culture / conservation / regeneration // the tropics
ConnectEvidence works in two ways - to inform good design within your team, and to persuade others to believe that your conservation enterprise idea is going to work, financially and impact-wise. This post provides an overview of how to understand the two groups of people you need to know intimately to be effective – your … Continue reading Conservation Enterprise Development: Research for Design
Most conservation enterprises start with an business idea to test, but how do you know that this idea is the best possible strategy? if possible, it's good to step back and choose an idea to develop based on the particular assets and resources of the place and the community dependent upon it. Getting to know … Continue reading Conservation Enterprise Development – getting to know your place
When it comes to using markets for conservation, organisations become adept at applying a particular approach. However, there’s a danger that you end up with a hammer in search of a nail, rather than choosing the right approach that fits the challenges and opportunities of a particular place, culture or landscape. This article provides a … Continue reading From Hammer to Toolkit: An Overview of Value Creation for Conserving Tropical Diversity
Why clear vast swathes of rainforest, with up to 75,000 tree species per kilometre, and replace it with a single species of oil palm? Why are custodians of a vast amount of cultural knowledge forced to live in poverty on the sidelines of society? The short answer is because there is a huge difference between … Continue reading Revaluing Tropical Diversity
For much of Robert Aldrich’s book Colonialism and Homosexuality, my main reaction was surprise at just how many of the famous people of the era of empire were apparently homosexual. From Rajah Brooke to Kitchener to W. Somerset Maugham, it’s clear that gay people as explorers, businessmen, writers and warriors made Britain’s Tropical empire in … Continue reading The Tropics and homosexual liberation
Following on from my last post, I started to write about how better access to meaningful, accessible information for Aboriginal leaders can improve decision-making, but I realised the issue was bigger than that. This post discusses how graphical data collection and display, app proliferation and mobile technology can improve decision making and accountability, both for … Continue reading How visual data and mobile technology can improve Indigenous decision-making and accountability
What to take, what to leave behind and how to make it all fit into your backpack (which always seems just a little too small) are things we all agonise over before a big travel adventure. I wanted to share what I did right and wrong my trip. What do you do differently? How to … Continue reading Packing for Africa
This article is the second in a series which discusses how current our current institutional landscape hinders Aboriginal community development. The usual explanation for dysfunctional institutions is that unskilled or unsavoury directors are not carrying out their function properly, yet what if the problem is the current institutional set-up itself? In 2008, the Labor government instituted reform of … Continue reading Rethinking Aboriginal Governance II – the NT’s Regional Councils
Tanzania is home of some of Africa’s greatest natural spectacles but it also feels, well, just that - a spectacle - its roads lined with German tourists in safari vehicles and its traditional African hospitality coming with a (large) price tag. You have to search harder for the magic here than elsewhere in Africa, but … Continue reading The Maasai Warrior and the Holy Mountain
Madagascar feels like a fairy tale. In its varied landscape, around 90% of its 200,000 known species are unique to the island; lemurs, fossas, tenrecs, pygmy chameleons and giant geckos are just some of the wonders. Originally settled by Indonesians, its culture is a strange mix of Indonesia, Africa and France, where people grow rice, … Continue reading Madagascar, the Nothing and the Neverending Story
tropicalism 