Format/Structure

The panel will consist of speakers followed by a Q&A.

Long Abstract

Given the current biodiversity and climate crises, significant national and international efforts are underway to protect and restore ecological systems. However, conservation often employs technocratic governance approaches which are rooted in positivist knowledge traditions that privilege quantifiable, reductionist ways of knowing. These ways of knowing can perpetuate siloed understandings of systems that are, in reality, integrated, while undermining diverse, place-based understandings of socio-ecological systems. This quantification and simplification provides the means for centralised control, coordination, and exchange, and ultimately, creates a concentration of power (Turnhout et al., 2014). This also results in the marginalisation of other forms of knowledge that are incommensurable with standardised metrics disempowering local communities, conservation practitioners, and farming communities as well as artists, social scientists etc (Leach et al, 2010).

This privileging of certain ways of knowing over others is argued to be a consequence of capitalist and colonial logics that are embedded in, and perpetuated by, many attempts to conserve nature (Turnhout, 2024). Although there have been efforts to overcome these logics by integrating different facets of socio-ecological systems, for example, by incorporating nature into economic markets, and some engagement with varied knowledge systems at scale, for example, within IPBES assessments (Tengö et al., 2017), a reliance on technocratic approaches and positivist frameworks within conservation governance persists.

Understudied but crucial aspects of these efforts is the politics of knowledge, ideas and discourses as well as power relations between individuals and institutions, that emerge from, and are interwoven with, such processes. Thus, this panel asks:

In what ways do power relations and politics shape which knowledge systems are legitimised or excluded in conservation efforts?

How can conservation practice move beyond technocratic governance to more pluralistic, inclusive, and just knowledge systems?

This Panel has 21 pending paper proposals.
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