Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how local peoples' environmental knowledge is often overlooked by externally-led participatory monitoring in community-based conservation in Ghana.

Paper long abstract:

Participatory monitoring activities often go hand-in-hand with community-based conservation initiatives, providing important opportunities to measure ecosystem change over time. However, despite their participatory nature, they often remain externally-led and fail to engage with local peoples’ existing approaches to environmental monitoring, and knowledge of environmental change. Based on 7 months’ research with participatory monitoring teams at two community-based conservation initiatives in Ghana, this paper explores how monitors’ modes of environmental knowing are shaped by the processes and epistemologies they are trained in, and how these reconfigured ways of relating to their environments often disregard rangers’ pre-existing knowledge and experience, which - though unacknowledged - they often bring to bear on their work. Additionally, the research is situated within a wider context of increasing top-down and remote ways of generating environmental knowledge, which often have real-world implications for communities engaged in conservation initiatives.