Conservation today necessitates a wide variety of participants: professional scientists, policymakers, government officials, local communities, tribal and indigenous peoples, hobbyists, artists, activists, and other actors. Moreover, participation extends across many dimensions of conservation research, planning, implementation, and evaluation. Participation can be witnessed in methodological developments such as community-based conservation, community science, co-production, democratization, participatory action research, citizen science, and transdisciplinary research.
In this session, we explore and critically interrogate participatory practices in conservation, focusing on the particularities of postcolonial and settler colonial contexts. As indigenous and postcolonial scholars have argued, colonialism is implicated in both environmental exploitation and many forms of environmental protection. Participatory projects do not always respect and foster the epistemic and political agency of non-academic actors. Nevertheless, indigenous, tribal, and local communities are increasingly making their voices heard as custodians, rights-holders, and experts in ecology and caring for Land or country. How does participation in conservation research and practice play out in these contexts? Is participatory conservation a pathway to environmental justice and sustainable and equitable futures? What challenges and limitations must be considered when designing participatory approaches?
The session brings together speakers spanning philosophy, social science, and conservation science. Over six talks, we will consider cases from South Asia, South America, North America, South Africa, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Across these cases, we encounter different groups of people participating in different aspects of conservation research and practice for different epistemic, ethical, political, and practical reasons in the face of a variety of ecological and social challenges. One of our goals is to reflect on this diversity. Another goal is to develop a sense for common challenges, consequences, and best practices for conservation that is anti-colonial, equitable, and liberatory.
In recent years, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial theorists have developed a variety of concepts for thinking about the intertwined ethical, political, and epistemological dimensions of participation in epistemic practices. For example, epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, and epistemic exclusion pick out problematic ways in which some people are excluded from full participation in practices such as testifying and inquiring. On the other hand, concepts like coercive inclusion, epistemic exploitation, and epistemic extractivism highlight problematic forms of inclusion in epistemic practices.
In this presentation we present an overview of these concepts. We then consider how they might help to analyse public participation in scientific research. We focus on the use of global citizen science platforms such as eBird, a platform for birdwatching observations. These platforms are typically developed in places like the US and Europe, but they enable people around the world to participate in research that can have important impacts both locally and globally—this seems to be a way to overcome epistemic exclusion and injustice. At the same time, these platforms funnel data and information towards wealthy institutions in the global north, a structure which is reminiscent of epistemic extractivism and exploitation. Using an ongoing empirical study of eBird India, we examine whether and to what extent the concepts from epistemology apply to the complexities of global citizen science platforms and their use in postcolonial contexts.
Recent years has seen the discourse around protected areas within especially the post-colonial context, change from what was considered to be traditional conservation practices, predicated on the so called “fortress “conservation” paradigm, towards more inclusive conservation practices focused predominantly on community and market participation. This later form of conservation has been described in the literature as the so called “new conservation” orientation. In this paper, we will use South Africa as a case country to demonstrate how the so-called new conservation orientation has become manifest in national conservation policy, and how it’s fundamental tenets of increased access by inter alia communities, and monetisation of protected areas will impact on the country’s existing protected are network. The paper will explore the possible implications of the shift towards the new conservation orientation and what they this may mean in practice for conservation agencies and government departments tasked with the administration of state-owned protected areas. The paper concludes that many of the traditional protected area categories both in south Africa and internationally are arguably incompatible with the new conservation paradigm in their current form when considering their specific defined objectives, necessitating either a revision of policy or of the legislative foundation of the protected areas as instruments of law and policy.
The integration of Indigenous Knowledges in planning represents an ongoing dilemma. On the one hand, involvement in the planning process enhances a decolonial space for Indigenous Peoples. On the other, it legitimates the coloniality of planning and coopts Indigenous Knowledges. Because of its complexity, a holistic view of the mechanisms Indigenous Peoples create to engage, support, and empower themselves during the planning process represents an alternative approach. In this paper, I apply the voice of place to describe the epistemological reclamation five Tribal Nations experience in the Bears Ears National Monument. The findings suggest a refusal of settler narratives in Indigenous Land, the importance of Indigenous processes, a praxis of relational Knowledges, and the fluid forms of moving between knowledge systems while maintaining knowledge sovereignty. By telling a story from the Tribes’ perspective, this research re-signifies the role of Indigenous Peoples when engaging in settler-state planning.
Participatory science is increasingly in demand, and biodiversity conservation is no exception. This demand is motivated by various aims, including finding effective socio-technical tools to mitigate biodiversity loss, environmental justice, and building trust among social actors. While ‘participatory science’ is sometimes presented as a monolith, participatory projects materialize ideals of democratic participation differently. Our talk addresses the nature and limits of participatory science, as a practice and label.
Building on recent work (including Dunlap et al. 2021), we provide a conceptual framework for navigating conservation projects involving scientists and non-scientists, including a taxonomy of participatory science based on degrees of democratization. We focus on examples of conservation and resource management in Aotearoa New Zealand, which are grounded in established standards for taking into account diverse priorities, values and environmental responsibilities.
We identify relationship-building as a key criterion distinguishing two sorts of collaboration: participatory science and co-developed projects, which, we suggest, should be distinguished not only in degree of participation but also in kind. The latter difference underlines the importance of relationship-building—e.g., between scientists, conservation practitioners, and local communities—before a genuinely co-developed project is even planned.
“Participatory science” aptly describes many collaborative projects that are not co-developed. However, the distinction between participatory science and co-development matters. Applying the label of ‘participatory science’ indiscriminately may problematically reinforce environmental and epistemic injustice. One message of our framework, then, is the importance of avoiding designating projects as ‘participation’ or ‘inclusion’ in science, which should be framed otherwise. Another message is the importance of local context, especially once we shift from discussing participatory science to discussing what successful co-development looks like.
Dunlap, L., Corris, M., Jacquart, M., Biener, Z., and Potochnik, A. (2021). Divergence of Values and Goals in Participatory Research. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 88: 284–91.
Community-based conservation, despite being more inclusive than fortress conservation, has been criticized for being a top-down implementation of external ideas brought to local communities for conservation's benefit. This is particularly true for Changpas, the pastoral people of Changthang in trans-Himalayan India. Our aim was to co-design conservation interventions through participatory action research. We worked with two Changpa communities to co-designe context-sensitive interventions to facilitate positive human–nature interactions. We did so by integrating the PARTNERS (Presence, Aptness, Respect, Transparency, Empathy, Responsiveness, Strategic Support) principles with the Trinity of Voice (Access, Standing and Influence). In Rupsho, we facilitated focus group discussions led by the community. We found livestock depredation by wildlife was primarily facilitated by the weather. This led to co-designing of a new corral design, which was piloted with seven households, safeguarding 2385 pashmina goats and sheep. In Tegazong, a restricted area adjoining the Indo-China border with no previous research records, we worked with 43 Changpa people to co-create research questions of mutual interest. Wildlife presence and reasons for livestock loss were identified as areas of mutual interest. The herders suggested they would record data in a form of their choice, for 6 months, while they live in their winter pastures. This participatory community monitoring revealed nutrition and hypothermia to be a key cause of livestock death. Subsequently, we delimited two previously untested interventions: lamb cribs and provisioning of locally sourced barley as a feed supplement. The wildlife monitoring recorded the first record of Tibetan Gazelle Procapra picticuadata, outside of their known distribution, in Tegazong. We aim to highlight the benefits of co-designing projects with local communities that link research and conservation, while also discussing the challenges faced. Ultimately, such projects are needed to ensure ethical knowledge generation and conservation, which aims to be decolonial and inclusive.
The increasing complexity of socioenvironmental problems such as climate emergency, biodiversity crisis, food production, social inequality, and so on, compels diverse epistemic communities to develop integrated, multidimensional approaches, and creative strategies for a just and sustainable future. Research collaborations, such as inter- and transdisciplinary teams, have the potential to mobilize diverse disciplines and knowledge systems to support sustainable actions and interventions. However, these collaborations are often challenging due to numerous epistemic asymetries that characterize them, which are among others, to differences in methods, intellectual resources, and epistemic practices, as well as to unequal power dynamics in distinc social contexts. Overcoming these assymetries is the first challenge to tackle socioenvironmental problems. It is widely recognized that arts-sciences integration in transdisciplinary settings work as potential catalysts for scientific development and social change towards sustainability. However, our knowledge about aesthetic values is still detached from those epistemic practices handling socio-environmental problems. This talk reflects on the roles of aesthetic experiences in the context of knowledge co-production in cross-cultural settings dealing with environmental conservation by asking: What role do aesthetic values and experiences play in communities of practice dealing with socio-environmental problems? How does aesthetic assist in the actions needed to enhance environmental justice? How do aesthetic values and preferences contribute to new imaginaries that scope sustainable futures? These questions will be addressed from an empirical-oriented approach considering two communities of practice embedded in the Global Epistemologies and Ontologies Project (GEOS): the Council of Care at fishing village Siribinha located at Bahia State, Brazil; and the Interstate Movement Babassu Coconut breakers located at Piaui and Maranhão State, Brazil. By focusing on the practical applications of aesthetic literacy in socioenvironmental contexts, this talk aims to provide contemporarily relevant discussion on the potential of aesthetics for environmental conservation and eco-resistance movements.