As pressures on the environment from ever-increasing numbers of people with more needs and demands for natural resources grow, so must the number of conservation problems. Examining conservation problems solely from the perspective of the species or habitat that is put under pressure simply leads to a rapidly escalating list of ever-more-difficult problems. Solutions are hard to find, especially solutions that will be effective over longer time periods. In fact, conservation is almost never this straightforward anyway. It is much more complex and usually there are many different winners and losers in different sectors of society, and often over time and in different places as well. No wonder, then, that progress to meet conservation targets has been so challenging. As the authors in this book show over and over again, the apparent conflicts between people and the environment are better tackled by appreciating that the conflicts are actually between different groups of people. While sometimes the conflicts are very clear, especially to conservationists working on the front line who encounter stakeholders with different perspectives, this is rarely the case, and it is even rarer that the issues can be simply or neatly circumscribed.

A key advance, then, is the recognition that conservation is an interdisciplinary endeavour and that biologists acting alone can never hope to make lasting progress. Instead, recognising the many linkages between nature and society, and building on the different kinds of values that people have and hold for nature will allow much more fundamental and ultimately sustainable progress to be made. Conservation will never work when it is either apparently or actually at odds with the needs and wishes of those who are nature's stewards.

So, this is a very important book, focussing as it does very clearly at the interface between conservation and livelihoods, and scrutinising many different strategies for enhancing both conservation success and social outcomes in mutually supporting relationships.