School of Geography and the Environment

Jennifer Gooden is a DPhil candidate at the School of Geography and the Environment and the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford. She holds an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management (BCM) from Oxford, where her MSc dissertation focused on policy barriers to rewilding in the UK and the Netherlands. She received her AB in Psychology from Harvard University.

Jennifer's research focuses on understanding the experience of individuals who have purchased land for conservation. She uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, including grounded theory and q-methodology, to query topics of motivation, identity, objectives, and prioritization in private land conservation.

Jennifer previously worked as the Director of Sustainability for the Oklahoma City municipal government, and she has prior experience in community capacity building in the nonprofit social services sector.

Jennifer's DPhil research focuses on one overarching question: what factors make private land conservation appealing, from a landowner perspective? She also explores how private land conservation affects a landowner's sense of identity and how landowners' perspectives correspond to or differ from those of other landholders and conservation NGOs on the topic of private land conservation.

Prior Research

Jennifer's MSc research focused on policy barriers to rewilding in the UK and the Netherlands. Interviews and field work revealed that the implementation of rewilding efforts are hindered by regulations and policies that were developed under a different conception of nature conservation. Barriers were encountered in institutions that governed keeping and release of animals, biohazards, agricultural subsidies, conservation land designations, public access, and energy infrastructure, as well as a lack of national wild land policies.