Contribution short abstract

Political ecology teaching helps conservation biology students see beyond technical fixes, engaging power and justice to envision transformative futures.

Contribution long abstract

The proposed presentation draws on my personal teaching experience as the sole social scientist within a team, to co-design and run the Integrative Biodiversity Conservation Science course at University of Bern over the past three years. Working with Conservation Biology students—most trained in technical, intervention-oriented approaches—I encountered early, disarming questions: “Why does nobody care about nature?” and “Why do conservation interventions work here but not there?” These questions revealed their growing discomfort with the limits of technocratic solutions and opened space for political ecology to help them examine power, institutions, inequality, and knowledge pluralism in shaping conservation outcomes.

The course is taught in two complementary formats. The first is a formal workshop series featuring speakers from diverse disciplines, paired with group work anchored in real-world projects through the ACT approach. The second is a parallel, student-led Seminar and Journal Club, in which students propose themes at the start of each semester and take turns leading discussions. Over three years, participation has expanded from two to more than twenty students, transforming the course into a collective learning space where students actively interrogate conservation paradigms and articulate new analytical orientations. Teaching political ecology within this predominantly natural-science environment—and doing so at the twilight of ecological and democratic crises—requires holding space for students’ anxieties while cultivating agency. I reflect on how political ecology can serve as a pedagogy of hope: a critical and dialogical practice that supports students in moving beyond despair and technocratic thinking toward imagining more just, relational, and sustainable futures.