About
Restore Eden is a conservation governance design practice. We work with large ecosystem projects globally, from diagnosis through full project development. The problem we address isn't a lack of conservation intent or ecological knowledge. It's a failure of governance architecture. Our practice is built on a single proposition: governance must precede finance, legitimacy must precede enforcement, and integration must precede scale. We design the systems that make conservation hold.
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Who is Restore Eden?
Robert Primmer | FOUNDER
Rob Primmer is the founder of Restore Eden, a conservation governance design practice built on thirty years of field experience across five continents. His work sits at the intersection of complex adaptive systems theory, polycentric governance, and conservation finance, focused on a single problem: why ecologically sound conservation projects fail, and how to design governance architectures that prevent it.
His career began in the Okavango Delta managing a community wildlife concession, moved through Vietnam where he led protected area proclamations and trained over 4,000 rangers nationwide, and has since spanned program design and evaluation work with USAID, REDD+ implementation in Mozambique, and institutional capacity building across West Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. His most formative project cost $20,000 a year and recovered a critically endangered primate population from 50 to over 160 individuals by building on community governance systems that were already in place.
Rob holds a zoology degree from the University of Cape Town and an LLM in Environmental Law and Management from Aberystwyth University. He is the architect of the Conservation Governance Diagnostic, a structured analytical tool used to identify structural risks in conservation project design before capital is deployed.
He is based in Samaná Bay, Dominican Republic, where Restore Eden's flagship engagement is building the governance architecture for a ridge-to-reef stewardship initiative across one of the Caribbean's most ecologically significant systems.