Louise Blackmore is a PhD student in the School of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Western Australia. She has a general interest in biodiversity management and policy, particularly how biodiversity conservation may be achieved on private lands. Louise’s key research interests include: the social aspects of environmental management, particularly the way in which private landholders make land management decisions; and the use of economic experiments to explore environmental policy issues. Prior to commencing her PhD studies, Louise worked as a Research Assistant within the Centre for Environmental Economics and Policy at the University of Western Australia. This project identified the key drivers of successful market-based instruments for biodiversity conservation in Australia, resulting in three published works on this topic.

Louise’s PhD research looks at the potential role of collaboration between landholder participants in biodiversity conservation programs. Specifically, she is using experimental methods to investigate the extent to which the presence or absence of trust relationships between landholders influences their willingness to collaborate in biodiversity conservation programs and the effort they subsequently put into biodiversity projects. Additionally, she is comparing the performance of collaborative "flat-rate" versus "competitive tender" programs across several key criteria. Louise’s research will provide useful insight into the potential role of collaborative conservation tenders in addressing environmental issues.