Goals and objectives
The overall goal of the project Hunting for sustainability is to assess the social, cultural, economic and ecological functions and impacts of hunting across a broad range of contexts in Europe and Africa.
HUNT seeks to understand what influences value systems and attitudes to hunting, how these attitudes influence and determine individual and societal behaviour in hunting, and finally, how this hunting behaviour influences biodiversity.
The specific objectives of this Medium-scale Focused Research Collaborative Project are to:
- Investigate the meanings attributed to hunting by different social groups in different localities.
- Analyse how institutional arrangements and institutional change influence hunting.
- Assess the economic importance of hunting and alternative forms of land use at different spatial scales.
- Consider which species are hunted, what harvesting strategies are employed and build models to quantify sustainability of these strategies..
- Examine how game management influences various aspects of wider biodiversity.
- Integrate the findings from the social, cultural, economic and ecological values and impacts of hunting into the European policy context and its wider global application.
- Establish communication concerning the design and implications of the project results with key stakeholders and policy makers, and to disseminate these findings to a wider public.
- Develop fora for the implementation of methodologies for the reconciliation of conflicts between key stakeholders over hunting practices.