Alexandra Zimmermann

Prof. Alexandra Zimmermann is the founding Director of the Centre for Conservation Diplomacy as well the Negotiating Coexistence training courses. Separately she is also Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, and the founding Chair of the IUCN SSC Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence Specialist Group. 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. She was the lead editor of the IUCN Guidelines on Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence and is currently preparing the first academic teaching textbook on the subject (Cambridge University Press). In 2023 she led and hosted the first global summit on HWC (International Conference on Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence) and regularly advises the UN and various governments on HWC policy and conflict negotiation matters.

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She specialises in interest-based negotiation, conflict analysis, community engagement, stakeholder dialogue, dispute resolution and social research. Having taught many elements of these topics over the past decade as short courses to conservation professionals from around the world, she has consolidated this material into the training course Negotiating Coexistence, which she also teaches as executive education at Oxford. She has written her first book on conflict resolution (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in August 2025) together with colleague and peacebuilding expert Dr Brian McQuinn. Raised in Indonesia, Lebanon, Germany, France, and Canada, her initial training was in zoology and conservation sciences before she gained her doctorate in conservation social research from Oxford University, trained as a facilitator and then in conflict negotiation at Harvard Law School and diplomatic negotiation at the United Nations.