Freya St John

Before undertaking my PhD in understanding illegal resource use I worked as a conservation practitioner in Greece and elsewhere for eight years. This sparked my interest in interdisciplinary research that seeks to understand people and their interactions with the natural world.

I am interested in understanding the links between human behaviour, well-being and conservation. Much of my research focuses on conservation conflict together with investigating the prevalence and drivers of peoples’ involvement in unlawful resource extraction. However, gathering robust data on rule breaking directly from people is challenging. For this reason, my group and I test cutting-edge social science techniques for asking people sensitive questions. Our work draws widely from social science disciplines in order to strengthen levels of understanding on what drives conservation-related behaviour including rule breaking and the differing levels of tolerance people exhibit for co-existing with wildlife.