CONDJUST is an ambitious five year project that seeks to contribute to a new field of enquiry: Conservation Data Justice. It tackles novel topics in Data Justice and apply them to the remote sensing, models and data used to create global maps of conservation priorities; it explores the epistemic communities producing these maps, their policy reach and the governance of this research in the conservation community.
CONDJUST is required because conservation prioritisation overlooks insights from political ecology, and because work on data justice does not examine conservation practices. These omissions present problems to rural peoples affected by new conservation plans – and to the conservation plans if peoples’ needs are omitted. CONDJUST is required because conservation prioritisation work, and conservation data, need to be decolonised, which means that the hierarchies, prejudices and blind-spots inherent in so many interventions must be challenged. It is required to reframe the debate about planetary scale conservation such that it moves beyond adding social dimensions to existing plans and instead is grounded in social justice, and most especially the just use of data, as a central organising principle.
CONDJUST is required because effective biodiversity conservation is one of the most pressing challenges of our time. Concerted efforts to address biodiversity loss have produced new planetary targets to prevent or reverse declines in species and restore degraded ecosystems. Campaigns are dominated by ambitious visions, such as protecting 30% of the planet by 2030 (’30 by 30’), and ‘Half Earth’ (50% by 2050). They are mediagenic: charismatic wildlife and distant exotic locations feature prominently, as do endorsements by leading scientists and public figures. Governments, donors, international organisations, NGOs and philanthropists have all promoted these planetary scale approaches to tackling biodiversity loss. Their momentum and influence are remarkable.
But they are also worrying. Decades of work by political ecologists and conservation social scientists have shown that wildlife and biodiversity conservation has a long history of marginalising, displacing and impoverishing minorities of rural people who live in or near the areas conservationists wish to protect. Protected areas do not only cause such problems. Conservation can bring (many) local benefits. But there is nonetheless a clear risk that ambitious new global conservation priorities will extend this history of marginalisation and loss.
Proponents of these initiatives argue that they incorporate human interests and will work with local communities and Indigenous Peoples. However these claims do not reassure if, for example, the global priority maps do not even count the number of people they might affect. More fundamentally than that, however, there are many assumptions, constructions and biases built into the data and models which can make people’s presences and activities hard to see. Conservation prioritisation research needs urgently to learn from the Data Justice community, because its work is driven by the need to see how injustice is built into the construction and analysis of large-scale data sets. Equally Data Justice research, although it includes work on Environmental Data Justice, does not touch the challenges of Conservation Data Justice. The role of conservation in causing social injustice is not yet recognised.
The confluence of Data Justice, political ecology and conservation prioritisation presents four challenges that CONDJUST will tackle through an interdisciplinary research agenda:
1. The empirical challenge —
How do the data and models used in conservation prioritisation include or exclude different types of human interest? What sources, assumptions, biases and distortions do they entail that can make some forms of human presence hard to see. How might economic valuations of land use diminish the importance of some types of human activity?
2. The theoretical challenge —
How can we understand the challenges posed by inequities in the data driving conservation prioritisation? Critiques of conservation practice in political ecology do not incorporate insights from the field of Data Justice. Thus it neglects the problems of recognition, visibility, inclusion, engagement and anti-discrimination, as well as the tensions between rights to anonymity and the need for open data. Equally Data Justice research does not use political ecologists’ insights into conservation. Both could help us to understand how fairer conservation might be pursued, particularly when combined with decolonized approaches to developing that theory.
3. The epistemic challenge —
How do communities of conservation scientists engage with insights from political ecology, and how do political ecologists communicate and share their findings? How could Data Justice insights bridge these communities. The problems of conservation prioritisation are underpinned by failures of interdisciplinary thinking and we need to understand the contours of the disciplinary communities and barriers between them.
4. The policy challenge —
How can data-informed policies be derived from current and future research, and from the current mix of epistemic (and policy) communities? How can new data and models be used in grounded, downwardly accountable ways? How do policies travel across space and from research communities to policy makers?