The Passing of Prof Marshall Murphree
29 October 2021
One of the great thinkers in community-based conservation, Marshall Murphree, has passed away at the age of 90. He was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Zimbabwe where from 1970 to l996 he was Director of the Centre for Applied Social Sciences. From 1994 to 2000 he was Chair of the IUCN Sustainable Use Specialist Group.
In the early 1990s, in a paper on Communities as Resource Management Institutions, Prof Murphree observed:
Resource use without resource management is non-sustainable. But equally any attempt to establish resource management without resource use is likely to be futile…
The evidence is that communities can become effective institutions for sustainable resource management, but only if they are granted genuine proprietorship, that is, the right to use resources, determine the mode of usage, benefit fully from their use, determine the distribution of such benefits and determine rules of access.
The paper is available here. This paper and the many others he wrote will continue to provide inspiration and guidance on community-based conservation for generations to come.
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