Cultivating stewardship to reimagine sustainable environmental futures across Africa.
The Inclusive Conservation and Tourism Lab at the University of Johannesburg is an African-led research group working towards building equal access to wild spaces.
Rethinking Access, Inclusivity, and Stewardship in African Tourism and Conservation
Across Africa, protected areas sit where biodiversity conservation, tourism, and social inequality meet. These landscapes hold immense ecological and cultural value, yet access to them remains uneven and shaped by histories that continue to determine who belongs in wild spaces.
Led by Professor Julia Giddy, the Inclusive Conservation and Tourism Lab studies these barriers to access and inclusion and develops alternative narratives, approaches, and management strategies to broaden stewardship and rethink how conservation and tourism are practised in African contexts.​
Our vision is a world where all people have access to protected natural environments that enrich their lives.
Our Objectives
Our mission is to advance social science research to understand the social dynamics of conservation, enable inclusive tourism, and promote environmental justice.
To achieve this, we have three interconnected objectives:
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Understanding Conservation in Context
Advancing context-specific research to understand the social dynamics of conservation.
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Advancing African Leadership
Develop a cohort of industry-ready, socially and environmentally conscious tourism practitioners and researchers
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Translating Research Into Action
Provide research-based guidance and practical support to transform the tourism and conservation sectors.
Our Research
Our research investigates the interconnected challenges of governance and socio-ecological injustice.
We are guided by three focus areas designed to understand the dynamics and barriers to inclusive and sustainable conservation futures.
Equity in Access to Protected Areas
Investigating who is able to access protected areas, who is excluded, and what are the structural, social, and economic barriers shaping participation.
Power, Narratives, and Knowledge Systems in Conservation
Understanding how conservation narratives are produced and controlled, whose voices dominate, and how alternative or indigenous knowledge systems reshape understanding.
Transformative Pathways and Comparative Learning
Exploring how barriers can be overcome, what alternative approaches and management strategies exist, and what lessons can be drawn from other contexts globally.
Impact
The Inclusive Conservation and Tourism Lab highlights how lived experience, identity, and historical context shape how people encounter and relate to protected areas.
The Lab contributes internationally to rethinking conservation practice, supporting emerging scholars, and building new forms of engagement between people and nature that are more equitable and contextually grounded.
In addition, the Lab seeks to not only learn about the dynamics of engagement with protected areas amongst local populations but also to provide experiences in protected areas to students and emerging scholars through experiential learning and hands-on field excursions.
Looking ahead, the Lab continues to expand its role across Africa as a hub for inclusive conservation scholarship, shaping both academic debates and real-world practice in tourism and environmental governance.
LEADERSHIP
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Julia Giddy, Director, Inclusive Conservation and Tourism Lab
Prof. Julia Giddy, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the School of Tourism and Hospitality at the University of Johannesburg, where she founded the Inclusive Conservation and Tourism Lab.
An NRF-rated researcher, her work focuses on the interplay between tourism and the environment, with particular attention to the tourism-inequality nexus, human-environment interaction, and conservation discourse in Africa.
She has published widely in high-ranked peer-reviewed journals and edited books, and presented at numerous local and international conferences. She is also actively engaged in several international academic networks and has supervised and mentored emerging scholars in the field.
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Nature-based tourism is transformative – everyone deserves to have these experiences and feel welcome and accepted in these spaces.
