Sue is a South African national and has extensive experience in the field of rural community development, protected areas, tourism concessions and tourism partnerships, as well as policy influence garnered over a twenty year career of study, research, strategy development, project implementation and peer review publication focused on Southern Africa and more recently expanding into Eastern Africa. She has management and implementation experience in both the NGO and ‘for profit’ fields, including managing the Wilderness Safaris Group Sustainability Fund and the distribution of grants to the regions.
She is Vice-Chair of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Groups (TAPASG) and Research Fellow at the Environmental Economics Policy Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. She is also the Coordinator of the TAPASG Communities & Heritage Working Group which works on community engagement and benefit-sharing from tourism and protected areas.
In 2008 Sue completed a Master of Business Science (Economics) from the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. Research for this degree compared conservation and agriculture in order to evaluate social optimality of land use in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. In 2013 Sue received a PhD (Resource Economics) also from UCT. Having completed coursework at the University of Goteborg in Sweden, the focus of her PhD research measured the socio-economic impact of high-end ecotourism in remote, rural communities adjacent to protected areas, based on over 1 700 community surveys in six southern African countries: Botswana, Malawi, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
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