Conservation social science: Understanding and integrating human dimensions to improve conservation

The authors examine the scope and purpose of eighteen subfields of classic, interdisciplinary and applied conservation social sciences. From this, they articulate ten distinct contributions that the social sciences can make to understanding and improving conservation. In brief, this includes value for descriptive, diagnostic, disruptive, reflexive, generative, innovative, or instrumental reasons. The authors contend that the social sciences can help facilitate conservation policies, actions and outcomes that are more legitimate, salient, robust and effective.