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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Local communities' situated knowledge is largely marginalised in biodiversity conservation and climate governance. We introduce the concepts of knowledge-scapes and adaptive spaces to weave diverse knowledge systems as an approach to achieve environmental justice.

Presentation long abstract

Biodiversity conservation and climate governance across Southeast Asia increasingly deploy technocratic frameworks rooted in reductionist epistemologies that privilege quantifiable metrics and centralised control. These approaches systematically marginalise the situated, place-based knowledge systems of farming communities who bear the greatest burden of climate and biodiversity crises, precisely the communities whose adaptive capacities are most urgently needed.

This paper interrogates the politics of knowledge that shape which epistemologies are legitimised or excluded in biodiversity conservation and climate governance. We introduce the concept of knowledge-scapes to trace how competing epistemologies: scientific, indigenous, and experiential, are produced, reproduced, and contested across institutional and territorial scales. We analyse adaptive spaces as relational configurations in which farmers, civil society actors, and researchers co-produce socio-ecological strategies under conditions of climatic precarity. Participatory research approaches, rather than extracting local knowledge into academic frameworks, strive to create conditions for communities to articulate, validate, and mobilise their own knowledge.

Creating the conditions under which locally held knowledge is legitimised, connected, and capable of shaping effective and just governance approaches, we argue, demands more than the integration of diverse knowledge systems into existing frameworks. It requires weaving together diverse knowledge systems in the face of critical environmental justice dilemmas within adaptive spaces. A reflexive engagement with knowledge politics is instrumental in connecting place-based knowledge systems with broader policy processes.

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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.

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The prioritization of area-based conservation strategies can perpetuate social, political, and historical structures rooted in colonial legacies. This critical examination of co-management conservation in 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). My study focuses on understanding the dynamics of conservation prioritization in the Peruvian Amazon looking at a conservation strategy that embodies the collaboration between Indigenous Peoples and the State under 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, livelihoods 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.

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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.

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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.

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This study synthesizes theoretical and empirical insights on how distant discursive power shapes local justice in conservation. A scoping review and six global case studies show how distant dominant narratives, values and knowledge systems generate site-level injustices.

Presentation long abstract

The urgency for a renewed ethos and praxis for biodiversity conservation is evident. Yet, despite growing attention to justice in conservation, there remains limited synthesis of how distant discursive power shapes site-level experiences of (in)justice. This paper addresses this gap by drawing on both theoretical and empirical insights informed by a discursive telecoupling lens. First, we conduct a scoping review to examine the breadth of theoretical and empirical evidence on discursive power in conservation, with particular attention to its justice implications through a telecoupling lens. Second, we draw on empirical material from six case studies across the Global South (Brazil, Lao PDR, South Africa) and the Global North (Sweden, Germany, Spain). Results illustrate how values, knowledge systems, and dominant narratives are constructed, legitimised, and circulated across spatial distances, and how these discourses filter into on-the-ground conservation regimes. Across the diverse body of literature reviewed and the case studies analysed, distant discursive power emerges as a key mechanism shaping which perspectives are prioritised or marginalised, influencing both the framing of conservation interventions and local perceptions of injustice. By consolidating theoretical and empirical insights, this study outlines the implications of discursive power for conservation policy and practice and highlights persistent knowledge gaps. Ultimately, the analysis underscores the need to confront entrenched discursive asymmetries, rooted in colonial and capitalist legacies, to support more equitable, inclusive, and contextually grounded conservation futures.