The use of celebrities in marketing campaigns is widespread globally, including in environmental conservation. Celebrity endorsements are pervasive, but there is limited evidence of their effectiveness. We conducted a review of celebrityendorsed environmental campaigns. We report on the extent to which celebrities have been used in these campaigns, whether evaluation of the endorsement has been conducted, and assess whether there is evidence that the celebrities achieved the objectives they set out to accomplish through their engagement. We searched the peer-reviewed and grey literature in six languages from July 2018 to January 2019 and found 79 campaigns implemented in nine countries from 1976 to 2018. Two thirds of campaigns were implemented in China and reported in Chinese. Only four campaigns were evaluated, but none of the evaluations provided evidence of the effectiveness of celebrity endorsement. Evaluation focused instead on overall campaign outputs and outcomes. Claims of effectiveness were made, but the lack of measurable objectives, theory of change, outcome indicators, and critical evaluation renders it impossible to determine whether the outcomes achieved by the campaigns can be attributed to celebrity endorsement. It thus remains unclear whether celebrity endorsement can contribute to conservation efforts. It is essential for environmental practitioners and researchers to report the outcomes and lessons learned from celebrity endorsements to ensure that their future use in conservation marketing campaigns is evidence-based, thereby improving conservation practice.
Tools and expertise to improve the evidence base for national and international Illegal Wildlife Trade policy already exist but are underutilised. Tapping into these resources would produce substantive benefits for wildlife conservation and associated sectors, enabling governments to better meet their obligations under the Sustainable Development Goals and international biodiversity conventions. This can be achieved through enhanced funding support for inter-sectoral research collaborations, engaging researchers in priority setting and programme design, increasing developing country research capacity and engaging researchers and community voices in policy processes. This briefing, addressed to policy makers and practitioners, is part of the 2018 Evidence to Action: Research to Address Illegal Wildlife Trade event programme, organised by five of the UK’s most active IWT research institutions, to support the London 2018 IWT Conference.
In June 2016, we observed a group of Yellow-billed Oxpeckers foraging on a single male Giraffe, in the Savuti area of Chobe National Park, Botswana. From photographic evidence we estimate the Oxpecker group numbered between 51 and 60, the highest number on record for a single host.
Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) can have significant and deleterious impacts. Academic-practitioner knowledge exchange can improve the effectiveness of strategies to counter IWT; however, cases of inadequate knowledge exchange have been reported. To explore the challenges to academic-practitioner knowledge exchange on IWT, we conducted three workshops in the United Kingdom with a total of 10 academics from five universities and 15 practitioners from nine organisations that work on IWT, plus one interview with a senior conservation practitioner. We identified five main challenges, including general differences in the aims and worldviews of academics versus practitioners; poor communication; and the large size, diversity, and dynamism of networks working on IWT. Stretched resources, particularly insufficient time and funding, accentuate these challenges. The challenges we identified align with the challenges experienced in other areas of conservation, but some aspects are particularly acute for IWT. Our identification and description of these main challenges to academic-practitioner knowledge exchange on IWT could guide efforts to address them in current or future work on IWT. Also, as shown, consideration of our findings alongside relevant literature flag measures that could contribute towards countering the identified challenges to academic-practitioner knowledge exchange on IWT.
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