Format/Structure

10-15 minute presentations depending on participants. Charis Enns will be discussant to provoke discussion and thinking about future special issue.

Long Abstract

Biodiversity conservation involves the expertise, values, and practices of a range of actors and interests. Political ecologists highlight how ‘non-traditional’ actors become involved in the pursuit of conserving biodiversity, such as those closely linked to business, financial, and security/military sectors.

Yet, conservation exists in a context of rapidly changing and emerging pressures/concerns linked to infectious disease, climate change, disasters, ecological breakdown, food/water insecurity, urbanisation, migration, among others. The need to deal with these overlapping socio-ecological crises opens up space for new actors and expertise to enter conservation, but they are not yet gaining the critical attention they deserve. Moreover, technological advancements in AI and big data have entered the conservation sphere, and agendas linked to rewilding/restoration, and the 30x30 objective of massively expanding conservation space necessarily enrols new actors. There are others that have a history of involvement in conservation yet have escaped critical attention.

This panel invites contributions that speak to the emergence and enrollment of new, different, unlikely, and overlooked actors (human and nonhuman) in conservation space, practice, thinking, and policy, both in-situ and ex-situ:

· Who are these new actors?

· What drives/shapes their enrolment in conservation? What expertise and values do they bring?

· How is this changing conservation space, practice, collaborations, power relations, and what does this mean for conservation futures.

Other potential lines of inquiry/prompts include the following, among others:

· Examples of crises or opportunities that are provoking the enrolment of new actors in conservation.

· How might crises be creating space for new actors from below/actors who resist hegemonic conservation narratives?

· To what extent can non-humans from wildlife, pathogens, to algorithms and technology be conceptualised as (emerging) ‘actors’ in conservation?

· With drastic cuts to conservation/development assistance, who/what is filling the void?

This Panel has 6 pending paper proposals.
Propose paper