Presentation short abstract

Care reveals and unsettles power in science–policy knowledge. Drawing on BPBES interviews and assessments, I show how everyday practices of listening, translation, and more-than-human care expose and challenge technocratic hierarchies in biodiversity conservation.

Presentation long abstract

Science–policy platforms such as the Brazilian Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (BPBES) are widely promoted as mechanisms for producing authoritative, policy-relevant knowledge for conservation. Yet these interfaces often reproduce technocratic assumptions grounded in a linear model of science–policy relations, which privileges standardization, measurability, and depoliticized ideals of neutrality. Such assumptions shape which knowledges are legitimised, how they must be formatted, and which practices are rendered invisible or “non-credible.”

Drawing on interviews with BPBES members and an analysis of Summaries for Decision-Makers, this research examines care as a situated, relational practice that can bring into view dynamics of power in the production of policy-relevant knowledge. We show that care—expressed in practices of listening, translation, managing epistemic tensions, and attending to diverse human and more-than-human concerns—plays a significant yet undervalued role in shaping the content, process, and impact of assessments.

At the same time, systemic pressures toward efficiency, consensus, and credibility limit the possibilities for care to transform knowledge hierarchies. I argue that through care we see, but more importantly, unsettle power in the everyday epistemic practices. More-than-human care here then makes the case for a relational epistemology as a starting point for policy-relevant knowledge in biodiversity conservation.

Presentation short abstract

Applying a relational lens to Wales' environmental governance organisation, we show how actors’ everyday, often unseen work—experimenting, translating, and repurposing practices and knowledges within and beyond formalized structures—creates pathways for transformative socio-ecological change.

Presentation long abstract

Against a backdrop of accelerating efforts to address the environment and biodiversity crises, place-based nature recovery has gained prominence across UK and international agendas. While relational understandings of place are well-established, emphasising interdependencies between people, ecologies, and institutions, they are rarely applied to the organisations responsible for environmental policy. Such institutions are often considered coherent and static, rather than internally diverse, relational, and contested spaces, where multiple values and practices of nature and place co-exist and co-evolve.

Turning a relational lens to organisational spaces, we examine how place is understood, negotiated, and enacted within policy institutions, and subsequently shapes interactions with local nature restoration. Drawing on research within Natural Resources Wales (NRW), an arm’s-length body responsible for national environmental governance, we examine Area Statements – regional, place-based plans mandated under the Environment Act (Wales).

Interviews and observations across NRW and the Welsh Government, show how staff exercise everyday agency that generates diverse practices of place-based governance. These often-unseen actions, occurring outside formal structures, create opportunities for transformative change. We identify three dynamics: (1) Everyday tactics that subtly subvert dominant systems; (2) Experimental spaces within risk-averse institutional cultures; (3) Translation work moving diverse knowledges and practices across institutional boundaries.

These small, provisional acts constitute an under-examined layer of transformative change – demonstrating how policy actors work within, through and despite, organisational power structures to enable alternative socio-ecological futures. We conclude by considering how Area Statements may be strengthened and learning may inform socio-ecologically just environmental governance in the UK and internationally.

Presentation short abstract

Transformative change is hindered by unaddressed and hidden power relations. This talk presents a project creating ‘critical social science literacy tools’ to make power visible and support inter-epistemic knowledge exchange towards transformative solutions that attend to power.

Presentation long abstract

Although transformative change has been identified as the most promising path out of the polycrisis, unaddressed power relations continue to block paradigm-shifting solutions. Yet, power relations must be visible in order to address them, and the most insidious ones continue to be obscured by apolitical technocratic governance. Political ecology’s voluminous analyses illuminate the power relations embedded in the capitalist and colonial systems of environmental management that inform such governance. At the same time, epistemic diversity can complicate communication of (abstract) knowledge on power and its operations and effects, resulting in such knowledge being ‘lost in translation.’ As a result, efforts to address the power relations that underpin both epistemic and material injustices, and barriers to transformative change, are often lacking or incomplete. Meanwhile, natural scientists have a substantial ‘science literacy’ toolbox, but no such tools that facilitate inter-epistemic knowledge exchange on power appear to exist. In this talk, I present a project whose explicit goal is to design ‘critical social science literacy tools’ to illuminate hidden power dynamics. Grounded in an ex-post analysis of two Swiss-based environmental programs, we design open access tools to assist both critical social scientists in teaching power dynamics, and transformative change initiatives in integrating these concepts into their solutions. I will describe how we used our questionnaire and interview results to pinpoint areas of confusion/misunderstanding with respect to power relations, co-design our tools based on these, and field test them in workshops. In doing so, I hope to expand and amplify such efforts towards transformation.

Presentation short abstract

The prioritization of area-based conservation strategies can perpetuate social, political, and historical structures rooted in colonial legacies. This critical examination of two conservation governance schemes of the Peruvian Amazon provides lessons to foster more just conservation strategies.

Presentation long abstract

The prioritization of area-based conservation strategies can perpetuate social, political, and historical structures rooted in colonial legacies. Even when the current Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework aims for conservation targets that “recognize and respect the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities” (CBD, 2022), conservation governance still relies on assumptions and data based on western knowledge, privileging certain perspectives in decision-making. The lack of critical recognition, dialogue, and action among various knowledge-holders, rights-bearers, and stakeholders exacerbates (in)justices in conservation and human-nature relationships (Petriello & Stronza, 2020; Shanee, 2019; Tengö et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2023). This issue is particularly evident in (post)colonial territories where marginalization discourses in conservation are continually reproduced by state actors and others with decision-making power (Collins et al., 2021). This research focuses on understanding the dynamics of conservation prioritization in the Peruvian Amazon looking at two conservation strategies. One that embodies the collaboration between Indigenous Peoples and the Estate under the National Protected Area system, and another that highlights the role of local communities in forest conservation outside the National Protected Area system. This paper is based on preliminary findings, which point at the tensions and negotiations happening in avant-garde conservation governance schemes where certain knowledges and priorities take the shape of data to become more visible than others. By critically reflecting on the justice dimensions of data (Pritchard et al., 2022), this paper seeks to provide critical lessons for conservation prioritization and action towards more equitable strategies that resist marginalization and support just, decolonizing futures.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation empirically investigates how water resilience is constructed as a hegemonic governing strategy during Mexico City's current water crisis. Through the example of Fondo Agua Capital, the city's public-private water partnership, it looks to what knowledges are amplified and silenced.

Presentation long abstract

Water is an increasingly contested global resource - with particular challenges facing southern megacities, such as in Mexico City where the fear of "day zero", where the whole city runs out of water, comes ever closer. In light of this, it is increasingly necessary to investigate the production of water knowledges, to see how these produce particular narratives of naturalised scarcity, and contribute to depoliticised water campaigns that place the burden of reducing water use on the poorest and most marginalised citizens.

Based on empirical research in Mexico City with government water experts, water academics, and people affected by water scarcity, and archival research into Fondo Agua Capital, this presentation explores how particular science-politics dynamics emerge in the Mexican context to create a technomanagerial water governance space. It brings literature on water financialisation in conversation with STS work on the production of knowledge, to highlight how financialisation is changing and shaping global water markets.

Mexico City's water public-private partnership Fondo Agua Capital is funded by international corporations and NGOs including Coca-Cola and The Nature Conservancy - and as such the metrics the PPP uses to demonstrate "success" are deeply embedded in geopolitical dynamics of economic neocolonialism, and the desire to present global south megacities - and water scarcity - as potential opportunities for global investment. Knowledge politics are a crucial and often ignored part of this process, and this presentation investigates how positivist water science is increasingly dominating Mexico City's policies and knowledge production within academic spaces.

Presentation short abstract

This paper analyses Colombia’s rapid adoption of OECMs through a data and epistemic justice lens, showing how national reporting criteria privilege international conservation targets, political interests and large, mappable units over local governance and situated knowledges.

Presentation long abstract

Colombia has rapidly reported Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures (OECMs) to demonstrate progress towards Target 3 of the Global Biodiversity Framework, now listing 46 areas in global databases (Protected Planet, 2025). OECMs were meant to acknowledge conservation efforts grounded in diverse governance and knowledge systems. Yet Colombia’s expansion has been mobilised through national guidelines and criteria that privilege large mapped units, such as river basins, and technocratic knowledge.

Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews with actors involved in national OECM reporting—government officials, conservation NGOs and research institutes—alongside participant observation at national OECM meetings and perspectives from Indigenous and local community organisations, this paper examines how these procedures create epistemic hierarchies in Colombia’s area-based conservation agenda. Insights from two river basins reported as OECMs, where local awareness of the designation is minimal, are used to contrast national narratives with on-the-ground governance practices and development priorities.

Using conservation data justice (Pritchard et al., 2022) and epistemic justice (Fricker, 2007) as analytical lenses, the paper shows how decisions about which areas to prioritise and which data qualify as evidence tend to privilege political interests and the fulfilment of conservation targets, while marginalising bottom-up governance and knowledges. It discusses power asymmetries, weak or absent FPIC, and Indigenous and local communities’ demands for recognition of their contributions to conservation through their own categories rather than externally imposed labels. The paper concludes by examining whose priorities and knowledges shape OECM decision-making, and how data, metrics and indicators influence these politics of knowledge.

Presentation short abstract

We explore interactions between researchers, activists and artists in a participatory action research project about biodiversity transformations. We discuss the role of traditional norms in these interactions and how to resist them to reclaim the transformative potential of transdisciplinarity.

Presentation long abstract

Within academic fields that are concerned with biodiversity loss, there is agreement that urgently needed social and ecological transformations will require the engagement of ‘non-academic’ stakeholders in the production of knowledge. Yet, these transdisciplinary initiatives often reproduce traditional scientific norms and practices, thereby risking their transformative potential. In this article, we offer examples of a participatory action research project that involved transdisciplinary collaborations between researchers, artists, and activists from the grassroots movement Foodpark Amsterdam. The examples are taken from three different ‘contact zones’ where arts, activism, and academia touched each other in different ways: analysing-mobilising, making-analysing, and mobilising-making. In our analysis, we identify how traditional norms and practices manifest in these contact zones and we reflect on our attempts to ‘uncommon’ these norms and practices in order to reclaim the transformative potential of transdisciplinarity. Our findings show how within transdisciplinary collaborations, traditional norms about researchers as the ones that analyse, activists as the ones that mobilise, and artists as the ones that make prevail. We will discuss the limiations of these norms and associated divisions of labor and explore modes of resisting them. We will argue that the transformative potential of transdisciplinary research relies on active strategies of resistance and refusal.

Presentation short abstract

Engaging with and valuing diverse knowledge systems can help guide processes of transformative change, but how do we do this in practice within nature conservation? This paper argues that a greater understanding of, and reflection on, values, power and context could cultivate such processes.

Presentation long abstract

It is argued that foregrounding plurality and inclusion can help guide processes of transformative change for social-ecological justice. One aspect of this involves engaging with and valuing diverse knowledge systems. Within the context of nature conservation, this could not only transform conservation itself but also enable conservation to enact transformative change: a fundamental, system-wide reconfigurations of human-nature interactions. Existing frameworks attempt to reconcile plural knowledges in a conservation context but are often formulated by academics and do not engage with how power relations are interwoven with, and emerge from, such processes in practice. Thus, this research asks what practices could enable UK nature conservation to better engage with diverse forms of evidence and varied knowledge systems while engaging with power relations? A Participatory Action Research and decolonial approach was used to explore this with a major UK conservation programme involving conversations, interviews, observations, reflective journalling and a Forum Theatre workshop. Preliminary analysis shows how a web of values, dimensions of context and frames of power influence what and how diverse knowledges are engaged. Dimensions of context include structural, social, and embodied contexts; frames of power refer to epistemological understandings of power. Cultivating greater awareness, understanding and reflection on this web in which conservation practitioners and their partners operate could facilitate intentional actions that value plural knowledges. Additionally, the analysis shows that relational, process-oriented working practices must be foregrounded to enable meaningful dialogue between epistemic communities. These shifts would enable nature conservation to embody the transformative changes needed for socio-environmental justice.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how the persistence of onto-ethical norms in the Mau landscape, Kenya, constitutes a politics of endurance that unsettles imposed technocratic frameworks. These dynamics position the Mau as a site of de facto pluriversal governance, sustaining diverse relations with the forest.

Presentation long abstract

Drawing on walking interviews and conversations with landscape actors, this paper examines how conflicting ontologies—technocratic and affective belonging—are negotiated and inhabited around Kenya’s South-Western Mau Reserve. Approaches to environmental protection here have been shaped by overlapping colonial and post-independence legacies. Entanglements with telecoupled tea production continue to dominate, and consolidation towards fortress-style conservation effaces lived histories of land appropriation while challenging local claims to forest ownership and cultural identity. The active assertion of colonial logics defines the conditions of legibility through which only certain relations are considered legitimate; however, in these rural contexts, where state authority remains limited and is routinely circumvented, everyday practices involving the forest—such as collecting firewood, crafting materials, or medicine, going to hunt, or pray—persist amid changing regulations and ecologies. Seemingly rival ontologies are present, neither entirely separate nor subsumed, intersecting in encounters that generate novel accommodations capable of bridging institutional and lived orders. A latent and obscured form of local governance therefore surfaces, grounded in a locally constructed moral gradient and enacted through onto-ethical norms that approach the forest as a living presence, provider, and refuge. I interpret this as relational endurance: a subtle politics in which illegality is not ontologically binding. In this context, interactions between worlds unfold through deeply embedded and habitual engagements that remain adjacent to state control. These dynamics position the Mau as a site of de facto pluriversal governance which unsettles attempts to standardise control, sustaining diverse understandings of what constitutes relations of care, use, and meaning with the forest.

Presentation short abstract

This study examines how agroecology researchers at Embrapa engage with diverse knowledges while navigating institutional constraints. It challenges the dichotomous framing of agroecology as either "political" or "institutional" to explore the plurality of agroecological pathways to sustainability.

Presentation long abstract

Agroecology's multiple dimensions— as science, practice, and movement—encompass a plurality of knowledge systems. Yet these dimensions receive different weights in different social contexts. Current scholarship has come to frame agroecology as a binary between "political" (movement-led) and "institutional" variants, with the latter representing the co-optation of agroecology and arguably the loss of its transformative potential. Agricultural research organizations generally privilege positivist, technocratic approaches, and might be assumed to neglect the political dimension of agroecology.

However, the political - institutional dichotomy oversimplifies the complex positionality of agroecology researchers who actively engage with farmers' and Indigenous knowledges while working within institutional contexts. This paper examines how researchers at Embrapa, Brazil's national agricultural research organization, engage with diverse knowledges while advancing agroecology. Drawing on the concept of "co-productive agility", the paper analyses how these Embrapa researchers strategically navigate tensions between institutional constraints and their participation in Brazil's agroecology movement. In doing so, the paper presents these actors not as external to social movements but as part of agroecology's plural, dynamic constellation—a perspective that opens space for productive engagement across difference rather than reinforcing polarization.

Based on interviews with Embrapa researchers as well as other actors in local agroecology networks, the paper explores multiple, situated pathways to sustainability. By recognizing the plurality and complexity of agroecological approaches, we can move beyond polarization toward more nuanced understandings that facilitate dialogue among different agendas and ultimately strengthen agroecology's transformative potential.

Presentation short abstract

Decolonising the politics of knowledge at play in contemporary global peatland conservation requires attention to entangled histories of expropriated labour and skill. The paper revisits key moments of geographical translation to rethink the politics of expertise and inclusive climate futures.

Presentation long abstract

This paper asks what it means to decolonise knowledge in global peatland conservation when the making of “peatlands” as climate assets rests on long histories of expropriated labour. Drawing on work-in-progress from the ERC project PEATSENSE, I examine how diverse knowledges and sensing practices are being reconfigured as peatlands become priority sites for climate mitigation. I focus on historical entanglements between the making of Scottish bogs, Patagonian turberas [peatlands] and Amazonian aguajales [palm swamps] across distinct political moments. Sheep-farmers dispossessed from the Scottish lowlands in the late nineteenth century became critical actors in reorganising more-than-human labour in Tierra del Fuego, their embodied agrarian skills producing peat in new ways - as fuel and agricultural support. Finnish palaeoecologists invited by Chilean and Argentinian governments later helped define peat as fungible substrate within national economies. These translations resonate with the twenty-first-century arrival of Finnish and British ecologists in the Amazon basin, deploying corers, drones, LiDAR and satellite classifications to redefine wetlands through the terminology of below-ground carbon in turba [peat], a term with little cultural history in the region. The analysis situates peatlands within human geography accounts of resource- making and governance and political ecology critiques of green extractivism. At the same time, it mobilises feminist STS to foreground more-than-human, embodied sensing practices through which peatlands have long been known, valued and contested. Ultimately, the paper asks what an inclusive climate future for peatlands would require, and how we might “provincialise” peatland conservation without abandoning urgent commitments to justice and biodiversity.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how symbolic power shapes which knowledge systems and values of nature gain legitimacy in conservation governance. Using Bourdieu’s framework and a Japanese fisheries case, it shows how shifts in symbolic legitimacy open pathways beyond technocratic approaches.

Presentation long abstract

Conservation governance often privileges technocratic and positivist approaches that frame knowledge as quantifiable and neutral, marginalising other ways of knowing and valuing nature. This paper examines these dynamics through the lens of symbolic power—the capacity to define what counts as legitimate knowledge, rational policy, or moral order. Integrating Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic power with Elder-Vass’s concept of socially endorsed beliefs, we advance a framework for examining how conservation institutions legitimise some values and knowledge systems while marginalising others. Symbolic power operates through recognition rather than coercion, stabilising dominant imaginaries of “objectivity” and “rationality” that underpin much of contemporary biodiversity governance. Yet legitimacy is not fixed. Shifts in symbolic legitimacy can occur through deliberative spaces or disruptive events that unsettle taken-for-granted assumptions and allow alternative epistemologies to emerge. Empirically, we illustrate this through the case of small-scale spiny-lobster fisheries in Japan, where cooperative norms and community deliberation have redefined what counts as responsible and legitimate management. By situating the politics of knowledge within broader structures of symbolic power, the paper shows that overcoming technocratic and reductionist governance requires not only epistemic pluralism but also transformations in the symbolic orders that legitimise certain ways of knowing while silencing others.