of the activities they do. The other half of respondents see a list of four activities, without the poisoning practice, so that we can estimate the prevalence of the behaviour from the difference between these two groups. Just in case some people are willing to talk, we then have three sections – one for each of the poisoning practices we know of, where we ask them directly and can get more details about the practice. We start innocently, for example by asking them what pest issues they face and what methods they have for dealing with them, before asking whether they use pesticides. As I think the use of poison for hunting in the dry season is probably the behaviour that is most concerning from a conservation perspective, we also have a set of Likert-style questions to assess respondent’s attitudes and perceptions of social norms around this behaviour, before the direct question itself.
As some of these practices are illegal and sensitive, respondents may not be truthful when we ask directly
We’re administering these questionnaires using the Open Data Kit – an open source bundle of software that allows you to design surveys and collect the data through an app on an android tablet. This makes it very easy to enter the data and collect it all into spreadsheets afterwards. It’s a bit of a learning curve to design the XLM forms used to produce the survey, but this is more than compensated by not having to carry hundreds of paper forms and typing these manually into a computer. I also carry a portable set of solar panels so we can recharge these tablets during long stints in the forest.
This post was originally published on the Edinburgh Conservation Science website.
“Let this be a warning to my future self: one month into the trip and none of this has gone as planned…”
It’s been a month since I arrived in Cambodia. Before leaving the UK I had prepared as much as I could. Via Skype and email I had arranged for two Cambodian students to meet me and to work as my research assistants. I had also prepared all the survey materials, questionnaires and focus group protocols – at least for the first phase of fieldwork. Well, let this be a warning to my future self – one month into the trip and none of this has gone as planned.
When I arrived in Phnom Penh back in June I took the weekend to acclimate and catch up with colleagues at WCS. On Monday my assistants came to meet me at the office. We signed their contracts, did some preparation and the next day were off to Preah Vihear – the town from which WCS bases it’s operations across the Northern Plains of Cambodia. I planned to use the rest of the week to translate my questionnaires and familiarise everyone with the material, and this was going well until one of my assistants got sick just a few days later. The doctor advised her to go to Phnom Penh to get a treatment at the hospital. Health is of course the most important thing, and going to do fieldwork in remote forest villages when sick is clearly not a good idea, so Vichet (my other assistant) and I resolved to have everything ready for when she returned.
By Sunday we were done, and we heard that she would have to stay away a little longer, so I gave Vichet a week off to go and finish writing his thesis. I myself took the opportunity to see another corner of Cambodia, Koh Kong, and enjoyed walking in the forest. While I was in the remote Tatai valley, with the faintest of mobile signals the news of her resignation reached me, as the doctor advised her not to travel for a month. I must admit I had a mild panic, but Vichet knew of another student who could take on the position. Before agreeing, I wanted to meet her and make sure she’d be up to the task, so I went to Phnom Penh to make the arrangements.
I lost count of the number of times I flooded my exhaust, forcing us to wait while it drained.
And so it was that on the 12th of July, nearly 3 weeks after arriving in country, I had a team ready to start the pilot study – Vichet and Chantheavy my sidekicks. We travelled to a village called Svay Damnak Chas, which is not inside one of our protected areas but has similar characteristics and is also surrounded by forest. I’d payed for the repair of 3 motorbikes that WCS had given up on, so although this was a very cheap option we were driving what might be called ‘pieces of crap’, as we soon found out. After arriving in the village we asked our way to the chief’s house, but he was staying at his rice field for a few days. We managed to get his phone number, and he advised us to speak to his deputy. At the deputies house we found that he too was in the field but would come back in the evening. I was impatient, and asked his son if he could take us to him. We just needed to get his permission to start working in the village, and find somewhere to sleep – and apparently, it wasn’t hard to get to the field. This was a mistake.
To get to the deputy, we drove for almost two hours through the forest, on roads that we found extremely challenging. Half the time was spent skidding over sand and the other half sloshing through deep pools of mud. I lost count of the number of times I flooded my exhaust, forcing us to wait while it drained. Eventually, tired and wet, we met the deputy heading back to the village on his ‘Kor-yun’ a kind of motorised cart. He said he’d have to call the chief when he got back to the village before he could decide, and so we started the aimless return journey. It was when I was waiting at the cusp of a deep pool that Vichet’s moto went wild. He flew through the air just beside me and turned on to his side in the deep pool. Some mud must have gotten into his accelerator cable and he could no longer control his speed. It was getting dark, so we hid the moto in the bush and came back for it the next day with a kor-yun. Of course, when we brought it to the village garage the problem could not be demonstrated and so nothing was done, until I fearfully drove it back to Preah Vihear after we finished our pilot.
The rest of our time in Svay Damnak Chas went fairly well. We hammocked under the deputy’s house and he kindly helped us to arrange our focus groups which we held in his yard. In the meantime we walked the village selecting households to survey. We learned a great deal, both about our protocols and about our research questions, and it was great for Vichet and Chantheavy to get some practice running a focus group before we do the real thing. It certainly wasn’t as scary as they may have thought beforehand. We got a better idea for how to phrase questions so that the villagers could understand them, and we also learned that one of our methods – the single sample count – was simply too complex for them to respond to properly. When the time came for our women’s focus group only a fraction of the invitees turned up, and more than an hour late. In contrast, all the men were early and we were joined by a swelling crowd as went.
We’re here to investigate the deaths of key wildlife species as a result of pesticide poisoning. Whether these were the result of the misuse of pesticides for agricultural purposes, or the intentional use of poison for hunting, was unknown. For the first few days of the pilot study all we were hearing is that pesticides were never used here, and that many people didn’t even know what a pesticide way. It was slightly baffling, but on the 3rd day was got a lucky break. One respondent mentioned that he uses poisons for catching birds and that they sometimes got stomach pains after eating this meat. Once we knew that this was a distinct behaviour, and once we understood the terminology used to describe these behaviours we were able to unlock a wealth of information in the focus groups and interviews. Everybody we asked offered us all the information we wanted about how they use these poisons, what species they catch and all the horrendous health effects that follow and that they seemingly ignore.
Naturally, these insights meant we had to change the focus of our questionnaire quite drastically to make sure we got this kind of information in future, but now knowing more about the behaviour of interest we are able to measure psychological constructs related to this much more effectively. Another issue is we’re not sure whether villages inside protected areas might be a little more sensitive about discussing this topic. So, tomorrow we’ll go to Kandak village to do a second pilot of our new survey instrument. Watch this space.
Emiel writes about the preparations for his trip. This post was originall published on the Edinburgh Conservation Science website.
I last wrote having just returned from Cambodia, and I write now as I’m preparing to return there. A lot has happened in the meantime.
Before I go, there is one formal hurdle I need to clear – the confirmation process. This is a sort of checkpoint I need to complete approximately 9 months into my PhD, in order to be ‘confirmed’ by the university. The process has three steps: Last week I gave a short presentation to my peers and academics in our department at an internal conference. It was the first real chance to explain to colleagues what I’ve been doing and what I want to do in the course of my PhD, and to hear about what others are doing. It was also a useful chance to get some feedback from everyone. I then expanded on this in my ‘confirmation report’ – a 26 page document (excluding appendices) giving more details about the background and reasoning for my research, setting out my research aims and describing how I’m going to answer these questions. I submitted the report to my advisor earlier this week and next will be my ‘confirmation panel’, where a small group of academics will question me about the report and provide feedback. Not only does the university use this to make sure us students are on the right track and capable of completing a PhD, but it should also be an invaluable opportunity to get some input from experts who aren’t directly involved with my project.
Before focusing on the confirmation report I took some time to draft what will hopefully be the first paper of my PhD. What I’m studying – information flows – is quite a new concept in conservation, although other fields, such as public health, have been looking at it for a while. One of my objectives is to say why we need to think about this and try some of the methods from other disciplines in a conservation context. To start this off I’m writing a sort of ‘opinion piece’ describing what it’s all about and why it’s important, and suggesting some of the ways that the issue could be addressed and why it might be different in conservation than elsewhere. This is a really fun exercise (in a nerdy sort of way) because it’s let me read widely and take time to really think about the concepts involved and how they relate.
In the background to all of this I have been thinking ahead to my first data-collection campaign. The past few months have been fascinating, and I feel like I’ve made progress, but fieldwork will produce the first tangible results. It will also be a significant investment. As such, I’m excited to get into the action, but I also feel a responsibility to make the right decisions. Through discussions with my supervisors and the team at WCS the plans have slowly been evolving and taking shape. At the same time there is a lot of practical/logistical stuff to think about – money, timing, transport. Most tricky of all is finding the right people, Cambodian students, to work with me as assistants.
I expect the next time I write will be from Phnom Penh
People from all over the world came to London to share in positivity, optimism and creativity at a 3-day Conservation Optimism summit.
This post was originally published on the Edinburgh Conservation Science website.
One really cool thing I’ve been involved with is the Conservation Optimism movement, which I’ve mentioned in previous blogs. This culminated in a 3-day summit at the end of April and I was very privileged to be part of the organising team through my supervisor EJ and the ICCS group at Oxford. Part of my job was to organise a panel of politicians with an interest in the environment. Unfortunately, although I’d secured commitments from very interesting speakers from all parties, Theresa May’s decision to call a snap election led to all of them withdrawing. This was disappointing, and it was easy to despair at the lack of political engagement with environmental issues suggested, but the rest of the summit provided an antidote.
People from all over the world came to London to share in positivity, optimism and creativity
I haven’t been to many conferences, but I’m sure there aren’t many like this. For three days, people from all over the world came to London to share in positivity, optimism and creativity. As well as politicians from other countries, we heard from psychologists about the importance of optimism for completing challenging tasks. We heard from businesses about how they are trying to do better. And we heard from many conservationists who have achieved real victories for the environment. It was a celebration of successes, a moment to learn from past efforts and the opportunity to think about taking conservation into the future. Realistically, not enough is being done for the environment, but the tide may be turning.
Social media, the internet, are incredible avenues for spreading messages and building support
Two of the plenaries really inspired me in particular. The first, Anna Oposa from Save Philippine Seas, because she was a young person that I could relate to. In fact, we’d even done our Masters courses in the same place, just a few years apart. But despite being young, she has achieved a lot in her home country. Using social media and smart slogans, she showed how she has built public campaigns and put pressure on politicians and businesses to think about the impacts of their activities on the oceans. Before she’d finished her speech, my head was spinning with ideas for issues in my local area and how I could try to address them. Social media, the internet, are incredible avenues for spreading messages and building support. The second speaker that impressed me was Lisel Alamilla, an environmental activist who then became a minister in Belize. It was fascinating to hear from someone who had both been a vocal and effective critic of the government, and then had a chance to join the government and implement those policies. I was interested to hear how she navigated the messy world of politics while trying to do good, and she seemed like a very resourceful, tactful and strong person.
There were also hundreds of smaller sessions; from conservationists sharing their successes and lessons, to innovative new ideas being developed. I took part in a workshop for the ‘Green list’ – an optimistic and forward-thinking counterpart to the famous IUCN red list. The red list is a central tool in conservation for classifying endangered species and keeping tabs on how close they are to extinction. But how do we keep tabs on species that are moving away from extinction thanks to conservation efforts? How do we communicate this and how can we measure the success of conservation in a standardized way. Those were some of the questions we brainstormed in the workshop, and no doubt the ‘Green list’ may be an equally important tool as we move from a problem-focused to a solutions-focused conservation.
Check #conservationoptimism on twitter, which has gained a life of its own with good news stories being shared every day.
An update after Emiel’s first PhD field trip to Cambodia. This post was originally published on the Edinburgh Conservation Science website.
I’ve just arrived back in the UK where, mercifully, the sun is shining. The past 5 weeks were spent in Cambodia. Already it feels like an alternate reality; the two sides to the coin that will be my life for the next 3 years. Each has its own daily rhythms, friendships, and all the innumerable details that make up and distinguish places separated by thousands of miles, and yet bridged by just a day’s travel. Building on 4 months working there last year, Cambodia is starting to feel familiar and as my language skills improve I feel increasingly at home. This is a blog about academia and work so perhaps I should just get all my feelings and impressions out now: I find Cambodia absolutely enchanting. Its people, language, music, food, landscape, everything and I cannot wait to return.
As attentive readers will remember, the purpose of my trip was to “scope”. To visit the field sites and connect with my partners at WCS in order to gain a better understanding of the situation and be able to plan my research. I am happy to report that it was a very successful trip. WCS are very supportive and engaged partners and I look forward to joining their team. They were very open to my ideas for designing interventions in an experimental way, so this will be an exciting challenge for the next few years.
Cambodia is starting to feel familiar and as my language skills improve I feel increasingly at home
After some time spent in Phnom Penh meeting people and taking Khmer lessons, I moved on to the town of Preah Vihear. WCS bases their operations in the “northern plains” from here and I stayed in their ‘technical-advisor house’. From here I met more of the WCS teams working in the area and made a number of trips into the field. Some of these were directly to sites related to my prospective research, but on others I took the opportunity to join trips that weren’t directly related. These were often exciting camping trips to very remote areas and gave me the chance to see what was going on in the area and to spend some quality time with the WCS team. I felt very privileged to have such access to these spectacular forests, which are not visited by many foreigners, even if it wasn’t without risks! (see the photo below with the knowledge that nobody was hurt)
This isn’t a travel blog so I wont overload you with details on where I went and what I ate. If you are interested in seeing a bit more of Cambodia and the places I went I’ll be working on some short ‘video diaries’. I’ve already made 2 of these (let me know what you think!) so check them out and watch this space.
Now that I’m back in the UK I will be working hard to plan and prepare my next trip. I will be looking for some Cambodian students to join me as field assistants and developing the research instruments that I will take to collect data. This trip may be sooner than expected, in just a few months, so there isn’t much time! In addition I’m helping to organise a summit on Conservation Optimism which is going to be fantastic and a very important event for conservation – do join if you have an interest in conservation.
I’m very pleased to share this guidance, published by the International Institute of Environment & Development, which aims to help conservation practitioners to evaluate the impacts of their interventions on human wellbeing.
Emiel de Lange 