Conservation & Community Development

Forest loss in Madagascar is driven principally by tavy shifting cultivation, charcoal and fuelwood production, cattle pasture burning, artisanal and industrial mining, and selective illegal logging of rosewood and ebony. Each has a different actor, a different economic logic and therefore a different possible intervention.

Participants learn to distinguish them in the landscape and in the data by reading satellite deforestation products, ground-truthing them on foot, and interviewing land users. They learn why a single explanatory story about deforestation is almost always wrong, and why interventions designed around the wrong driver fail.

The rosewood trade in particular teaches the international dimension: a Malagasy forest crime driven by demand thousands of kilometres away, mediated by CITES listings, port enforcement and political instability.

Madagascar's protected area network expanded dramatically under the Durban Vision commitments, and the country has been a major testing ground for community-based natural resource management through the transfer of management rights to local associations.

Participants examine how these arrangements work in practice: what the association actually controls, how patrols are staffed and funded, how sanctions are applied, and where the model succeeds or collapses. They also confront the literature on conservation displacement and the real costs borne by communities when access is restricted.

Payment for ecosystem services, REDD+ projects and mangrove carbon schemes are studied as live cases with visible strengths and visible problems, rather than as policy abstractions.

The development side of the programme is delivered with Malagasy partner organisations that set the priorities. Projects span reforestation nurseries with native species, fuel-efficient stove construction that reduces charcoal demand, water and sanitation infrastructure, school support, and sustainable livelihood initiatives such as aquaculture and handicraft enterprise.

We are explicit with participants about the ethics of volunteer work. Unskilled international volunteers do not build better than local tradespeople, and projects that displace paid local labour do harm. Our model is participant contribution alongside, and funding of, local employment, with the educational value flowing to the participant rather than pretending the participant is the beneficiary of the community's need.

Participants are also trained in the basics of monitoring and evaluation, so they can ask the question that matters about any project: how would we know if this worked?

Participants learn structured interview and questionnaire technique, informed consent, participatory mapping, focus group facilitation, wealth ranking and household survey design, alongside GIS mapping and basic spatial analysis. These are genuinely employable skills and are rarely taught to undergraduates in a real setting.

Malagasy language instruction runs throughout. Even functional greetings and basic conversational competence transform the quality of interaction and the honesty of data collected, and the programme treats language as a methodological tool rather than a courtesy.

Because our teaching team includes Malagasy researchers, lecturers and development professionals, participants encounter the national perspective as the default rather than as a consultation exercise. Many alumni continue with partner organisations, and several projects on our current sites were designed with earlier cohorts. This is the programme where our hybrid identity, research association and professional expedition operator, matters most, because sustained community work depends on relationships maintained between expeditions, not just during them.