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Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that the implementation of technologies such as AI in conservation practice requires a collaboration between conservation practitioners, digital innovators, and ethnographers. To make this point, I draw on the studies of collaboration from the literature on critical data studies.

Paper long abstract:

In light of the accelerating biodiversity loss, conservation biologists attempt to use all methods and tools at their disposal to alleviate the crisis. In this vein, the field has begun to critically reflect on the role and the promise of technology. One of the prominent technologies which some have argued could have potential benefits for conservation is artificial intelligence (AI). But what role can or should AI play in conservation biology? My paper argues that the implementation of technologies such as AI in conservation practice requires a collaboration between conservation practitioners, digital innovators, mathematicians, and social scientists. To make this point, I draw on the lessons about generative modes of collaborations between ethnographers and data scientists from the literature on critical data studies, and the framework of “critique and contribute” proposed by Gina Neff from the Oxford Internet Institute and her colleagues (2017). I draw attention to the absence of political ecologists in imagining and designing conservation technology, and call for their increased participation in these processes. Yet in order to make such collaboration feasible, it is important to revisit the critiques of quantitative sciences in political ecology. Therefore, the paper calls for political ecologists to revisit their conception of quantitative sciences not as tools of governmentality embedded solely in the power/knowledge nexus, but as productive (albeit imperfect) methods of environmental governance. This reevaluation is intended to promote a possibility for ethnographers to engage with computational tools and their designers as to make them more fair, just, transparent, and equitable.