Researcher Profiles

Mike  Jones trained as a wildlife ecologist in Zimbabwe and was employed by  Zimbabwe's Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management until  2005. Over a period of 25 years much of his work was focused on large  mammal population monitoring, sport hunting management, rangeland  ecology, protected area management planning, community based natural  resource management and environmental assessment.

Mike began a second career in conservation, leading community based  natural resource management programs for different small US based  non-profit organistions, working with farmers, foresters and fishermen  in a number of countries within southern and eastern Africa. This work  also entailed engagement with farmers and ranchers in the United States in various projects that enabled peer-to-peer learning among natural  resource practitioners on two continents. The purpose of this work was  to improve the capacity of natural resource managers on private land and   enable them to share power with central government authorities. The  work was founded on experience with Zimbabwe's wildlife devolutionary  wildlife policy that had demonstrated the ability of farmers and  ranchers to manage their wildlife effectively and develop wildlife  production as a sustainable form of land use and livelihood.

In 2009 Mike moved to Sweden where, as a practicing member of the  Resilience Alliance, he occupied an unpaid position at the Stockholm  Resilience Centre, developing networks of practitioners willing to  experiment with the application of resilience science to natural  resource stewardship. With its holistic view of nature in the context of   complex adaptive systems, models based on resilience theory provide a new and more useful way of understanding and managing change in living systems than previous approaches based on linear models aimed at maximum  sustainable yield resource use. Mike has developed resilience  practitioner networks in the International Association of Impact  Assessors, leads a Resilience Task Force in IUCN's Commission on  Ecosystem Management, and is a visiting scholar at the Wallow Mountain  Institute in Oregon US, where he works as a facilitator and trainer with   a variety of agricultural universities and land management agencies in   the application of resilience science to planning and policy processes.

Mike's work at CBM includes facilitating the development of CBM  strategy; building strategic alliances with CBM partners; linking CBM  scientist to opportunities for international collaborative research;  developing an interdisciplinary network of scientists with an interest  in the resilience of food systems; and the creation of resilience short courses for natural resource management professionals. Mikes research  work is focused on the synthesis of scientific papers for policy  audiences.