Alexandra Zimmermann

Dr Alexandra Zimmermann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at University of Oxford, the founding Chair of the IUCN SSC Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Specialist Group, and founder of Negotiating Coexistence. For the past 25 years she has worked on human-wildlife conflict (HWC) in a vast range of social, political and economic contexts around the globe, including conflicts over jaguars and pumas in Brazil and Venezuela, elephants in India and Indonesia, tigers in Nepal, bears in Bolivia, and fruit bats in Mauritius. Alexandra specialises in conflict analysis, community engagement, stakeholder dialogue, dispute negotiation and social research. She leads an annual MSc-level module in the Department of Geography at Oxford University and has taught a range of professional courses for the World Bank’s Global Wildlife Program and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). She was the lead Editor of the IUCN Guidelines on Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence and is currently preparing the first comprehensive textbook on the subject (Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence in Theory and Practice, Cambridge University Press) as well as a practitioner’s guide to managing conflicts (Negotiating Conflicts in Conservation, Oxford University Press). In 2023 she led and hosted the first global summit on HWC (International Conference on Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence) was previously a senior advisor on HWC to the World Bank, and regularly advises the UN and numerous governments on HWC policy and conflict negotiation matters. Raised in SE Asia, Middle East, Europe and Canada, her initial training was in zoology and conservation biology (BSc, 1997, Leeds University, MSc, 2000, University of Kent) before she specialised in conservation social sciences (DPhil, 2014, Oxford University) and trained in nonprofit strategic management at Harvard Business School (2015), conflict negotiation at Harvard Law School (2017) and diplomatic negotiation at the United Nations (UNITAR, 2019).